Down the centre of the scroll runs the famous title called Tarîkh or "Inscription,â a sort of acrostic. By thickening one or two letters in each line in a vertical column, the following has been obtained:
"I Abishuah, son of Phinehas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, the favour of Jehovah be upon them, for His glory I have written this Holy Torah (copy of the law) in the entrance of the tabernacle of the congregation on Mount Gerizim, even Bethel, in the thirteenth year of the possession by the children of Israel of the land of Canaan and all its boundaries. I thank the Lord.â
My second visit was paid after the death of Amram, in company with Lieutenant Kitchener and Mr. Elkarey the missionary. Jacob, the old man's nephew, was now high-priest; on the 10th of June, 1875, we repaired again to the synagogue. The high-priest, an eminently handsome man about thirty-five years of age, received us, dressed in robes of dark purple, with the crimson turban; his brown beard long and square, not marred at the corners; his dark eyes with drooping lids, the beautiful olive complexion and delicate aquiline nose, perhaps a little too square at the end, made him a model of beauty of a certain type--the Jewish beauty, for which the priestly family of the Hasmoneans was so famous, and which captivated Herod the Great in Mariamne, the last of her race.
Hastily admitting us, he locked the door, and brought us to the veil now covered over with a gorgeous yellow satin cloth. A younger priest brought out the second manuscript, but was hastily told "not that one;â and the silver case once more appeared, and was placed on a sort of trestle. Whilst we examined it, some urchins got up on the roof and looked through the skylight. The priest was alarmed, he drove them away, replaced the old scroll, unlocked the door, and showed us the other two.
There is a marked difference in the treatment Abishuah's roll receives at the hands of the priests. It is indeed a Samaritan Fetish, and is only seen by the congregation once a year, when elevated above the priest's head on the Day of Atonement.
The so-called "Fire-tried Manuscriptâ belongs to a poor widow in Jerusalem, named Mrs. Ducat. She lent it to a German savant named Dr. Jacob Frederic Kraus, and his essay on the manuscript is kept with it. The whole consists of 217 leaves, containing the Torah or law, from the twenty-ninth verse of the first chapter of Genesis to the blessing of Moses in Deuteronomy. Six leaves are added in a smaller hand on parchment at the beginning, the first being almost illegible. The real manuscript only begins at Gen. xi. 11; three leaves are added at the end for protection, after Deut. xxix. 30. The whole is much worn, and measures eleven inches by nine inches, and three inches in thickness. The text is divided into paragraphs, with verses, sentences, and words separated by a single dot; words are not allowed to be broken by the line, but in order to fill up the line the last letters are further apart, unless they form the word Jehovah which is read Elwem. The letters are not so small as those of Abishuah's roll, nor as large as those of the later roll; the hand is steady and uniform. The Decalogue is not numbered by marginal letters, in this respect it resembles Abishuah's roll, and so also the paragraphs are neither numbered nor stated in either text. These points seem to show the Fire-tried Manuscript to be ancient.
