sal migration, went east to India. But this is not at all inconsistent with the idea of proper names coming afterwards from another, or a foreign source. It is not at all likely that these roving, dispersed adventurers would think of giving a common or collective name to themselves. The Phoenicians were among the earliest established people. They followed with their trade these pioneering men of the West. Whenever the latter formed settlements on the capes, and isles, and secluded coasts of the Mediterranean, even to far Italy and Spain, the Phoenician ships, with their ubiquitous commerce, were soon after them. Homer pictures this very vividly, though at a much later time. The arrival of such a Phoenician vessel, and some adventure connected with it, form quite a frequent and familiar episode, especially in the Odyssey. A commercial intercourse of this kind must have had much to do with this early naming. The foreign traders would first see the necessity of some general or collective epithet, and they would be the first to supply the want. As history has shown in other cases, appellations thus coming from a foreign source become easily naturalized in the native language, and especially would this be the case with a general name thus applied, in distinction from the tribal designations more familiarly employed among the settlers themselves. The attempt to find the meaning or origin of the name Pelasgi in the earlier or later Greek, would be very much the same as if some latter day antiquarian should rack his brain to get the source and significance of Australian, Canadian, or Yankee, out of the languages afterwards spoken in the regions to which these epithets are applied.* They all came from abroad and so did Pelasgi. Thus, while the *There is a perfectly analagous example furnished by the name Welshmen, which was not given by themselves to the people so called, but had a foreign origin. It denotes wanderers (German Wallen, Saxon Wealh). So Italy was called by the Germans Wälschland, or Welshland. See New Am. Cyclopædia, art. Wales. The name Pelasgi having been thus given by the foreign traders, it is easy to see how it would become adopted among the scattered clans and tribes between whom the Phoenicians were the principal medium of intercourse. Indeed it would be difficult to point out how a common designation of these widely branching and scattering people could ever have arisen in any other way. The name Greek did not become universal for the later inhabitants until it was employed in that way by the Romans. early Greeks called themselves Hellenes, Ionians, etc., the * Dr. Röth, cited by Donaldson, advocates the claims of the Phoenicians to a large share in the early cultivation of Greece, and so would find the origin of the name Pelasgi in that language. He makes it, however, from the same root with Philistine, which certainly has far less reason, either phonetic or historic, than the one we have maintained. time when it was written, however early we may set it. This is in accordance, too, with an idea maintained by some of the most trustworthy commentators, that the Table has, to a great extent, a Phoenician origin, or that portion of it, at least, that relates to the Mediterranean settlements. It is more than probable, then, that in the words above cited we have the very language of the Phoenician document, and that such language was suggested by the very idea which, before or afterwards, gave rise to this name. There is another consideration which favors this etymology. Palag is not the most common Hebrew word for dividing, or cutting, although it comes near enough to it to be so rendered. It has rather, in Kal, the intransitive sense of branching, parting into limbs, or streams. In the use of the name, then, the foreign traders would pictorially describe them as the branching people, ever settling new places, and this would be in graphic contrast with their own home life, or the Tyrian state as confined to its own narrow and unchanging territory. Such a use of the term suggests what Herodotus says of the Hellenes as afterwards divided from the general Pelasgi: 7ò 'EAλnνικὸν ἀποσχισθὲν ἀπὸ τοῦ Πελασγικοῦ; Ι, 58 (see Rawlinson). The verb he uses (ànоoxioμa1), is, in other places, most commonly employed by him to describe such a division of streams, branching out or dividing themselves from the main channel; and this, as every Hebrew scholar knows, is the most significant use of the Hebrew or Phoenician noun peleg; as in Psalm i, 3, 5, channels, "rivers of waters," □ (applied more to artificial than to natural streams) and so in other places. If we only admit that the name may be of Phoenician origin, no other word in the Hebrew or Phonician language could be better adapted to such a purpose, or would more readily suggest itself to a foreigner as a name for such a peculiarly branching or spreading people. Among the earliest of these far-dispersing tribes were the Dodanim,* already mentioned as settling the extreme West of Greece. They brought with them this yearning for some *See Herodotus ii, 17; vii, 233, &c. †The LXX Version 'Pódio, Rhodians, comes clearly from mistaking the Hebrew D for R. divine intercourse which had been, more or less, a favorite idea in the old Eastern ancestral land. The wilderness country into which they came intensified the desire, and in its solemn oak groves they easily fancied that they heard whisperings, and murmuring sounds, reminding them of the patrial Deity of whom tradition told as walking among the trees of the garden and inquiring for one who was lost,-God seeking man, and thus giving the highest encouragement to that converse desire for divine communication, in some form, which has ever been so strong in the human breast. Was it all imagination, or may there not have been some objective reality in it? Who knows enough of the ways of God, or of the deep things of the human soul, to venture an unhesitating answer in the negative? Subsequent abuse and idolatry do not disprove a real sacredness of origin, as could be shown by clearest scriptural proof. Equally strong is the evidence, from the Bible itself, that the stream of divine revelation, ever following after the human apostacy, was not confined to the Jews. There were glimpses of it given to other peoples, out of the Abrahamic, and even the Shemitic line. The Philistine Abimelech had a vision of God; the Elohim came to him with a special revelation, Gen. xx, 2. The Canaanite Melchizedek was an oracular as well as sacrificing priest of El Elyon, God most high. The Pharaoh of Joseph's day speaks like a worshiper of the Jehovah who appeared to him in dreams, and sent to him an interpreting messenger. So was it. with Baalam, the prophetic son of the East, to whose ecstatic vision the roll of the future was so widely opened. Abundant evidence of the same kind is furnished in the book of Job. A knowledge of our Lord, and of his advent, was somehow given, from an earlier or later source, to contemplative souls in far-off Persia. These examples are not made known that we should confine ourselves to them. There may have been many others not recorded, even as there are mentioned sacred histories that have been lost. We should not, therefore, be shocked, or even startled at the question: Did these early wanderers really hear something divine in the woods of Dodona, leading them to regard it as an oracular spot, like Bethel or Mizpah to the Jews? There is nothing irrational, nothing incredible, nothing contrary to the Scriptures, in such a supposition. The gross delusion and imposture which marked the later oracular seats (though Dodona ever preserved a deeper impression of solemnity) would not militate against the idea. It was so in Judea and in Israel. Sacred relics were turned into objects of profane worship; the calves of Jeroboam were set up in the consecrated spot where Jacob, by the divine command, had built his altar; lying prophets and false visions mingled themselves with the true. So the cheats at Delphi present no absolute bar to believing in a primitive sacredness at Dodona. There may have been a true" inquiring of God," and after God, at that early day, by men who had not wholly lost the old patriarchal traditions; and if so, we may heartily believe our Bibles, and yet indulge the thought that, in some accordance with their dim aspirations, and their faint "gropings" (Acts xvii, 27) he may have been "found of them." The spirit of the declaration warrants us in taking it in its largest sense: "He hath never said to the sons of Adam, seek ye my face in vain." It is very precious, this idea of God as ever seeking our lost humanity, following it through the wilderness, ever striving, as it were, to hold intercourse with it, until there intervenes that dense cloud of wickedness, sensuality, or gross idolatry, through which no ray of heavenly light can penetrate. They may have heard a voice in the deep, solemn grove,—such a voice as sounded through the sin-desolated Eden-Ye sons of Javan, where are ye? or as it came to the ears of the fleeing prophet, in the cave at Horeb: Why art thou here Elijah? Why wander ye so far, seeking the ayrбTov Deóv, the "unknown God," or good? He whom your fathers worshiped is still present in this distant land,* "not far from *It appears from 1 Maccabees xii, 21, (Septuagint) that there had ever remained, among the Jews, a traditional remembrance of some early kinsmanship between them and the Greeks. It is brought up as an argument for a proposed treaty of alliance; For it has been found in writing (Ev Ypapy) concerning the Spartans and the Jews, that they are brethren, and that they are of the race of Abraham." The reference to the writing may have been to the Genealogical Table, Gen. x, 4. With the substitution of Javan (grandson of Noah) for Abraham, it would be literally correct. |