forms should be used, just as we decide in English between the different pronunciations of the word bow.  As long as the Hebrew remained a living language, that is, the language of the masses of the people, this outline alphabet was sufficient for all practical purposes.  The modern Arabs read without difficulty their ordinary books, which omit, in like manner, the signs for the vowels.  The regularity of structure which belongs to the Shemitic languages generally, makes this omission less inconvenient for them than a like omission would be for us in our western tongues.

4.  During the long Babylonish captivity the mass of the Jewish people, who were born and educated in Babylon and the adjacent regions, adopted of necessity the language of the country; that is, the Aramaean or Chaldee language.  After the exile, the Hebrew was indeed spoken and written by the prophets and learned men, but not by the people at large.  In Nehemiah 8:8 we are told that “they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.”  This has been explained by some as meaning simply that they expounded to them the sense.  But the more natural meaning is that they interpreted to the people the words read from the law.  We find, soon after the captivity at least, the old Hebrew supplanted as a living language among the people at large by the Aramaean or Chaldee.  Why not date the change from the latter part of the captivity itself?

It was natural that the prophets and historians, all of whom wrote soon after the exile, should employ the sacred language of their fathers.  This fact cannot be adduced as a valid argument that the body of the people continued to speak Hebrew.  The incorporation, on the other hand, of long passages in Chaldee into the books of Daniel and Ezra implies at least that this language was known to the people at large.  As to the children spoken of in Neh. 13:24, who “could not speak in the Jews’ language, but according to the language of each people”—­the people, to wit, to which their mothers belonged—­“the Jews’ language” here is probably the language used by the Jews, as distinguished from that used by the people of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab.  Keil, Introduction to Old Testament, Sec. 18.

5.  After the Hebrew had ceased to be the language of the common people, its traditional pronunciation was carefully preserved for many successive centuries in the synagogue-reading.  It was not till several centuries after Christ (somewhere between the sixth and the tenth centuries) that the vowel-signs and other marks of distinction were added in order to perpetuate, with all possible accuracy, the solemn traditional pronunciation of the synagogue.  This work is ascribed to learned Jews of Tiberias, called Masoretes, from Masora, tradition; and the Hebrew text thus furnished by them is called the Masoretic, in distinction from the unpointed