cal 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 sy