Rashi's thorough knowledge of Hebrew enabled him to depend upon his memory for quoting the appropriate verses, and in all his citations there is scarcely a mistake, natural though an error would have been in quoting from memory. Distinguishing between the Hebrew of the Bible and that of the Talmud, he sees in the Hebrew of the Mishnah a transition between the two. Often, for the purpose of explaining a word in the Bible, he has recourse to Talmudic Hebrew or to the Aramaic. He pays careful attention to the precise meaning of words and to distinctions among synonyms, and he had perception for delicate shading in syntax and vocabulary. Owing to this thorough knowledge of Hebrew he readily obtained insight into the true sense of the text. By subjecting the thought of the Holy Scriptures to a simple and entirely rational examination, he not seldom succeeds in determining it. Thus, as it were by divination, he lighted upon the meaning of numerous Biblical passages. A long list might be made of explanations misunderstood by his successors, and revived, consciously or unconsciously, by modern exegetes. An illustration in point is his explanation of the first verse of Genesis, quoted above. Long before such Biblical criticism had become current it was he who said that the "servant of God" mentioned in certain chapters of the second part of Isaiah represents the people of Israel. Needless to say Rashi never tampers with the text. At most, as is the case with Ibn Djanah, he says that a letter is missing or is superfluous. Sometimes, too, he changes the order of the words. Neither copyists' mistakes nor grammatical anomalies existed for him. Yet he believed in all sincerity that the ancient sages could have corrected certain Biblical texts to remove from them a meaning startling or derogatory when applied to the Divinity.