HEBERT, JACQUES RENE, commonly called Per Duchesne as editor of a journal of that name, a violent revolutionary organ; took part in the September Massacres; brutally insulted the queen at her trial, to the disgust of Robespierre; was arrested by his colleagues, whom he dared to oppose, and guillotined, his widow found weeping, following him to his doom (1756-1794).

HEBREW, a Semitic language, the ancient language of the Jews, and that in which the Old Testament is written, the words of which, as indeed of others of the same stock, are derived from triliteral roots, and the verb in which has no present tense, only a past and a future, convertible, moreover, into one another.

HEBREW POETRY is of two kinds, either lyric or gnomic, i. e. subjectively emotional or sententiously didactic, the former belonging to the active or stirring, and the latter to the reflective or quiet, periods of Hebrew history, and whether expressed in lyric or gnome rises in the conscience and terminates in action; for Hebrew thought needs to go no higher, since therein it finds and affirms God; and it seeks to go no farther, for therein it compasses all being, and requires no epic and no drama to work out its destiny.  However individualistic in feature, as working through the conscience, it yet relates itself to the whole moral world, and however it may express itself, it beats in accord with the pulse of eternity.  The lyric expression of the Hebrew temper we find in the Psalms and the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the gnomic in the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, while the book of Job, which is only dramatic in form, is partly lyric and partly dramatic.

HEBREW PROPHECY had throughout regard for the Jews as a nation and to see that it fulfilled its destiny as such in the world.  This purpose we see carried out by five steps or stages.  It taught, first, by the NEBIIM (q. v.), that the nation must regard itself as one nation; secondly, by Elijah, that it must have Jehovah alone for its God; thirdly, by Amos, that as a nation it was not necessarily God’s chosen; fourthly, by Isaiah, that it existed for the preservation of a holy seed; and finally, that it ceased to exist when it was felt that religion primarily concerned the individual and was wholly an affair of the conscience.  Thus does Hebrew prophecy terminate when it leads up to Christianity, the first requirement of which is a regeneration of the heart (John iii. 3), and the great promise of which is the outpouring of a spirit that “will guide into all truth” (John xvi. 13).

HEBREWS, EPISTLE TO THE, an epistle of the New Testament of uncertain authorship addressed to Christians of Jewish descent, who were strongly tempted, by the persecution they were subjected to at the hands of their Jewish brethren, to renounce the cross of Christ, which it was feared they would too readily do, and so to their own ruin crucify the Son of God afresh, there being only this alternative for them, either crucifixion with Christ or crucifixion of Christ, and death of all their hopes founded on Him.