Hebrews

Amongst the Hebrews a promise made by a male at the age of thirteen, and by a female at the age of twelve, was valid.

” Hence a promise is called by the Hebrews a bond or chain, and is compared to a vow.

The term use is to be understood here as applied not only to the bare unproductive use of a thing, but to that which is attended with profit, whether it be temporary, personal, hereditary or circumscribed, as was the case among the Hebrews with regard to transfers, which could be made for no longer a time than till the year of Jubilee.

"For the Hebrews ask for signs," as the Apostle says, "and the Greeks seek wisdom.

"For not only for the Hebrews and those under the Law," according to the Apostle, "is it reasonable to become a Jew, but also, for the sake of the Greeks, a Greek, that we may gain all.

In the Laws, indeed, Plato — that philosopher sprung from the Hebrews — bids the farmers neither to draw water for irrigation nor to take it from others, unless they have first dug for themselves down to the so-called virgin soil and found the ground without water.

Sacrifice to ancestors was certainly not unknown to the Hebrews either as a foreign practice or as a prohibited idolatry.

Hence there arose, among the ancestor-worshipping peoples, a most intense desire for male offspring and, as a consequence of this desire, a remarkable set of ideas about paternity, sonship, and inheritance, which must have been widely diffused of old among all the more powerful races of mankind, and specially those of the Aryan stock.

The Levirate, under which the son is born to the dead man from his brother, ‘that his name be not put out of Israel,’ is best known to Englishmen from the casuistical question of the Sadducees in the twenty-second chapter of St.

but the laws, all that are true, and the right opinion concerning God, you have profited from the Hebrews themselves, "who not with empty deceits, nor with works of men — gold and bronze and silver and ivory, and idols of wood and of stone, of dead mortals — do they pay honour, all that mortals do in their empty-minded counsel;

The use of seals, however, as mere fastenings, is doubtless of much higher antiquity;

But Professor Smith's saying has already been given, that the Arabs, the Hebrews and the Aramaeans in their most ancient times were living together in the Arabian peninsula, and then the Hebrews and the Aramaeans went forth and the Arabs remained in their place.