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forty-two feet in length and six feet in depth, and each to be fastened at the end by fifty loops; and that there were eleven of such curtains to be so fastened; it is manifest that the rendering "coupled one to another" is objectionable: for that he clearly had to hang them up and fasten them one after the other: or as in Isaiah xxvii., 13, where leahhad ehhad, which are of the same word, are rendered "and ye shall be gathered one by one"; or as Dr. Julius Fuerst, in his Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon of the Old Testament, renders it, "one after the other, singly"; and again, in Isaiah Ixvi., 17, where he renders it "shall be consumed one after the other, man for man."
Furthermore, the expression leghalloth 'ervathah as rendered is not at all to my satisfaction. It always includes the notion of turpitude and moral defilement. It implies here the contracting of an incestuous union with her. Maimonides repeatedly renders 'ervah incest. The rendering in the Authorised Version is like a witness speaking truth, but not the whole truth. The full meaning of the expression is "to commit incest with her."
The passage ends with the Hebrew word behhaiyeyha which they whose letters they quote invariably translate to suit their own purpose, namely, to argue therefrom that, when the wife is dead, the man may marry her sister.
Many Hebrew words are compound. A preposition is prefixed to a noun, and a pronoun is suffixed. Thus, in this instance, the first syllable he is in; and the last syllable ha is her; and the noun between them is simply life; there is nothing whatever about time either in the words or in the sense. Marriage with a wife's sister is forbidden because, by marriage, the husband had become one flesh with his wife, or literally flesh of her flesh (rendered "near of kin" in the 6th verse of our Authorized Version); and had therefore also become flesh of the flesh of her sister by the absolute physical change which he himself had undergone. This is one of those things in Scripture apparently hard to be understood by some people, especially by those who are intentionally blind: and yet both the verses 15 and 16 contain cases analogous to it: but I will presently prove it indisputably from Nature.
To those unacquainted with Hebrew it is yet perhaps known, that wherever in the text of the authorised version, a word, or a part of a word, is in italics, it is to be understood that there is no word in the original text answering to it. The idioms of the two languages are so
