If there remained no trace of the original writings of the Old Testament books preserved for us in the Hebrew tongue, we should still possess very reliable witnesses of ancient date to testify to their existence in substantially the same form in which we have them; for the children of Jewish exiles, who were forced gradually to substitute the language of their conquerors for their mother tongue, had well authenticated translations for their use in the synagogues. The most remarkable of such translations is the so-called Greek Septuagint, commonly believed to have been made for the Alexandrian Library by seventy Jewish rabbis at the request of King Ptolemy Philadelphus. We shall have occasion, later on, to revert to the significance of this Greek version. For the present it is only necessary to mention that it was so highly esteemed by the Jews themselves that they used it for several centuries in their reading to the people, many of whom understood only the Greek. Even the enemies of the Jews bear witness to the unchanged character of the oldest portion of the Hebrew Bible for centuries before the coming of our Lord. About the year 536 B.C., on the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon, the Samaritans, a mixed race of Jewish and Aramaic stock, sought from the temple authorities at Jerusalem the privilege of worshipping with the rest of the Jews in the holy city. This was refused. Shortly afterwards one of the priests at Jerusalem was excommunicated for having married the daughter of a Samaritan prince. He sought refuge in Samaria, and having built a temple on Mount Garizim, induced the people to worship according to the Mosaic Law. They were found to possess a copy of the Pentateuch, which they had transcribed in Samaritan characters; and whilst the Jews of Southern Palestine held no communication with them, and the Samaritans on their part looked upon the Jews as schismatics who had changed the ancient observances of the Law, yet both recognized the same sacred code as the rule of their conduct and religion. A copy of this valuable version, which at a later date was translated into the actual Samaritan dialect, was discovered at Damascus in 1616, and has since been printed in several editions at Paris and London. It is of great importance, as it establishes a perfect accord with the reading of the Jewish Hebrew text. These versions, made at different times, in places widely apart, and by men who were decidedly hostile to each other on religious as well as on national grounds, force us to admit a well-fixed, universally known, and trusted original of the books of Moses; for where there is a copy there must be something copied from, just as when we see the well-defined shadow of an object we know that the object itself exists.