The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-10-06
 MOST ANCIENT HEBREW MS.


 Kept for Centuries in the Synagogue
 at Nablus, Syria-Brought to This
 Country by Former Missionary-Its
 Antiquity is Apparently Proved by
 Cryptogram.
 The Rev. w. Scott Watson, of West New York, N. J., who for several years has been collector of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, has recently obtained an incomplete text of the Samaritan Pen tateuch, which is apparently older by several centuries than any other He brew text of which the date is known. The date of MT. Watson's text Is A. H. 35 or A. D. 656 For more than quar- ter of a century the Russian govern ment has possessed the most ancient Jewish and Samaritan Biblical docu ments of a known age in Christendom. In the Imperial Library in St. Peters burg was to be found the earliest He brew manuscript of the Bible of any kind Of which the time of writing had been definitely ascertained, namely, the CodeX Babylonicus of A. D. 9l6. It is referred to by the translators of the English Revised Version on the first page of their preface Tn the. same col lection is a copy of the original text of the Books of Moses, and the rest of the Old Testament, of A. D. 1909, and a fragment of the Samaritan Pentateuch written in A. D. 1175. These have been considered heretofore the oldest manu- scripts of the kind In existence.
 Mir. Watson spent three years in Syr- ia as a missionary, and at that time got possession of many very rare and valuable texts, including a Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch of A. D. 12S2. For the last year he has been pursuing his studies in photography in Germany. few months ago he received a letter from one of his friends in Nablus, Syr- ia saying that a Pentateuch of A. H. 35 could be obtained there. MT Wat son sent for 1t at once and was on pins and needles until it reached him at Heidelberg, and he had satisfied him self that it was genuine and of the date given. MT. Watson got back to Ameri- ca fortnight ago with his treasure, which he showed to a reporter yester- day.
 In it's present form the manuscript consists of four hundred and thirteen pages bound together, comprising the entire Pentateuch. Of these one hun dred and sixty pages are of parchment, and these alone date back to 656. The other pages were added few years ago by Jacob, the high priest, at Ma blus, and are fragmentary, and the priest, in restoring the text, has patched them with paper. Most of the pages, however, are in excellent condi- | ton, and the color of the parchment bears testimony to their age. The ink | is black, except in the case of a few pages which were evidently on the out | side of one of several sections into which the parchment was divided, be- | fore the restoration and binding were done
 | The date of the manuscript, MT. Wat son says, is contained in Q very simple cryptogram which is so arranged as to | furnish, he thinks, very convincing proof of the genuine antiquity of the text. On most of the pages the writing runs clear across without a break The 1 cryptogram occurs in the first fifteen pages of Deuteronomy, on which the | writing, although it reads straight across, is divided into two columns. | The writing is so spaced out that in the narrow blank between the columns the | significant letters or words which form l the cryptogram stand out separated | from the body of the text, although l forming part of it, as the lines are read across. The cryptographic characters do not occur in every line, but at irreg- ular intervals of two, three, four or five lines. There are thus but four or five | on each page. Read down the pages | they form a sentence of which the fol- lowing is a translation:
 q, Jacob, the son of Israel, the son of Joseph, the son of Mar, the priest in the city of Damascus. wrote the Holy
 hand for the elder and the stay and the
 pillar, Joseph, the son of the elder and l the stay and the pillar Ishmael. of the
 children of Saginah, in the year thirty five of the kingdom of Ishmael And
 praise be to God"
 The pages on which the cryptogram
 is written are all of the old parchment
 and none of them is even patched with paper. The writing is distinct. | The leaves of the book are about six
 and three-fourths by five and one i fourth inches in size, with text space
 on each side that varies from five and | one-half to four and one-half by four
 and one-eighth to three and five
 eigths inches The full pages of Gene
 sis have with one exception thirty-nine
 lines each. but elsewhere the number
 ranges from twenty-nine to thirty-five, l the blank spaces between paragraphs being included. The characters are of
 the modified form of ancient Phoeni- clan called Samaritan.
 There is a limited use of the superlin-
 ear system of diacritical signs common l in later Samaritan documents. There