Parchment (Hastings' Dictionary)

Parchment is a writing material prepared from the skin of the sheep or goat. ‘The skins are first soaked in lime to remove the hair, * Is 857 ‘The parched ground shall become a pool.’ The word rendered ‘parched ground’ here is 37¥ #drdbA, which ocours also in Is 4910 and nowhere else. As the Arab.

word for the mirage is serab, and as the idea of the mirage suits the sense here, it has generally been understood that the prophet’s mean- ing is that where there is only the mocking semblance of water there will be found real ls, Of. Koran (Sura xxiv 8ῦ.- quoted in Ges. and Skinner, ‘The works of the unbelievers are like the mirage in the desert, The thirsty takes it for water, till he comes up to !t and finds that it is nothing.

” But this sense is less suitable to the other passage; ac RV has here ‘glowing sand’ and at 4010 ‘heat,’ with ‘mirage’ in the marg. at both places (see, further, Cheyne, Intr, to 14. ὃ 674 PARDON and are then shaved, washed, dried, stretched, and ground or smoothed with fine chalk or lime and pumice-stone.’ The finest kind is made from the skins of calves or kids, and called vellum. The Eng. word ‘ parchment’ is a form of pergamina or ergamena (Gr. περγαμηνή), an adj.

signifying ‘ of Pawan the city of Pergamum (now Bergamo) in Asia Minor being the place where parchment was invented, or at least brought into use. The ὁ is no proper part of the Eng. word which was adopted from the Fr. parchemin. Chaucer says (Bathius, v. iv. 14, Skeat’s ed. p.

200), ‘Thilke Stoiciens wenden that the sowle hadde ben naked of it-self, as a mirour or a clene parchemin, so that alle figures mosten first comen fro thinges fro withoute-forth in-to sowles, and ben empreinted in-to sowles.’ The word occurs only in 2 Ti 4", where St. Paul asks Timothy to bring to him the cloke which he left at Troas, ‘and the books, especially the parchments’ (καὶ τὰ βιβλία, μάλιστα τὰς μεμβράνατ). The Greek word is simply the Lat. membrana (properly an adj.

membrana cutis, from membrum, a limb, member of the body), the skin, rchment. This is its only occurrence in bibl. reek. It is impossible to say what the parch- ments were, or why they chiefly were wanted. Perhaps they were more precious than the books be- cause parchment and not paper (papyrus) ; they may even have been vellum.* Perhaps their value was in their contents—the Old Test.

in Greek (Kenyon), his diploma of Roman citizenship (Farrar), his ‘commonplace books’ (Bull), or even a copy of the Grundschrift of the Gospels (Latham). J. HASTINGS.