ABBREVIATIONS. As there are satisfactory grounds for believing that the word Selah, in the Psalms, is not an anagram, the earliest positive evidence of the use of abbreviations by the Jews occurs in some of the inscriptions on the coins of Simon the , Maccabee. Some of these, namely, have l' for 7K1r, and In for 111111; and some of those of the first and second years have N and ZVI; the former of which is considered to be a numeral letter, and the latter an abbreviation for anno H. (Bayer, De N1171118 Hebrao Samaritanis, p. 171). It is to be observed, how ever, that both these latter abbreviations alternate on other equally genuine coins, with the full legends 1111N fII' and n+nt, rim; and that the coins of the third and fourth years invariably ex press both the year and the numeral in words at length.
The earliest incontestable evidence of the use of abbreviations in the copies of the Old Testament is found in some few extant MSS., in which common words, not liable to be mistaken, are curtailed of one or more letters at the end. Thus is written for 5N1e and the phrase 613.6 non, so frequently recurring in Ps. cxxxvi., is r 5 , in some MSS. written 11 t. Yet even this licence, which is rarely used, is always denoted by the sign of abbreviation, an oblique stroke on the last letter, and is generally confined to the end of a line; and as all the MSS. extant (with hardly two exceptions) are later than the tenth century, when the Rabbinical mode of abbreviation had been v. long established and was carried to such an extent, the infrequency and limitation of the licence, under such circumstances, might be considered to favour the belief that it was not more freely employed in earlier times.
Nevertheless, some learned men have endea voured to prove that abbreviations must have been used in the MSS. of the sacred text which were written before the Alexandrian version was made; and they find the grounds of this opinion in the existence of several Masoretic various lections in the Hebrew text itself, as well as in the several discrepancies between it and the ancient versions, which may be plausibly accounted for on that as sumption. This theory supposes that both the copyists who resolved the abbreviations (which it is assumed existed in the ancient Hebrew MSS. prior to the LXX.) into the entire full text which we now possess, and the early translators who used such abbreviated copies, were severally liable to error in their solutions. To illustrate the application of
this theory to the Masoretic readings, Eichhorn (Einleit. ins A. 7: i. 323) cites, among other passages, Jos. viii. 16, in which the Kethib is and the Keri and Sam. xxiii. 20, in which is the Kethib, and the Keri. With regard to the versions, Drusius suggests that the reason why the LXX. rendered the words (Jon. i. 9) 'IZIN '111), by Boaor Kyoto' Elul, was because they mis took the Roth for Daleth, and believed the 71zei to be an abbreviation of Jehovah, as if it had been originally written (Quart. Ebraic. iii. 6). An example of the converse is cited from Jer. vi. I1, where our text has rvirr mil, which the LXX. has rendered Ovn6y aor, as if the original form had been hinnri, and they had considered the yod to be a suffix, whereas the later Hebrew copyists took it for an abbreviation of the sacred name. Kenni cott's three Dissertations contain many similar con jectures; and Stark's Davidis aliorunzque Carminum Lib, i Y. has a collection of examples out of the ancient versions, in which he thinks he traces false solutions of abbreviations.
In like manner some have endeavoured to ac count for the discrepancies in statements of 'umbers in parallel passages and in the ancient versions, by assuming that numbers were not expressed in the early MSS. by entire words (as they invariably are in our present text), but by some kind of abbrevi ation. Ludolf, in his Con:mental-. ad Hist."Ethiop. p. 85, has suggested that numeral letters may have been mistaken for the initial letter, and, conse quently, for the abbreviation of a numeral word, giving as a pertinent example the case of the Roman V being mistaken for Viginti. He also thinks the converse to have been possible. Most later scholars, however, are divided between the alternative of letters or of arithmetical cyphers analo gnus to our figures. The last was the idea Cap pellus entertained (Critica Sacra, i. to), although De Vignoles appears to have first worked out the theory in detail in his Chronologie de l'Histoire Sainte: whereas Scaliger (cited in Walton's Piv. legamena, vii. 14) and almost all modem critics are in favour of letters. Kennicott has treated the subject at some length; but the best work on it is that of J. M. Faber, entitled Litmus olinz pro vocibus izu numemndo a scliptoribus V. T. esse adhibitaf, Onoldi, 1775, 4to.