Page 66 - New English Book L

65

death by the Law of God, Who had given him the gift of
prophecy (Lev. xx 12). However, the story of Jacob (pbuh)
and that of his not very exemplary family is to be found in
the Book of Genesis (chaps. xxv. - 1.).

The famous prophecy, which may be considered as
the nucleus of this testament, is contained in the tenth
verse of the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis as follows:-

“The Sceptre shall not depart from Judah,

And the Lawgiver from between his feet,

Until the coming of Shiloh,

And to him belongeth the obedience of peoples.”

This is the literal translation of the Hebrew text as
much as I can understand it. There are two words in the
text, which are unique and occur nowhere else in the Old
Testament. The first of these words is “Shiloh,” and the
other “yiqha” or “yiqhath (by construction or contraction).

Shiloh is formed of four letters, shín, yod, lámed and hi.
There is a “Shiloh,” the proper name of a town in Ephraim,
(1 Sam. i., etc.), but there is no yod in it. This name cannot
be identical with, or refer to, the town where the Ark of the
Covenant or the Tabernacle was; for until then no sceptre
or lawgiver had appeared in the tribe of Judah. The word
certainly refers to a person, and not to a place.

As far as I can remember, all the versions of the Old
Testament have preserved this original Shiloh without
giving it a rendering. It is only the Syriac Pshitta (in
Arabic called al-Bessita) that has translated it into “He
to whom it belongs.” It is easy to see how the translator
has understood the word as composed of “sh” abridged
from of asher = “he, that,” and loh (the Arabic lehu) = “is
his.” Consequently, according to the Pshitta, the clause
will be read in the following manner: “Until he to whom
it belongeth come, And,” etc. The personal pronoun “it”
may refer to the sceptre and the lawgiver separately or