ABSTRACT
I DISCOVERED a few years ago, in going through the attic of my mother's house, an old Hebrew Bible that had belonged to my grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, as well as a Hebrew dictionary and a Hebrew grammar. I had always had a certain curiosity about Hebrew, and I was perhaps piqued a little at the thought that my grandfather could read something that I couldn't, so, finding myself one autumn in Princeton, with the prospect of spending the winter, I enrolled in a Hebrew course at the Theological Seminary, from which my grandfather had graduated in 1846.1 have thus acquired a smattering that has enabled me to work through Genesis, with constant reference to the English translation and the notes of the Westminster Commentaries, and this first acquaintance with the Hebrew text has, in several ways, been to me a revelation. In the first place, the study of a Semitic language gives one insights into a whole point of view, a system of mental habits, that differs radically from those of the West. But, besides this, I had never read Genesis before. In college I had taken the second half year of a course in Old Testament literature, so I did have some familiarity with the prophets and the later phases of Biblical history, but the Pentateuch and the earlier historical books were known to me only in patches or through simplified versions of Bible stories that had been 4read to me when I was a child. I came to them in the original for the first time rather late in life, when I had already read many other books, and since such an experience is probably rare—Hebrew being studied mainly by Christian seminarists and orthodox Jews, both of whom come to it early and with definite religious predispositions—I am going to give a report on it. I am myself neither a Jew nor a Christian, and I propose to disregard, in doing so, the little I know of the tons of theological commentary that have been written by the various churches. I do not propose to take for granted—as, from recent conversations on this subject with even well-educated people, I conclude I am warranted in not doing —that the reader is any better acquainted with even the most famous Bible stories than I was when I recently began to explore them.
