ii. 6-9 in threatenings of violent death. In Job, the Psalms, and the Prophets it has a constant poetic, elegiac use, so that we may sum up by saying, that it is confined to poetry or visions of calamity, and never used of any prose conception of the rational thought regarding the future life. It leaves us at full liberty to believe all the evidence that happy hopes for the future coexisted with mournful views of death, precisely as the two sets of ideas have coexisted under the Christian system. Who has spoken more darkly of death than our own poets? Death, as the negation of life in the present, must always be so spoken of; but faith and hope are not made doubtful thereby.

Some, as Tayler Lewis in Lange (English edition), say that Sheol must be distinguished from the "grave" because the Hebrew has another word (kereb) for "tomb." But those who will look at the use of this word will see that it is limited generally, if not always, to the visible sepulcher, and not employed in ideal relations, as is Sheol. And we do not contend that Sheol indicates "the grave" narrowly, but the world of death and the grave as the antithesis of life in this world. The Chaldean legend of Istar's descent to Hades is apparently the original of all the "journeys to the dead," and was a sufficient warrant for all the Hebrew poets have said of Sheol, but was no actual or proper source of dogma for the future life to such as were capable of thinking for themselves.

We have said nothing thus far of any belief among the early Hebrews of the future for the wicked. But we find language in the Pentateuch which certainly forms an indication that opinion on this matter was not wanting. The sinner is threatened with death in a most emphatic manner: "He shall surely die" (Heb. dying he shall die). Again it is frequently said of him: "He shall bear his sin." And more dreadful still are the words: "That soul shall be cut off from his people." This phrase is used thirteen times in the

Pentateuch. In Lev. xx. 2-3 and xvii. 10 it is distinguished from death, and made the culmination of divine threatening. It is denounced in various connections, as of ritual disobedience, violation of the Sabbath, and of abominable vices. But in every case it is of definite disobedience to a divine command. It did not involve the execution of the death penalty except in the case of a civil offense. In other cases, commentators, as Knobel, say that God himself completed the excommunication or rejection. But what was this rejection

by God when "He set his face against the sinner"? The thoughtful Hebrew, who saw the prospect of blessing in the future from the covenant of God under which he lived, and from the doctrine of life as a gift restored by God, what could he infer from the cutting off of souls from the people of God? What, but the loss of promise and hope for the future, and the antithesis of the great promise of life which was ever sounding in his ears? To be shut out from the covenant of Jehovah was the end of all vision of blessing for life here or hereafter. And to see this was a sufficient belief of future chastisement. And there was a noble dignity in this, as compared with the wild polytheistic notions of the nations by whom the Jews were surrounded; and also as compared with the horrors of apocalyptic imagination, which were so abundantly developed in the later days of cruel persecutions of the Jews by relentless enemies. No transgressor, therefore, could come to his death feeling that he had not been abundantly warned of possible judgment to come.

LATER JEWISH VIEWS.

The development, in later Jewish literature, of a more distinct doctrine of a future life, and the words of Christ himself imply such views in the early days as we have supposed. In Ps. xlix. the author shows a clear sense of the difference between Sheol and the abode of the blessed, and so in Ps. xvi. and lxxiii. Talmudic and apocryphal writings make

Adam and Abraham to preside over their pious descendants. Abraham's bosom is paradise; and Fourth Maccabees associates Isaac and Jacob with Abraham in this, using the plural, εἰς τοὺς κόλπους. And in the closing lines of this book the martyrs are said to be gathered into the company (e's πaτéρwv Xopóv) of the fathers and to receive from God pure and immortal lives (vxás). Christ takes up this tradition when he makes Lazarus to be received to Abraham's bosom; and, again, when he makes the saved to come from the east and the west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When asked if there were few that were saved, he replied: "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and yourselves thrust out." In regard to the resurrection, he said: "God said, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living." We have here Christ's authority for saying that God spake to Moses as having the "living" patriarchs in his holy keeping, and we must take it for granted that Moses so understood him. Certainly this does not mean Sheol as the exegetes have conceived it.

The home of the fathers, therefore, in the keeping of their covenant God was the heaven of the Hebrews.

ARTICLE IV.

PAUL'S PHRASEOLOGY AND ROMAN LAW.

BY THE REV. GEORGE F. MAGOUN, D. D.

LOYALTY to the inspiration of the New Testament, and to the divine origin of Old Testament truths reproduced and exalted in it, does not forbid studious inquiry into the mould of its language. The dress of religious thought may be human, historic, ethnic, individual, while the body is from God. The New Testament differs from the Old in that it was not produced in purely Oriental surroundings. When revelation. struck the Greek language and the institutions of the Roman Empire, it struck modes of expression and forms of diction entirely novel to an Asiatic Jew.

There is more evidence of the Apostle Paul's familiarity with Roman law than there is of his acquaintance with Greek literature; at least with such literature at large, other than the writings of Aratus and Cleanthes, natives of Southern Asia Minor like himself. That his education and mental habits should lead him, in conveying ideas and truths more profound and spiritual than his hearers and readers had yet grasped, to clothe them with a "costume"-to use Professor Stuart's favorite term-drawn from sources well known to them as to him, was altogether natural. How, indeed, could he help it? Why should the Holy Spirit prevent his doing so? He evidently did not. It is a growing impression among scholars that Paul's great difficulties and obscurities would largely disappear if we knew better the sources of that figurative diction of his, which, it has been observed with dis

crimination, is never poetical or ornamental, but always logical and legal. How could it have been otherwise, indeed, with his cast of mind and training?

But a judicious appreciation of what has just been mentioned will not ascribe every comparison the Apostle makes of spiritual to secular things to the ready influence of Roman law. Some things in a lax way attributed to this influence the present writer has shown elsewhere1 are independent of it. The more common error, however, has not been on that side, but the opposite. We may, perhaps, find in the former the best starting point for an investigation of the latter. I. Assuming that Paul wrote Heb. ix., it is clear that he might have alluded to a divine "will" or "testament" had he been addressing Roman Christians. If neither of these is true, we should then need to see-in order to be satisfied of any such allusion-that the subject-matter required such a reference to the peculiar, the exclusively Roman, legal instrument; that dianкn is the Greek equivalent for testamentum; that this peculiar Roman form in the disposal of heritable property had become as much Greek as Roman, and that all this was familiar to the (unknown) writer of this epistle-a Hebrew convert to Christianity, it is agreed. But this nowhere appears. Indeed at Athens, only a child

1 In an article on "Roman Law and Contemporary Revelation" to appear in the Green Bag (Boston, law monthly) in 1895. As that paper is in a sense preliminary to this, it ought to be read first, in order to a "large, sound, roundabout," and just judgment of what is here said. To avoid crossing from the border land between law and revelation into the field of biblical interpretation, the former paper was confined to cases in which it is a mistake to regard the Apostle's form of expression or of thought as shaped by his knowledge of Roman law. The prominence of the topic first touched there is due to such facts as these: Succession to an estate was one of the three great principles at Rome of the early jus civile; and the title "de testimonio" was one of the four libri singulares studied in the first year of a law student's four years' course, along with the Institutes of Gaius. But that Paul knew all this and pursued such a course of study does not of itself prove the presence of law phraseology in any particular passage of his writings.