It is not my purpose to compare Leeser’s Version with others. From the hour when his “Law of God” appeared in Philadelphia, in 1845, Leeser’s Pentateuch won the affectionate regard of American Jews. The Pentateuch was issued in octavo, in Hebrew and English; the whole of the Bible came out in quarto, in English alone, towards the end of 1853. From that time it has been often reprinted in varying forms, simply and in editions _de luxe_. But it is not the printers who made the book popular, though I must remark that, despite the small public support the enterprise secured, the 1845 Leeser Pentateuch is a beautiful specimen of the printer’s art. What made the book was the people’s growing love for Leeser. Can higher praise be given, can a finer fate be wished, than that a man’s book shall live in his brethren’s hearts because of him? This is not the time to criticise Leeser’s work. Like Benisch, he had no feeling for English style. He could, in the twenty-third Psalm, alter the wonderful melody of “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,” into “In pastures of tender grass he causeth me to lie down.” He could take the haunting rhythm of Job’s “There the wicked cease from troubling, there the weary are at rest,” and give us “and where the exhausted weary are at rest,” which is no nearer the literal Hebrew (“the wearied in strength”), and is incomparably farther from its beauty. Or again, the felicitous opening lines of the nineteenth Psalm, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork,” become in Leeser “The heavens relate the glory of God; and the expanse telleth of the works of his hands.” It is this more than anything else that made it impossible for English Jews to use Leeser’s Bible. Revision of Leeser on scholarly grounds was also necessary, no doubt. Thus, in his rendering of Esther 6. 8, where Haman suggests the details of the pageant in behalf of the man whom the king delighteth (why did Leeser substitute _desireth_?) to honor, Leeser has: “Let them bring a royal apparel which the king hath worn, and a horse on which the king hath ridden, and let there be placed a royal crown on his head.” But, as Ibn Ezra had in part already pointed out (as Leeser notes), and as we know to be almost certainly the case, the crown was for the _horse’s_ head. In the Revised Version the passage runs: “Let royal apparel be brought which the king useth to wear, and the horse that the king rideth upon, and on the head of which a royal crown is set.”