ABANA, or AMANA ( or ; the former being the kethib or Hebrew text, and the latter the keri or marginal reading; Sept. 'Aẞavá,), the name of one of the rivers which are mentioned by Naaman (2 Kings v. 12), Abana and Pharpar,' as 'rivers of Damascus." Amana signifies perennial,' and is probably the true name, the permutation of b and m being very common in the Oriental dialects. It is easy to find rivers of Damascus; but there is a difficulty in appropriating the distinctive names which are here applied to them. The main stream by which Damascus is now irrigated is called Barrada. This river, the Chrysorrhoas, or golden stream,' of the ancient geographers, as soon as it issues from a cleft of the Anti-Lebanon mountains, is immediately divided into three smaller courses. The central or principal stream runs straight towards the city, and there supplies the different public cisterns, baths, and fountains; the other branches diverge to the right and left along the rising ground on either hand, and having, furnished the means of extensive irrigation, fall again into the main channel, after diffusing their fertilizing influences, without which the whole would be an arid desert, like the vast surrounding plains. In those plains the soil is in some parts even finer than here, but barren from the want of water. The main stream and its subsidiaries unite in greatly weakened force beyond the town on the south-east; and the collected waters, after flowing for two or three hours through the eastern hills, are at length lost in a marsh or lake, which is known as the Bahr el Merdj, or Lake of the Meadow. Dr. Richardson (Travels, ii. 499) states that the water of the Barrada, like the water of the Jordan, is of a white sulphureous hue, and an unpleasant taste.' At the present day it seems scarcely possible to appropriate with certainty the Scriptural names to these streams. There is indeed a resemblance of name which would suggest the Barrada to be the Pharpar, and then the question would be, which of the other streams is the Abana. But some contend that the Barrada is the Abana, and are only at a loss for the Pharpar. Others find both in the two subsidiary streams, and neglect the Barrada. The most recent conjecture seeks the Abana in the small river Fidgi or Fijih, which Dr. Richardson describes as rising near a village of the same name in a pleasant valley fifteen or twenty miles to the north-west of Damascus. It issues from the limestone rock, in a deep, rapid stream, about thirty feet wide. It is pure and cold as iced water; and, after coursing down a stony and rugged channel for above a hundred yards, falls into the Barrada, which comes from another valley, and at the point of junction is only half as wide as the Fijih. Dr. Mansford (Script. Gaz. in ABANA), who adopts the notion that the Abana was one of the subsidiary streams, well remarks that Naaman may be excused his national prejudice in favour of his own rivers, which, by their constant and beautiful supply, render the vicinity of Damascus, although on the edge of a desert, one of the most beautiful spots in the world; while the streams of Judæa, with the exception of the Jordan, are nearly dry the greater part of the year, and, running in deep and rocky channels, convey but partial fertility to the lands through which they flow.'

ABARIM (D; Sept. 'Aßapíu), a mountain (y), or rather chain of mountains (Day) which form or belong to the mountainous district east of the Dead Sea and the lower Jordan. It presents many distinct masses and elevations, commanding extensive views of the country west of the river (Irby and Mangles, p. 459). From one of the highest of these, called Mount Nebo, Moses surveyed the Promised Land before he died. From the manner in which the names Abarim, Nebo, and Pisgah are connected (Deut. xxxii. 49, Get thee up into this mountain Abarim, unto Mount Nebo; and xxxiv. 1, 'Unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah'), it would seem that Nebo was a mountain of the Abarim chain, and that Pisgah was the highest and most commanding peak of that mountain. The loftiest mountain of the neighbourhood is Mount Attarous, about ten miles north of the Arnon; and travellers have been disposed to identify it with Mount Nebo. It is represented as barren, its summit being marked by a wild pistachio-tree overshadowing a heap of stones. The precise appropriation of the three names, however, remains to be determined, as this locality has not yet (1843) had the advantage of such searching exploration as Professor Robinson has applied to Western Palestine.

[Cucurbita citrullus.]

ABATTACHIM (N; Sept. olkvos). This word occurs only in Numbers xi. 5, where the murmuring Israelites say, 'We remember the fish which we did eat freely in Egypt, the cucumbers and the abattachim, &c. The last word has always been rendered MELONS.' The probable correctness of this translation may be inferred from melons having been known to the nations of antiquity; and it may be proved to be so, by comparing the original term with the name of the melon in a cognate language such as the Arabic.

The cucurbitaceæ, or gourd tribe, are remarkable for their power of adapting themselves to the different situations where they can be grown. Thus Mr. Elphinstone describes some of them as yielding large and juicy fruit in the midst of the Indian desert, where water is 300 feet from the surface. Extreme of moisture, however, is far from injurious to them, as the great majority are successfully cultivated in the rainy season in India. Mr. Moorcroft describes an ex

ciently famous to be observed and recorded by the Greeks. Having thus traced many of these Eastern products to the works of almost contemporary authors, he was led to conclude that many of them must be the same as those mentioned in the Bible, especially as there is often considerable resemblance between their Arabic and Hebrew names (Essay, p. 138).

Although, like Hasselquist, Alpinus, Forskal, and others, the author studied these subjects in Eastern countries, yet he differs from them all in the circumstances under which he pursued his inquiries. His investigations were carried on while he was resident in the remotest of the Eastern nations known in early times, who were probably among the first civilized, and who are still not only acquainted with the various drugs and their names, but possess an ancient literature, in which many of these very substances are named and arranged. Having obtained the drugs, heard their names applied by the natives, read their descriptions, and traced them to their plants, he formed many of his opinions from independent sources. It may therefore be considered a strong confirmation of the correctness of his results when they agree with those of previous inquirers; when they differ, it must be ascribed to the peculiar process by which they have been obtained.-J. F. R.

[Cucumis melo.]

ABBA (ABB, EN) is the Hebrew word 28. father, under a form peculiar to the Chaldee idiom. The Aramaic dialects do not possess the definite article in the form in which it is found in Hebrew. They compensate for it by adding a syllable to the end of the simple noun, and thereby produce a distinct form, called by grammarians the emphatic, or definitive, which is equivalent (but with much less strictness in its use, especially in Syriac) to a noun with the article in Hebrew. This emphatic form is also commonly used to express the vocative case of our language-the context alone determining when it is to be taken in that sense (just as the noun with the article is sometimes similarly used in Hebrew). Hence this form is appropriately employed in all the passages in which it occurs in the New Testament (Mark xiv. 36; Rom. viii. 15; Gal. iv. 6): in all of which it is an invocation. Why Abba is, in all these passages, immediately rendered by & Tarp, instead of Tárep,

may perhaps be in part accounted for on the supposition that, although the Hellenic (as well as the classical) Greek allows the use of the nominative with the article for the vocative (Winer, Gram. des Neutost. Sprach. § 29), the writers of the New Testament preferred the former, because the article more adequately represented the force of the emphatic form.

It is also to be observed that, in the usage of the Targums, NN, even when it is the subject of an ordinary proposition, may mean my father; and that the absolute form of the word is not used with the suffix of the first person singular. Lightfoot has endeavoured (Hora Hebr. ad Marc. xiv. 36) to show that there is an important difference between the Hebrew N and the Chaldee NN: that whereas the former is used for all senses of father, both strict and metaphorical, the latter is confined to the sense of a natural or adoptive father. This statement, which is perhaps not entirely free from a doctrinal bias, is not strictly correct. At least the Targums have rendered the Hebrew father by NN, in Gen. xlv. 8, and Job xxxviii. 28, where the use of the term is clearly metaphorical; and, in later times, the Talmudical writers (according to Buxtorf, Lex. Talm.) certainly employ NN to express rabbi, master-a usage to which he thinks reference is made in Matt. xxiii. 9.-J. N.

ABBREVIATIONS. As there are satisfactory grounds for believing that the word Selah, in the Psalms, is not an anagram, the earliest positive evidence of the use of abbreviations by the Jews occurs in some of the inscriptions on the coins of Simon the Maccabee. Some of these, namely,

and some ;חרות for חר and ישראל for יש have

of those of the first and second years have N and ; the former of which is considered to be a numeral letter, and the latter an abbreviation for, anno II. (Bayer, De Numis Hebræo-Samaritanis, p. 171). It is to be ob served, however, that both these latter abbrevia tions alternate on other equally genuine coins,

;שנת שתים and שנת אחת with the full legends

and that the coins of the third and fourth years invariably express both the year and the numeral in words at length.

The earliest incontestable evidence of the use of abbreviations in the copies of the Old Testament is found in some few extant MSS., in which common words, not liable to be mistaken, are curtailed of one or more letters at the end. Thus is written for ; and the phrase 170 by, so frequently recurring in Ps. cxxxvi., is in some MSS. written S. Yet even this licence, which is rarely used, is always denoted by the sign of abbreviation, an oblique stroke on the last letter, and is generally confined to the end of a line; and as all the MSS. extant (with hardly two exceptions) are later than the tenth century, when the Rabbinical mode of abbreviation had been so long established and was carried to such an extent, the infrequency and limitation of the licence, under such circumstances, might be considered to favour the belief that it was not more freely employed in earlier times.

Nevertheless, some learned men have endeavoured to prove that abbreviations must have

been used in the MSS. of the sacred text which were written before the Alexandrian version was made; and they find the grounds of this opinion in the existence of several Masoretic various lections in the Hebrew text itself, as well as in the several discrepancies between it and the ancient versions, which may be plausibly accounted for on that assumption. This theory supposes that both the copyists who resolved the abbreviations (which it is assumed existed in the ancient Hebrew MSS. prior to the LXX.) into the entire full text which we now possess, and the early translators who used such abbreviated copies, were severally liable to error in their solutions. To illustrate the application of this theory to the Masoretic readings, Eichhorn (Einleit. ins A. T. i. 323) cites, among other passages, Jos. viii. 16, in which the Kethib is, and the Keri ; and 2, Sam. xxiii. 20, in which is the Kethib, and the Keri. With regard to the ver sions, Drusius suggests that the reason why the LXX. rendered the words (Jon. i. 9) "y, by doûλos Kuplov eiuí, was because they mistook the Resh for Daleth, and believed the Jod to be an abbreviation of Jehovah, as if it had been originally written y (Quæst. Ebraic. iii. 6). An example of the converse is cited from Jer. vi. 11, where our text has, which the LXX. has rendered Ovuóv μov, as if the original form had been, and they had considered the Jod to be a suffix, whereas the later Hebrew copyists took it for an abbreviation of the sacred name. Kennicott's three Dissertations contain many similar conjectures; and Stark's Davidis aliorumque Carminum Libri V. has a collection of examples out of the ancient versions, in which he thinks he traces false solutions of abbreviations.

In like manner some have endeavoured to account for the discrepancies in statements of numbers in parallel passages and in the ancient versions, by assuming that numbers were not expressed in the early MSS. by entire words (as they invariably are in our present text), but by some kind of abbreviation. Ludolf, in his Commentar. ad Hist. Ethiop. p. 85, has suggested that numeral letters may have been mistaken for the initial letter, and, consequently, for the abbreviation of a numeral word, giving as a pertinent example the case of the Roman V being mistaken for Viginti. He also thinks the converse to have been possible. Most later scholars, however, are divided between the alternative of letters or of arithmetical cyphers analogous to our figures. The last was the idea Cappellus entertained (Critica Sacra, i. 10), although De Vignoles appears to have first worked out the theory in detail in his Chronologie de l'Histoire Sainte: whereas Scaliger (cited in Walton's Prolegomena, vii. 14) and almost all modern critics are in favour of letters. Kennicott has treated the subject at some length; but the best work on it is that of J. M. Faber, entitled Literas olim pro vocibus in numerando à scriptoribus V. T. esse adhibitas, Onoldi, 1775, 4to.

than it is to conceive how such very dissimilar signs and sounds, as the entire names of the Hebrew numerals are, could be so repeatedly confounded as they appear to have been. This adequacy of the theory to account for the phenomena constitutes the internal argument for its admission. Gesenius has also, in his Geschichte der Hebräischen Sprache, p. 173, adduced the following external grounds for its adoption: the fact that both letters and numeral notes are found in other languages of the Syro-Arabian family, so that neither is altogether alien to their genius; letters, namely, in Syriac, Arabic, and later Hebrew; numeral figures on the Phoenician coins and Palmyrene inscriptions (those employed by the Arabs and transmitted through them to us are, it is well known, of Indian origin). And although particular instances are more easily explained on the one supposition than on the other, yet he considers that analogy, as well as the majority of examples, favours the belief that the numerals were expressed, in the ancient copies, by letters; that they were then liable to frequent confusion; and that they were finally written out at length in words, as in our present text.

There is an easy transition from these abbreviations to those of the later Hebrew, or Rabbinical writers, which are nothing more than a very extended use and development of the same principles of stenography. Rabbinical abbreviations, as defined by Danz, in his valuable Rabbinismus Enucleatus, & 65, are either perfect, when the initial letters only of several words are written together, and a double mark is placed between such a group of letters, as in the common abbreviation of the Hebrew names of the books of Job, Proverbs, and Psalms (the last letters only of words are also written in Cabbalistical abbreviations); or imperfect, where more than one letter of a single word is written, and a single mark is placed at, the end to denote the mutilation, as for . The perfect abbreviations are called by the Rabbinical writers 'n N, i. e. capitals of words. When proper names, as frequently happens, are abbreviated in this manner, it is usual to form the mass of consonants into proper syllables by means of the vowel Patach, and to consider Jod and Vau as representatives of I and U. Thus

Compendia vocum Hebraico-Rabbinicarum, Lips. 1780, which is the completest work of the kind extant.

With regard to the abbreviations in the MSS.