[444] The word occurs in _Perez_ Uzza. There still, however, remain some obviously unexplored mysteries about these words. Paronomasia, as I showed long ago in other works, plays a noble and profound part in the language of emotion; and that the interpretation should here be made to turn upon it is not surprising by any means. We find it in the older prophets. Thus in Jer. i. 11, 12: "What seest thou? And I said, I see a rod of _an almond tree_. Then said the Lord unto me, Thou hast well seen: for I will _hasten_ My word to perform it." The meaning here depends on the resemblance in Hebrew between _shaqeed_, "an almond tree" ("a wakeful, or early tree"), and _shoqeed_, "I will hasten," or "am wakeful over."
And that the same use of plays on words was still common in the Maccabean epoch we see in the Story of Susanna. There Daniel plays on the resemblance between σχῖνος, "a mastick tree," and σχίσει, "shall cut thee in two"; and πρῖνος, "a holm oak," and πρίσαι, "to cut asunder." We may also point to the fine paronomasia in the Hebrew of Isa. v. 7, Mic. i. 10-15, and other passages. "Such a conceit," says Mr. Ball, "may seem to us far-fetched and inappropriate; but the Oriental mind delights in such _lusus verborum_, and the peculiar force of all such passages in the Hebrew prophets is lost in our version because they have not been preserved in translation."
As regards the Medes, they are placed _after_ the Persians in Isa. xxi. 2, Esther i. 3, but generally _before_ them.
[445] LXX., ἔδωκεν ἐξουσίαν αὐτῳ τοῦ τρίτου μέρους; Theodot., ἄρχοντα τρίτον. See _supra_, p. 210.
[446] The LXX. evidently felt some difficulty or followed some other text, for they render it, "And _Artaxerxes of the Medes_ took the kingdom, and Darius full of _days and glorious in old age_." So, too, Josephus (_Antt._, X. xi. 4), who says that "he was called by another name among the Greeks."
[448] _Antt._, X. xi. 4. This was the view of Vitringa, Bertholdt, Gesenius, Winer, Keil, Hengstenberg, Hävernick, etc.
[451] See Herod., i. 109. The Median Empire fell B.C. 559; Babylon was taken about B.C. 539. It is regarded as "important" that a late Greek lexicographer, long after the Christian era, makes the vague and wholly unsupported assertion that the "Daric" was named after some Darius other than the father of Xerxes! See _supra_, pp. 57-60.