ara, he cut, cut out, carved, planed down, polished; and
he refers to Lee, who characterizes it as a silly theory that bara
meant to create ex nihilo. In Joshua xvii. 15 and 18, the same verb is
used in the sense of cutting down trees; in Psalm civ. 30 it is
translated by 'Thou renewest the face of the earth.' In Arabic, too,
according to Lane, bara means properly, though not always, to create
out of pre-existing matter. All this shows that in the verb bara, as
in the Sanskrit tvaksh or taksh, there is no trace of the meaning
assigned to it by later scholars, of a creation out of nothing. That
idea in its definiteness was a modern idea, most likely called forth
by the contact between Jews and Greeks at Alexandria. It was probably
in contradistinction to the Greek notion of matter as co-eternal with
the Creator, that the Jews, to whom Jehovah was all in all, asserted,
for the first time deliberately, that God had made all things out of
nothing. This became afterwards the received and orthodox view of
Jewish and Christian divines, though the verb bara, so far from
lending any support to this theory, would rather show that, in the
minds of those whom Moses addressed and whose language he spoke, it
could only have called forth the simple conception of fashioning or
arranging--if, indeed, it called forth any more definite conception
than the general and vague one conveyed by the [Greek: poiein] of the
Septuagint. To find out how the words of the Old Testament were
understood by those to whom they were originally addressed is a task
attempted by very few interpreters of the Bible. The great majority of
readers transfer without hesitation the ideas which they connect with
words as used in the nineteenth century to the mind of Moses or his
contemporaries, forgetting altogether the distance which divides their
language and their thoughts from the thoughts and language of the
wandering tribes of Israel.

How many words, again, there are in Homer which have indeed a
traditional interpretation, as given by our dictionaries and
commentaries, but the exact purport of which is completely lost, is
best known to Greek scholars. It is easy enough to translate [Greek:
polemoio gephyrai] by the bridges of war, but what Homer really meant
by these [Greek: gephyrai] has never been explained. It is extremely
doubtful whether bridges, in our sense of the word, were known at all
at the time of Homer; and even if it could be proved that Homer us