On the Origins or the Antiquity of the Hebrew Language

—most ancient testimonies of the Greeks about this matter, which that distinguished author Josephus—to whom, because of his signal skill, erudition, and candor in writing, a statue was donated in the most eloquent city—brings forth in his books of Jewish Antiquities and Against Appion the Grammarian (which his own Jews suppress out of hatred for the truth), and beyond those also which Eusebius of Caesarea brings forth most amply in his Evangelical Preparation, you will recognize here by no light arguments that this Hebrew language once gave its vocabulary to the more notable provinces of the world through the sons of Noah: for Noah is the same as Janus to the Latins, from the discovery of the use of wine (for Iain wine signifies wine to the Hebrews), but to the Greeks he is oinotērē wine-bringer likewise: sometimes called Chaos by the poets, because all things seem to have arisen from him: sometimes he is called Heaven, as one who is believed to be the author and propagator of the whole of posterity in the highest memory of men: it is also established that he is called Ogyges by some, under whom the first and greatest of floods occurred. Furthermore, that from this one, the Arabic, the corrupted Chaldean, and the one different from Hebraism, the Indic, which today occupies the greatest part of the world, have flowed: it will certainly be established that the Greek language, besides many words and the origin of all disciplines, also has not a few locutions and tropes of speaking from it. Nor do I undertake to treat this argument so as to persuade the learned to learn the languages themselves, to whom nothing is more persuaded: but for the sake of those who, when they find a man skilled in some language different from his own, immediately proclaim him a heretic. If you take away from them that one freedom of slandering, in which they are most powerful, you will have called them stones and trunks: so that those Phrygians, wise too late, may see that without the knowledge of ancient languages, there can be no reason for either things or words. I want, however, before the thing itself, for the sake of the age in which I wrote this, to ask for a place of pardon from the fair reader, should it happen that I have erred anywhere. For I know I will be laughed at. But that will be common to me with many, which is the anchor of the miserable. I will be detracted from, by the upright not at all: if by the wicked, their disparagement is praise. I will say what Jerome said: "If it does not please, do not read it." But to the matter.