THE JEWISH CHURCH IN ITS RELATIONS TO THE JEWISH NATION AND TO THE "GENTILES:" OR, THE PEOPLE OF THE CONGREGATION IN THEIR RELATIONS TO THE OF THE LANDS. "Art thou a Master of Israel, and knowest not," that, BY REV. SAM'L C. KERR, M. A. CINCINNATI: 28 WEST FOURTH STREET. 1866 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by REV. SAM'L C. KERR, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of Ohio. THE late Dr. J. Addison Alexander, in his commentary on the Psalms, recently re-issued by the Presbyterian Board of Publication, translates the Hebrew phrase, ben nekar, in Ps. xviii, 44 (rendered in the common English version, "strangers") by the English phrase, "son of outland;" so, also, in his commentary on Isaiah (see Isa. lxii, 8). According to this rendering, Ex. xii, 43, referring to the ordinance of the passover, should read: Any son of outland shall not eat of it. The position is startling to the Bible student. If it be correct, how are we to understand Ex. xii, 48: "And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee and will keep the passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it?" Again, if this position be correct, who were the servants bought with money," or "thy bondmen and thy bondmaids of the heathen round about," who, it is acknowledged, were circumcised and ate the passover? If Alexander's rendering be correct, of course these renderings are incorrect. The solving of this difficulty was the problem the author proposed to himself in the first place, without any thought of a work so extensive as the present. The first thing worthy of note that developed itself in the course of his investigations, was the fact, that our English translators had rendered indiscriminately a number of Hebrew words by a class of English words conveying the general idea of the term stranger. For a simple statement of the entire absence of any discrimination in the rendering of these Hebrew terms, see pages 16, 17. The next thing that developed itself, was, that the LXX were to a great extent uniform in rendering these Hebrew words into Greek, and in certain cases entirely 80. In this extensive examination of the Greek translation, it became very apparent that there were two classes of proselutoi, corresponding entirely to the representations of Tradition respecting "the two sorts of proselytes"-the one being of the people of the land, the other being of the people of the congregation. Once understanding that these classes of pro(iii) (RECAP) 7 8 9 5 6 |