But what is very strange and worthy of observation is that the word “python” should be found in Deuteronomy so long before that Greek term was known to the Hebrews; and indeed this word is not to be found in the Hebrew, of which we have never had a good translation.
There are many insurmountable difficulties in this language; it is a mixture of Phœnician, Egyptian, Syriac, and Arabic, and has undergone many alterations to the present time. The Hebrew verbs had only two moods, the present and the future; the rest were to be guessed at by the sense. The different vowels were frequently expressed by the same characters, or rather, indeed, they were not expressed at all; and the inventors of points have only increased the difficulties they meant to remove. Every adverb had twenty different significations, and the same word had frequently several contrary senses. Add to this that the language was in itself very dry and barren; for the Jews, not being acquainted with the arts, could not express what they knew nothing of. In a word, the Hebrew is to the Greek what the language of a pedant is to that of an academic.
[59] The opinion of Ezekiel was at length the prevailing one of the synagogue; not but that there were always some Jews who, though they believed in a state of eternal punishment, yet believed at the same time that God punished the sins of the fathers upon the children. At present, indeed, they are punished even beyond the fiftieth generation, and yet are in danger of eternal punishment. It may be asked how the offsprings of those Jews who were not concerned in putting Christ to death can be temporarily punished in the persons of their children, who were as innocent as themselves. This temporal punishment, or rather this manner of living, so different from all other people, and of trading over the whole earth without having any country of their own, cannot be considered as a punishment, compared with what they are to expect hereafter on account of their unbelief, and which they might avoid by a sincere repentance.
[61] Those who have thought to discover the doctrine of hell and heaven, such as it is now believed by us, in the Mosaic books, have been strangely mistaken; their error is owing entirely to an idle dispute about words: the Vulgate having translated the Hebrew word _Sheol_, the pit, by the Latin word _infernum_, and this latter having been rendered in French by _enfer_, hell, they have taken occasion from this equivocal translation to establish a belief that the ancient Hebrews had a notion of the _Hades_ and _Tartarus_ of the Greeks, known to other nations before them by different appellations.