other trees have put forth their verdure, but before its own leaves appear [Thomson, "Land and the Book," chap. xxii.]. The circumstance of Aaron's rod producing almonds as well as flowers is in accordance with the peculiarity of the almond tree, that its fruit is formed at once, and is seen while the flowers yet remain upon it. The flowers are pink and white, and very numerous. The tree flourishes in Asia, Africa, and Southern Europe, and its fruit is an important article of commerce, as also is the oil which is expressed from them. Almonds are of two kinds, the sweet and the bitter; but the most esteemed are what are still called Jordan almonds. The oil is used for domestic and medicinal purposes. The fruit of sweet almonds is in common use as a dessert. The almond tree attains the height of twenty feet, and is an interesting object in Palestine at the present day, where it is extensively cultivated. Some think that the almond tree is meant in Gen. xxx. 37. [See HAZEL.] The Hebrew name of the almond is shaked, a word which means watchful" or vigilant,” and refers to the early blossoming of the tree. It should be noticed that the peach tree is a species of almond (Amygdalus Persica), and that this, as well as the other, may be found in Palestine, in every part of the country, and on both sides the Jordan. 66 ALMS. This word is primarily derived from the Greek language, and properly signifies pity, or mercy; It is connected with our English word "eleemosynary,' or charitable, benevolent. The original word may be applied both to the disposition to show kindness, and to the act of kindness; but in the New Testament it only occurs in the latter sense [Matt. vi. 1—4; Luke xi. 41; xii. 33; Acts iii. 2, 3, 9; ix. 36; x. 2, 4, 31; xxiv. 17]. Another Greek word, literally meaning 'justice,' or "righteousness," is sometimes used in the same sense, and in some good copies occurs in Matt. vi. 1-4. The reason of this is, that it is a just and right thing to be kind or merciful to the poor. Among the later Jews, the term " righteousness" was very often used in the sense of alms-a use of the word which is to be met with not only in Jewish, but in Christian authors. The duty of almsgiving is many times commended in the Scriptures [see Exod. xxiii. 11; Lev. xix. 10; xxv. 35-38; Deut. xv. 7-11; xxiv. 19; Ps. xli. 1; lxxxii. 4; cxii. 9; Prov. iii. 28; xi. 25; xiv. 21, 31; xxi. 13; xxviii. 27; xxxi. 20; Eccles. xi. 1, 2; Isa. lviii. 5-7; Ezek. xvi. 49; xviii. 7; Dan. iv. 27; Matt. xix. 21; xxv. 35-45; Luke vi. 35; xi. 41; xii. 33; xiv. 13; xix. 8; Acts ii. 42— 46; xi. 29; xx. 35; Rom. xii. 8, 20, 21; 1 Cor. xvi. 1-3; 2 Cor. viii. 1–16; ix. 1-15; Eph. iv. 28; Heb. xiii. 16; James ii. 15, 16; 1 John iii. 17, 18]. The mode and spirit of performing the duty of almsgiving in its widest sense, is taught by our Lord [Matt. vi. I -4; see, too, Rom. xii. 8; 2 Cor. ix. 7. Various promises and encouragements are attached to liberal and generous consideration of others. Some of these are connected with passages already referred to; others are Gal. vi. 9, 10; Phil. iv. 1419; Heb. xiii. 16. Examples of almsgiving and liberality may be found in Boaz, Ruth ii. 8; Job xxix. 15; Luke x. 34, 35; xix. 8; Acts xi. 29; Rom. xv. 26; 2 Cor. viii. 2; Heb. vi. 10; 3 John 5. The law of God made special provision for the poor [see GLEANING, POOR, TITHES]; but also, as we have seen, strongly enjoined benevolence to all who were in need. Precepts so elevated and generous as those in Exod. xxiii. 4-6; Prov. xxiv. 17; xxv. 21, 22, are peculiar to the inspired volume among the writings of antiquity. The Jews, in course of time, perverted the simple Biblical teaching, and began to ascribe to almsgiving a degree of merit truly extraordinary. The Jewish perversions were adopted in the Romish Church, and in accordance with the notion that almsgiving almost, if not quite, saved a man's soul, sundry portions of Scripture were misinterpreted. The word "righteousness" was taken to signify "alms" in such texts as Isa. i. 27; xxviii. 17. Daniel was made to exhort the king of Babylon "to redeem his sins by alms, and his iniquities by pitying the poor;" and men were taught not only that God was appeased by alms, but that pardon was procured, and merit acquired, as well as all sorts of temporal and spiritual good. The apocryphal books have greatly helped this style of teaching, for, among other things, they boldly declare that "alms doth deliver from death." The true doctrine of Scripture on the subject may be gathered from the texts referred to above. The word alms," although now regarded as plural, was originally a singular noun, and was so used by our translators, Acts iii. 3, an alms." 66 [See ALMS.] AL'MUG, or ALGUM TREES. These are different forms of the same name, the first (almuggim) occurring in 1 Kings x. 11, 12; the second (algummim), 2 of the book of Kings renders the word by "unhewn Chron. ii. 8(7); ix. 10, 11. The Septuagint translator wood," whilst in Chronicles it is translated by "pinewood." The old Latin version in 2 Chron. ix. 10, 11, renders it as "thyine wood," citron wood. That the alinug tree was a native of the Lebanon has been supposed from the request of Solomon to Hiram that he should send him such timber from the above-named region. The almug tree of Ophir was probably of a finer quality and a larger size, and this explains why it is expressly stated [1 Kings x. 12] that no such Authorities are much divided as to the real meaning of almug trees were seen before or since in Jerusalem. the word. Some, with a fair show of probability, have supposed it to be sandal wood. Maria Callcott, in her claims of the thyine wood to be the almug. She says, Scripture Herbal," p. 2, &c., strongly advocates the "I have seen the wood of the Thuya articulata: it is dark nut-brown, close-grained, and very fragrant." It must be borne in mind that the almug, whatever it was, was a wood adapted for the construction of musical instruments. It was very highly esteemed by the ancients, and devoted by Solomon to sacred purposes, as well as for the adornment of his own palace. Gesenius is not disinclined to think the almug was red sandal wood, and adds, "Many of the Rabbins understood coral, and in this sense the singular (almug) is used in the Talmud; but this is not wood (trees); although, if this use of the word by the Talmudists be ancient, that precious wood might be so called from its resemblance to coral, as if coral-wood, Korallenholz." R. Kimchi supposes it to be the tree called “Brazil wood," and this latter opinion Gesenius considers most probable. AL'OE, and LIGN-AL'OE. The aloe is a wellknown exotic plant, having broad and very thick leaves, terminating with prickles. The stem rises from the centre, and bears a flower yielding a white kernel, light and round. The drug commonly known as aloes is extracted from this plant, and used medicinally. Anciently the gummy substance procured from the aloe by incision, or by bruising the leaves and thus causing exudation, was used in embalming the bodies of the dead. Probably the same substance produced also the perfume mentioned under this name in Scripture, as in Ps. xlv. 8-"All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia;" and in Prov. vii. 17-"I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon;" and Song of Solomon iv. 14. Myrrh and aloes were also conjoined in the process of embalming, as mentioned in John xix. 39, where Nicodemus is said to have brought "a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight." LIGN ALOES are referred to as trees in Numb. xxiv. 6-"As the trees of lign aloes which the Lord hath planted." The Hebrew word ahalim, thus rendered by the Geneva version and our own, is also rendered "tents" in the Septuagint and other versions. It seems probable that the aloe thus referred to is not the same as the Indian lign-aloe, but it may be the Syrian aloe, or that of Rhodes and Candia, which is a small shrub (aspalatha) covered with prickles. Perfumers, having removed the bark, use its wood (in Latin, lignum) to impart consistency to such perfumes as would without it be too thin and liquid. On the whole, however, it is most probable that the lign-aloe and the aloe of other Scripture passages were foreign plants, as the Jewish writers suppose. It has been reasonably conjectured to be identical with the eagle-wood, or Aquilaria Agallochum. The only notice of any species of aloe growing in or near Palestine is that of Captain Mangles, who saw in the valley of Petra, in Edom, monogram, with the inscription, Januarius quiescit in "a very beautiful species of aloe, bearing a flower pace. Vixit annos) —; which may be thus read, "In of an orange hue, shaded to scarlet; in some instances it had upwards of a hundred blossoms in a bunch." The modern medicinal aloes are collected from various species of aloe; some growing in Asia, where, however, they are not native; some in the West Indies, where they have been introduced for the purposes of commerce; but the Socotrine aloe (see engraving) is the best. It is a beautiful plant, growing to the height of five or six feet, with vivid green leaves, and a flower of scarlet, white, and green. It owes its name to the island of Socotra, lying at the mouth of the Red Sea; and probably the method of collecting and managing the juice, which gives the Socotrine aloes the superiority over others, is a relic of the practice of the ancient Egyptian priests and embalmers, who made so much use of it, and possibly might have their agents on the island, near as it is to Egypt, for the purpose of buying it up. [See Calcott, "Scr. Herbal."] ALOTH, ascents; a place mentioned only in 1 Kings iv. 16. It was under the charge of Baamah, one of the twelve officers who provided victuals for Solomon and his household, each during one month in the year; and was probably near Ashur. But it is uncertain whether it was a city or a district. Some believe it to be identical with BEALOTH [which see]; but, although the Hebrew word is the same in both passages, the meaning is evidently different, as it is a compound word in one case. ALPHA. The first letter of the Greek alphabet, so called from the Hebrew aleph. [See ALEPH.] In ' form it resembles our A. Our Lord, in Rev. i. 8, 11, says, "I am Alpha and Omega," which is explained to signify "the beginning and the ending,"- "the first and the last," in reference to the eternity of his Divinity. Compare Rev. i. 17, and Isa. xli. 4; xliv. 6, in the two last of which places the Lord appropriates WA QUIESCIT IN PACE IANUARIUS VIXIT A Fig. 2.-SEPULCHRAL INSCRIPTION-Roman Catacombs. (KIP.) Christ, the First and the Last, Januarius rests in peace. He lived years." AL'PHABET—from Alpha, beta, the two first Greek letters-signifies the characters of any written language placed in their proper order. A written language of some kind is indispensable to any considerable progress in civilisation: it enables each generation to benefit by the experience of those which have preceded it. Oral tradition may suffice for the preservation of a certain amount of historical or other facts; but these are likely to be distorted during transmission, and even to be gradually lost, so that tradition can be depended on only to a certain extent, and for a limited period; and those nations which have trusted exclusively to it have never thoroughly emerged from barbarism. Since it is improbable that our first parents were created without being at the same time endowed with a means of effecting a mutual interchange of ideas, without which even Paradise itself would be deprived of a great part of its charms, there is little practical utility in speculating on the manner in which From the remains which still exist of the most ancient an oral language might have been gradually invented. tongues that is, of those which most approximated to the first type of human speech-it may be inferred that the language of our first parents was extremely simple, and that it expressed, so far as was possible, by the sounds it included, the peculiar characteristics of the objects it was intended to describe, and of the ideas it was intended to convey; for "Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field" [Gen. ii. 20]; and the names he bestowed were no doubt founded on the peculiarities he observed in each of them: just as he named his wife, from the circumstances in which she had been created," she shall be called woman, because she is taken out of man [ver. 23]; and from the relations in which she stood to the human family, "And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living" [iii. 20]. It is equally useless to enter into the question whether spoken or written language has been of the greater benefit to mankind. written language has its own special and incommunicable advantages, and its use may be traced to the remotest antiquity. The art of writing was certainly known when the books of the Pentateuch were composed, since they make frequent allusions to it [Exod. xxxii. 15, 16, &c.]. There is reason to believe that the Phoenicians derived the art of writing from Chaldea; and tradition asserts that Cadmus brought a knowledge of letters from Phoenicia into Greece fifteen hundred years before the Christian era. The oldest Greek inscriptions to which a date can be with any certainty assigned are not older than the seventh century B.C. For Fig. 1.—MONOGRAM OF CHRIST-Roman Catacombs. (MAITLAND.) to himself the title of the "first and the last." The early Christian Church frequently combined the letters Alpha and Omega with "the monogram of Christ," as a symbol of the Divine Redeemer. The catacombs at Rome furnish us with numerous examples, two of which we have engraved. It is to be observed that the earliest monograms of Christ, of which the engraving (fig. 1) is an example, do not contain the figure of a cross. Their cross-like form is produced by a combination of x and p, the first letters of xpiorós, Christ, in various directions. These figures were sometimes inclosed in a circle, to express more em- The first step in the formation of a written language phatically the idea of eternity. The second illustra-must naturally have been the production of ideographic tion, one of the inscriptions over the places of sepul- characters; that is, of those which depict the objects to ture in the catacombs. exhibits a later form of the be spoken of. This is certainly the way in which any and in the Greek. The hieroglyphic and enchorial portions at first appear to bear no resemblance to each other; but an examination of the various manuscripts found in mummies enables us to connect them in the different stages of transition from one to the other. It is, however, incontestable that in the earliest systems of writing (both of Egypt and Assyria), examples occur of the ideographic and syllabic methods having been simultaneously employed. The Egyptian scribes employed a selected number of hieroglyphs to form syllables, the word being completed by the symbol of the idea placed after the phonetic or syllabic hieroglyphs. They had, at the same time, a written or cursive hand, upon the same plan. The Assyrian form of writing consisted of groups of wedges, or arrow heads, the representations of older hieroglyphs, or symbols, so reduced, as to be almost, if not entirely, abstract, and employed as syllables. But the writing also mingled with it ideographs, used to determine the ideas, but fewer in number than the Egyptians. In Egypt, about B.C. 700, the language became, as to its writing, more alphabetic, although not entirely so, from the appearance of the demotic; and the cuneiform, or arrow-head, about B.C. 525, became purely alphabetic, while alphabetic Phoenician writing can be traced, probably, up to the ninth century B.C. It is the influence of the Phoenician alphabet which probably modified the other syllabic systems of the old world, whilst from it are apparently derived the Greek, Etruscan, and all cognate alphabets. intelligent person, unacquainted with the art of writing, would proceed at present; it is that which was adopted by the Mexicans, who, rude as their method was, on account of it, had made a considerable progress in civilisation before the arrival of the Spaniards among them. That this was the first step in the art of writing, is confirmed by the fact that the Greek word graphein signifies both to paint and to write. The next step would be the adoption of symbols, instead of rude pictures; this would, in the course of time, occur of itself, on account of the gradual change of the ideographic characters, from the natural tendency to rapid writing, and from the suggestions of convenience. The next step would be the employment of mere arbitrary signs, most probably suggested by the characters already in use, if not a further and final degradation of them. At first it may be difficult to conceive how abstract ideas, &c., could be expressed ideographically; but this was easily accomplished, by the adoption of characters with which they appeared naturally associated. Thus, providence would be well represented by an eye; ingratitude, by a viper; friendship, by two hands clasped, &c. A very natural modification of ideographic or symbolic writing would soon suggest itself, in the use of the symbols to express syllables; and this would give rise to syllabic writing, partially exemplified by Hebrew and other Oriental languages, and to its fullest extent by the Chinese. With a syllabic alphabet, much fewer symbols would suffice to express a word; thus, "republic," which requires eight of ours, would be expressed by three syllabic characters. But the use of such, without marks to indicate the change of vowels, must either be attended with great uncertainty, and hence the vowel points in the Hebrew, &c.; or a vast number of characters must be used, as in the Chinese, which is partly ideographic and partly syllabic. The Chinese contains 214 elementary signs, which are, in reality, hieroglyphics; and from these, by combinations, are formed about 80,000 others. It has been supposed by many that what are considered as the Syrian and Assyrian alphabets were originally syllabic, in the full sense of the word; but that, whatever alphabet was adopted by the Phoenicians, it was so simplified by them that they were considered to have invented letters. Ideographic characters might be used to express articulate sounds; thus, the symbol for an ox might represent an O, that for a goat, G, and so on; and they were actually so employed by the Egyptians; for, in the hieroglyphic portions of the Rosetta stone, the name of Ptolemy is thus expressed; and elsewhere, that of Cleopatra; but whenever these characters were used in this way, they were inclosed in an oval ring or cartouche. The Hebrew characters, as we shall find when we examine them presently, originated in a practice of this nature; but whether the writing alluded to in the books of Moses was symbolical or alphabetical, it is impossible to decide. The Egyptian hieroglyphics, which may well be supposed to have been preserved unchanged, on account of the sacredness of the purpose for which they were employed, are valuable aids in tracing the progress of writing from the ideographic to the alphabetic. The symbolic may ultimately cease to have any perceptible connection with the ideographic character; but this is due to the intermediate transitions having been lost. The Rosetta stone now in the British Museum, one of the most interesting and important relics of antiquity, contains the same inscription, in the hieroglyphic, or sacred character; in the enchorial, or ordinary character of the country; That the Hebrew characters were originally ideographic is not only shown by their names, which, as we shall find presently, are those of objects well calculated for pictorial representation; but these objects are in many instances found in the corresponding Egyptian hieroglyphics; thus the objects indicated by the names of the Hebrew letters, Aleph, Gimel, Kaph, Nun, Ayin, &c. (Ballhorn's "Alphabete orientalischer und occidentalischer Sprachen," Leipzig, 1859, p. 8). What we term the Hebrew are, however, now very generally believed not to be the most ancient characters that have come down to us; the Samaritan and the Phoenician, offshoots of the primitive Hebrew, have better preserved the forms of their originals-that is, more closely resemble the hieroglyphics from which they are indirectly derived. And since many of the older examples of the Greek letters which, though according to Herodotus [v., 58] derived from the Phoenician, are more ancient than some, at least, of the existing specimens of Hebrew, Phoenician, and Samaritan ; they, as we might expect, approach more nearly to the forms of the objects from which the letters of the Hebrew alphabet have borrowed their names. It would not, as a rule, accord with our plan to give more than a single specimen of even the more important alphabets: we must, therefore, refer our readers for further illustration of our remarks to Boeckh, Mazzochi, the Elgin marbles, and other monuments in the British Museum, &c. Be it observed, however, that most of the letters of the Arabic and Syriac alphabets have four different shapes, varying according to the position which they assume in the composition of the word. A similar change occurs in certain of the Hebrew letters when placed at the end of a word, or the close of a line; some of them being dilated to fill up the space, and others being produced below the line at the conclusion of a word or sentence. The Coptic alphabet, like the Greek, has a corresponding set of smaller letters, occasionally somewhat differing in shape from the It will be observed at a glance that the characters most closely allied to those of the Hebrew language are the Aramaic, the Palmyrene, the Phoenician, and the Samaritan. The Estrangelo is the more ancient form of the Syriac. The Kufic is the older form of the Arabic, to which it bears a strong resemblance. The Coptic alphabet bears evident traces of its close affinity to the Greek. It is the present liturgical language of the native Egyptian Church. The Ethiopic and Amharic alphabets are identical, with the exception that the Amharic has seven more characters than the Ethiopic. These latter languages and the Coptic are read from left to right. The Etruscan, however, the language of the ancient masters of a large portion of Italy, is read from right to left, like the Semitic languages. We have, as far as possible, in the first eleven alphabets placed the corresponding letters in the same horizontal line, in this tabular view. |