Christian faith and life Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: which it canot fairly be made to be bear. But on the other hand the translation, "They have like men transgressed the covenant" remains vapid and meaningless unt... more »il a sense beyond the suggestion of the words themselves is forced upon it. The simple 'men' must be made in some way to bear a pregnant sense—either as mere men, as opposed to God, or as common men as opposed to the noble or the priestly, or as heathen as opposed to the Israelites—to none of which does it seem naturally to lend itself here,—before a significance equal to the demands of its context is given it. Almost as little can be said for the version as old as the LXX. "They (are) like a man that has broken a covenant." This rendering certainly involves a forcing of the words out of their natural sense. No such exegetical Naturalness of objections ,ie against The Comparison rendering 'Like With Adam. Adam, Anydifficul. ties that may be brought against it, indeed, are imported from without the clause itself. In itself the rendering is wholly natural. Nor is it without positive commendations of force. The transgressing of Adam, as the great normative act of covenant-breaking, offered itself naturally as the fit standard over against which the heinousness of the covenant- breaking of Israel could be thrown out. And Hosea, who particularly loves allusions to the earlier history of Israel (cf. ii. 3, ix. 10, xi. 8, xii. 4), was the very prophet to think here of the sin of our first father. We shall let Delitzsch, however, outline for us the considerations which commend this interpretation; and to his remarks we shall append the discussion of Prof. Given, as a specimen of the comments which are conceived in a more practical vein. Says Delitzsch (on Job. xxxi. 33): "Most expositors have taken kad- hSm (in Job xxx...« less