“And this is the number of them: thirty chargers of gold, a thousand chargers of silver, nine and twenty knives,
“Thirty basons of gold, silver basons of a second sort four hundred and ten, and other vessels a thousand.
“All the vessels of gold and silver were five thousand and four hundred. All these did Sheshbazzar bring up with them of the captivity that were brought up from Babylon unto Jerusalem.”
“Surely that is sufficient historical fact!” the old Professor said in his hard, “dry-as-dust” voice. “Again, farther on, there is, you see, a statement that Titus destroyed Jerusalem and that he built the Arch of Triumph in Rome and placed a representation of the candlesticks upon it. Does not every schoolboy know that! Bosh! my dear Frank!”
“True,” exclaimed Frank, “but see! in the next line but one is a reference to the existence of something in ‘the whole prophecy of Ezekiel’—something in ‘black and white.’”
Professor Griffin shrugged his shoulders.
“Ezekiel develops the doctrine of individual responsibility and of the Messianic kingdom as no prophet before him,” was the Professor’s reply. “It may refer to that. The prophet’s style is not of the highest order, but is extraordinarily rich and striking in its imagery. The authenticity of the book is now admitted, all but universally, but the corrupt state of the Hebrew text has, for ages, been the despair of students. Cornhill, in 1886, made a brilliant attempt to reconstruct the Hebrew text with the aid of the Septuagint.”
Griffin noticed that his young friend did not quite follow that last remark, so he added:
“The Septuagint is, as you may perhaps know, the earliest Greek translation of the Old Testament scriptures made directly from the Hebrew original during the third century before Christ for the use of the Hellenistic Jews. In the literary forgery produced about the Christian era, known as the ‘Letter of Aristeas,’ and accepted as genuine by Josephus and others, it is alleged that the translation was made by seventy-two men at the command of Ptolemy II. You will find portions of it in the British Museum, and from it we find that the translation is not of uniform value or of the same style throughout. The Pentateuch and later historical books, as well as the Psalms, exhibit a very fair rendering of the original. The prophetical books, and more especially Ezekiel, show greater divergence from the Hebrew, while Proverbs frequently display loose paraphrase.”
“But is there anything in those typed lines which strikes you as unusually curious?” demanded young Farquhar, pointing to the smoked and charred fragment upon the blotting-pad.