We next find this same general phrase introduc tory to another but much shorter catalogue ; for (2.) In the remarkable passage of Ezek. xxi. 21, or 26 in Hebrew Bible, we have the three famous divina tions of the king of Babylon. The prophet repre sents the monarch as standing `.at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divi nation (Mpp pbr?). (a.) He made his arrows bright' [or rather, he shook and mingled them cether, Vulg. commiscens sagittas, n+173 each arrow having inscribed on it the name of some town to he assaulted. From the quiver the arrows were drawn one by one ; and the city which was written on the first arrow drawn out was the first to be beleaguered' (St. Jerome, in loc.) In this instance Jerusalem was the ill-fated object of this divination, as we learn from the next verse, where the divination for .7. (tho»+ npr) signifies the arrow bearing the inscription of the doomed capital, as it first emerged from the divining quiver. We have here a case of the pcXop.aprela. This superstition, which is prohibited in the Koran (chap. iii. 39 ; v. 4), was much practised by the idolatrous Arabs. Their arrows, which were con sulted before anything of moment was undertaken, as when a man was about to marry, or undertake a journey, or the like, used to be without heads or feathers, and were kept in the temple of some idol. Seven such arrows were kept at the temple of Mecca, but in divination they generally used but three." On one of these was written my Lord hath bidden sae ; on the second was in scribed my Lord hath jar-bidden me; whilst the third was blank. If the first was drawn, it gave the god's sanction to the enterprise ; the second prohibited it ; but the third being drawn required that the arrows should again be mixed and again drawn until a decisive answer was ob tained (Pocock's Spec. Arab, 324, etc. ; Gesenius, Thes. 1224 ; Sale's Koran, .Prelim. Disc. 90 j Clodius, Diss de Mag. Sagitt. iii. 2). This pcX0 btavrEia of the king of Babylon must not be con founded with the peXopoXia of Jonathan, the affec tionate expedient of his secret warning to David, I Sam. xx. 20, etc., in which, though there were three arrows, there was no uncertain divination, but an understood sign. Again, in the shooting of arrows by Joash, king of Israel, at the command of the dying prophet (2 Kings xiii. 17, iS), there is in the three arrows only an accidental, not a real resemblance ; moreover, we have in this action not an unauthorised superstition, but a symbolical prophecy (comp. the symbol with Virgil, /Ell. ix. 52, 'En, ail, et jaculxm attorquens millet in auras ; Principiam pugnic').
(b.) 'He consulteth with images,' vs73 (LXX. brepcorijo-ac Ev robs XtrliTOIS ; Vulg. in terrogavit ia'ola), literally, as in the margin, He consulted with Teraphim. We postpone the de scription of these household gods of the Shemitic nations [TERAPHim], which are often mentioned in O. T. from the time of the Syrian Laban (Gen. xxxi. 19), to this of the Chaldee Nebu chadnezzar (see Aug. Pfeiffer, De Teraphim, in Ugolini Thes. xxiii. 566) ; who, unnecessarily in deed, suggests, on grammatical grounds, that the king of Babylon may have used these three divina tions of the Athnach clause previous to his leaving home. Dr. Fairbairn [on Ezek. xxi. 21], says, This is the only passage where the use of teraphim is expressly ascribed to a heathen.' (c.) He looked in the liver,' innm nt.n (LXX.
Karao-trowncrcicrat; Alex. Vulg.
Exta consul:tit). Here we have a case of a well known branch of the Extispiciurn (or art of the Hun spices), practised in Rome by the Etruria?' sooth sayers, and much referred to in both Greek and Latin authors. Cicero, de Divin.ii. 15, mentions the importance of the liver in divination of this kind ; hence thisbranch was called 4prarorricoria (Herodian. viii• 3. 17). See also Pliny, xi. 37 ; Ovid, Metam. xv. 136. Arrian (Attains. vii. IS) mentions an evil prognostication in reference to the deaths of Alexander and Hephmstion ; and Suetonius (Aug. xcv. 2, a happy one ; victimarum osmium jecinora replicata intrinsedis ab lam fora). Strabo also, Book III., p. 232 [ed. Casaub.], mentions this divination as practised by the Lusitani : not only animals offered in sacrifice, but captives in war furnished these barbarians with rd. Porti rod lEpoo-zzowaii p.avretiovrad. A still more hideous mode of divination is mentioned of the ancient Britons, who would cut down at a blow of the sword one of their human sacrifices, in order to observe the posture of his fall, his convulsions, flow of the blood, etc., etc., and so gather their predic tions according to the rule of their ancestors. This is the only instance mentioned in Scripture of this superstition. (3.) The generic word opp is once more rendered specific in I Sam. xxviii. 8, where Saul requests the witch of Endor to divine to him, ZeINZ, by the familiar spirit. But we have already considered this phrase under Deut. xviii. TO, 12 (See above, I. e).
What remains for us to do, is to collect the other terms of divination which lie scattered in various passages. (4.) The first of these terms is ?tpiArl. This word occurs in Is. xix. 3, in a passage descriptive of the idolatry and super- stition of Egypt. It is derived by Gesenius and WS Meier from a root LDU:;..t, akin to Arab. which signifies to utter a dull murmuring sound. Meier defines our noun by Die Lispelnden,' mar mnrers or lispers. If so, we have here a class of the ventriloquists already described. But the LXX. gives another turn to the word ; rendering by evyciXpar ; as if, after gods, it meant their shrines. Herodotus (ii. T 83) tells us the Egyptians possessed many oracles besides that of Latona at Buto, which was most esteemed of all.
He adds, that ' the mode of delivering the oracles (al gavrhi'aL) varied at the different shrines.' These oracular officials were probably the vsv.gri of Isaiah. (5.) The 6th verse of chap. ii. of this prophet, in giving a reason why God forsook his people, the house of Jacob, charges them with being 'soothsayers,' This word is substan tially the same as that which we considered above, under (I a) : we have here the additional informa tion that this species of divination was copied by the Jews from the Philistines ;' their proneness to follow the idolatrous practices of their various neighbours was in direct defiance of God's injunc tions to them, and contributed more than anything to their ruin. (6.) In Dan. ii. 2, four classes of diviners are mentioned ; two were described above, in (i c) ; of the others, 1:14pt5;;st (Chald. r;Vt.:, in Dan. ii. 27) is probably allied by derivation with the word 9ttm, which we have already described [Meier says ;:gx=rirjz The noun rivit..; quiver), from the same root, suggests the notion of concealmeniandcovering. This, the probable mean ing of our term, suits very well with the idea of divi nation, though it ill accords with the A. V., which in all the eight* passages in Daniel, where it is found, renders it astrologers. Divination by the stars is not implied in the original. The LXX. in every place except one [and that is doubtful, see Trommii Concord. ii. I], translates rint by nd-yos, and the Vulg. generally by magus. This suggests the association of the convt.z. with the /.4.1-yot ti/r6 civuroWv of St. Matthew ii. i. (Dutripon, Con cord. Bibl. Sacr. 824.) This, added to the fact that ?v....4.; is generally coupled with the Char t alum im and the Chala'xans, probably influenced our translators in their choice of the English The original, however, is much less specific. Some philologists have imagined the word ao069 is no other than 9S.:1N with the aleph dropped, and have also connected it with the Persian Sophi. Such a derivation would rather point to occult arts and cabalistic divination. (7.) vnpiri [See above, t. c.] The expression used by Daniel in i. 20— vrpp-Inri is an asyndeton, for other places prove the second to be a different class from the first ; see ii. 2, so. The close conjunction of the ?''DM•I with the Chartumminz indicates their participation of the qualities of the latter, the i.Epo ypau.uarcis of both Egypt and Babylon, over whom Daniel was appointed Fat or Master. In the learned Dissertatio D. Millii de Chartumminz aliisve orientalium magic [Ugolini Thes. xxiii. 529 538] nearly all the accomplishments of the divin ing art are attributed to this influential caste, beginning with the genethliac mysteries. The horoscope, which was much in use by the ;VOLK61, brings us back to astrology, which (though not implied in the designation n'W;;.l) was no doubt a part of their wisdom. Gesenius, in Thes. and Lex., derives the word from t] 1, a graving tool,' and (on the authority of Creuzer, Symbol/A n. Jll tlzologie, i. 245; and Jablonski, Pivleg.izz Panth. /Egypt., p. 91, etc.) connects the arts of the Chartummim with the sacred hieroglyphical writings. Not less probably, from such a deriva tion, these diviners might be connected with the sys tem of talismans, so rife in the East, and in Egypt in ancient times. The talisman [Arab. ,„L ; Greek niXceza] is defined (in Freytag, Lex. Arab. s. v. iii. 64) to be a magical image upon which, under a certain horoscope, are engraved mystic characters, as charms against enchantment or fascination.' Talismans, among other uses, are buried with treasures, to prevent them from being discovered. Thus this divination appears as a counterpart against another species (in rhabdo mancy) which was used for the discovery of trea sure. Equally varied are the gifts ascribed to the Chartumminz in the translations of the LXX. and the Vulgate. In eleven of the fifteen occurrences of the word (all descriptive of the magicians of Egypt and Babylon), eiraoeb6s and Incantator are used ; Oapuanos and Veneficus in two ; and in the remaining two /,,rynr4s and Interpres. (S.) vit."2 (LXX. XaXoctioe ; Vulg. Chaldxi). Here, says Cicero (de Div. i. 1), we have a class `so named, not from their art, but from their nation' --` Non ex artis, sed ex gentis vocabulo nominati.' And only a section of the nation, the learned caste ; the dominant race,' says Ernest Renan, `which gave their name, though only a minority, as the Turks elsewhere, to the mass of the population, which differed from them in descent' (1-hstaire langues Slmitiques, pp. 67, 68). They are men tioned by Herodotus (i. 'SI) as a Sacerdotal caste. Cicero, I. c.,notices their devotion to astrology, and ' their working out a science by which could be predicted what was to happen to each individual, and to what fate he was born.' Diodorus Siculus, after Ctesias, assigns the same office at Babylon to the Chaldxans as the priests bore in Egypt (Hst. ii. 29). Juvenal (Sat. vi. 552) and Horace (Caren. i. xi., nec Babylon/as tentkris numeros) refer to the Chaldean divination. The prophet Isaiah (xlvii. 12, 13) mentions several details of it, in terms which we have already described. (How the the military and the learned classes of Babylon [comp. 2 Kings xxiv. 5, so, etc., with Dan. ii. 2]; and how conflicting are the views of the modern learned as to the origin of the Chakheans, see Renan I. c., and Sir H. Rawlinson, in note of Rawlinson's Herod., vol. i. p. 319. See also CHALIILEANS, p. 467 of this work.) (9.) One name more (occurring in Dan. ii. 27 ; iv. 4. ; • and v. 7, s) remains to be noticed descriptive of the savans of Babylon—r [LXX. ; Vulg.