The corpus of early Hebrew poetry, to which these two lengthy poems belong, has been the subject of a great deal of critical discussion, both because of the many problems involved and because of the contribution which these poems make to the history of Hebrew prosody, grammar, lexicography, and religion. It is thus not without value that further efforts at solution of some of the difficulties be made. The following brief notes deal with two passages that have been the subject of extended investigation by various scholars.

Throughout the history of western Christianity, a major stumbling block has been agreement upon the definition of certain terms. Milton and his critics have shared in the difficulty of communication which lack of a common terminology has caused. Nowhere is this more evident than in his discussion of the Son of God in the Christian Doctrine, where his employment of “substance,” “subsistence,” “essence,” and “hypostasis” has confused students who were attempting to understand the complex meanings which lie back of these words. Milton has often not followed the interpretations of these words usually held in Christianity; rather, he has adopted meanings which were very early associated with them but which lost currency centuries ago, even though they have never been completely forgotten.

In the last issue of the Harvard Theological Review, Mr. Eugene McGee has rendered the service of repeating the old caricature of Nominalist Eucharistic theology (this time pinning the donkey's tail on the English reformer Cranmer) and extending this line of argument in such a way that it can be clearly faced and perhaps finally silenced. For, contrary to Mr. McGee's claim, he is not the first to “discover” the Nominalism of Cranmer. Throughout the forties and fifties of this century there raged a controversy over whether Cranmer could be called a Zwinglian and, if so, to what degree. In this controversy were drawn Dom Gregory Dix, G. B. Timms, E. C. Ratcliff, C. C. Richardson, and G. W. Bromiley. In the course of their arguments both Dix and Richardson referred to the Nominalism of Zwingli and Cranmer, who, Dix and Richardson felt, shared essentially the same position. “Cranmer,” Dix said, “was a man of the high Renaissance period, with all its deliberate ‘subjectivism,’ which sought so intently to segregate what was present in the forefront of consciousness as words as the only significant element in human life.” Richardson expanded on this charge. “The philosophic presuppositions of Zwingli's thought on the Eucharist,” he said, “are derived from Nominalism and humanism. Like most of the Reformers Zwingli attacks transubstantiation from a Nominalist point of view.” McGee's exposition bears a striking resemblance to Richardson's development of this thesis, and is to be regarded as its “re-presentation.”

Proponents of the view that marriage by purchase existed in ancient Israel point, in affirmation of their thesis, to Ruth 4:10, “And also Ruth the Moabitess, wife of Mahlon, קניתי to be my wife.” Specifically, they point to the use of the verb קנה. In the Bible, when not in connection with God or wisdom (the latter exclusively in Proverbs), it implies purchase. Basing themselves on the passage in Ruth, such lexicographers as Gesenius — Buhl and Koehler — Baumgartner list “eine Frau kaufen” or ”purchase to be one's wife” as one of the meanings of the verb קנה.