rendered
Chrysoprase in the Septuagint version, and is by others referred to the
emerald on the ground that the land of Havilah, where it is there said
to occur, is thought to have been a part of what was later called
Scythia, and as such would include the emerald region of the Urals. But
the ancient emeralds are now known to have come largely from Upper
Egypt, and such vague conjectures are of little use in determining what
stone was really meant in this most ancient allusion. Professor Haupt
has even suggested that we might translate the Hebrew word shoham used
in this passage by "pearl," since he conjectures that one of the four
"rivers" surrounding the land of Havilah was the Persian Gulf.
For
all attempted identifications of the stones mentioned in the Old
Testament, we are principally dependent upon the Greek version of the
Seventy. As this was made in the Alexandrian period, not far from the
time of Theophrastus, whose work on gems we shall presently mention,
the names at that time adopted by the Greek translators may be
regarded as fairly correct equivalents of the Hebrew. The difficulty
lies more in the translation of the classical names into the English,
and arises largely from the unscientific nomenclature of the ancients;
the same name being employed for stones that resemble each other to
the eye, but which are now well distinguished by chemical and physical
differences formerly unknown.
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