A Critical Disquisition on the Etymology and Import of the Divine Names ELOAH, ELOHIM, EL, JEHOVAH, and JAH. 1. Of the Names ELOAH and ELOHIM. What may be the true etymology of these words, and what the notion radically involved in them, are questions which have never yet been satisfactorily resolved; and we pretend not to clear them entirely of their difficulties. They are of the number of those, in which it is much easier to detect error, than to discover the truth; and if the truth be discovered at all, it can only be by the slow process of the method of exclusion. We reject, therefore, without the least hesitation, the wild conjectures (for they deserve no better name) of Abarbanel, who makes either word a piece of patchwork, made up of the word, with letters of the Tetragrammaton added to it; and with another addition, in the case of the latter word, of which he can give no rational account. Particular objections to these derivations, which amount indeed to a confutation of them, will appear in the sequel: but at present we set out with rejecting them, as the mere guess of a grammarian of a late age, who had nothing to allege, either of authority or of reason, in support of his conjecture. With equal confidence we reject all derivations of these Hebrew names of God from other languages; the Persian, or the Arabic. For all such schemes of derivation seem to involve a principle, which we cannot but condemn, that the chosen people of the true God, the depositaries of the primeval faith, borrowed their names for the object of their worship from Idolaters. It is not to be denied, that light is often to be thrown upon a Hebrew word, by comparing its senses in the different dialects of Oriental speech, the Hebrew, the Samaritan, the Chaldee, the Syriac, the Persian, and the Arabic; for we consider all these as various dialects only of one language, of which the Hebrew was not, like the lingua communis of the Greeks, the youngest, but the most antient, and the parent of the rest. In words that run through all, or several, of these dialects, it may certainly happen, that the primary sense of a word, on which all its other senses depend, may be preserved in the application of the word in the latter dialects, when, for some reason not now to be A Critical Disquisition on the Etymology and Import of the Divine Names ELOAH, ELOHIM, ÉL, JEHOVAH, and JAH. 1. Of the Names ELOAH and ELOHIM. What may be the true etymology of these words, and what the notion radically involved in them, are questions which have never yet been satisfactorily resolved; and we pretend not to clear them entirely of their difficulties. They are of the number of those, in which it is much easier to detect error, than to discover the truth; and if the truth be discovered at all, it can only be by the slow process of the method of exclusion. We reject, therefore, without the least hesitation, the wild conjectures (for they deserve no better name) of Abarbanel, who makes either word a piece of patchwork, made up of the word, with letters of the Tetragrammaton added to it; and with another addition, in the case of the latter word, of which he can give no rational account. Particular objections to these derivations, which amount indeed to a confutation of them, will appear in the sequel: but at present we set out with rejecting them, as the mere guess of a grammarian of a late age, who had nothing to allege, either of authority or of reason, in support of his conjecture. With equal confidence we reject all derivations of these Hebrew names of God from other languages; the Persian, or the Arabic. For all such schemes of derivation seem to involve a principle, which we cannot but condemn, that the chosen people of the true God, the depositaries of the primeval faith, borrowed their names for the object of their worship from Idolaters. It is not to be denied, that light is often to be thrown upon a Hebrew word, by comparing its senses in the different dialects of Oriental speech, the Hebrew, the Samaritan, the Chaldee, the Syriac, the Persian, and the Arabic; for we consider all these as various dialects only of one language, of which the Hebrew was not, like the lingua communis of the Greeks, the youngest, but the most antient, and the parent of the rest. In words that run through all, or several, of these dialects, it may certainly happen, that the primary sense of a word, on which all its other senses depend, may be preserved in the application of the word in the latter dialects, when, for some reason not now to be discovered, that primary sense went into disuse, and was lost in the parent tongue. Yet in such cases it would be absurd to consider the word in the parent language, as derived to it from that dialect, in which the primary sense is found. For the circumstance may be owing only to the imperfect state, in which all these languages (with the exception of the Arabic and Persic) now remain; and the number and class of writers, that are come down to us in each, But with respect to the words which are the imme diate objects of this disquisition, no such information, as we have supposed to be in many cases attainable, is to be derived from the use of them in the various dialects of the East. The word, as a name of God, runs through them all; but we shall not find, in any one of them, any other sense of the word, which may be supposed to have given it the power of signifying "God," rather than to have been derived to it from that, as a prior signification. We except not from this remark even the Hebrew root, if that should be found to have אֱלוֹהַ] any connexion with Eloah אֱלֹהִים or Elohim the names of God. As to the Arabic roots and, the first a verb signifying and 66 to be awe struck," the second a noun denoting "benefi |