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Dr Blayney, however, for his edition of 1769, gave what may be called “a New Version of these headings, bearing somewhat of the same relation to the Old that Tate and Brady does to Sternhold and Hopkins. It has been stigmatized by some as a doctrinal depravation of them, and praised by others as an improvement. It is in fact a modernization or dilation of them, with little systematic difference of doctrine, but with less force of it, giving however in many cases a better account of the real contents of the chapters than the old1.” This portion of his labours Blayney speaks of with complacency in his Report to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press (Appendix D, p. xcviii.); but whatever might be its merits, it met with no sort of acceptance. Oxford Bibles have returned long since to the headings of 1611; his changes were never adopted at Cambridge. It was felt, perhaps, that there is much comment of this kind in the original edition which long prescription alone has persuaded men to tolerate, and his work was rejected not because it was bad, but because it was new.

The chronological dates placed in the margin of the present volume are derived from Bishop Lloyd’s Bible of 1701 (above, p. xix.), without any pretence of vouching for their correctness. They are in substance taken from Archbishop Ussher’s Annales V. et N. Testamenti (1650–4), and are beyond doubt sufficiently exact to be a real help to the reader, the data on which they are constructed being always assumed as true. In the history of the later kings of Judah modern researches have not been able to suggest a variation from them of more than two years. The dates according to the Greek reckoning, set under those of the Hebrew in the first six books of the Bible, are grounded upon the well-known differences in respect to numerals between the text of the Hebrew and of the Septuagint, in the fifth and eleventh chapters of Genesis. Bp. Lloyd’s dates have not been materially tampered with since they were first brought into our Bibles, though in some copies they are repeated more frequently than in others. Lloyd and after him the books of 1762 and 1769 had assigned to the ninth chapter of Zechariah the date of b.c. 587 (being 67 years earlier than that of his first chapter), in accordance with an opinion, more plausible than solid, to which Joseph Mede first lent the weight of his profound learning, that the last six chapters of that prophecy are the composition of some earlier writer, who flourished about the period of the Captivity. Modern Bibles later than 1835 have substituted in ch. ix. the date of b.c. 517; in Bagster’s edition of 1846, it is reduced to b.c. 510, in the American of 1867 to b.c. 487, which is much too low. A mark of interrogation has simply been placed by us after this and some other questionable dates. The year b.c. 791 for the eclipse referred to Amos viii. 9, being now known to be incorrect, other more possible dates have been substituted within brackets. In Jer. xxvii. 1, “b.c. 598” is omitted altogether, as it rests on the needless supposition that for “Jehoiakim” in the text we ought to read “Zedekiah.” The like remedy has been applied to Isai. ix. 8 and x. 1, which obviously belong to the same idyl or ode, and are connected by the same refrain: yet the one part of it is assigned to b.c. 738, the other to b.c. 713. It would have been well to have set a query after the date (b.c. 862) of the prophecy of Jonah, inasmuch as it is nearly certain that the Twelve Minor Prophets stand in the Canon in chronological order: and certainly on comparing Mic. vi. 16, the third chapter of that book must have been written before the fall of Samaria, not eleven years after it (b.c. 710). In the second Prologue to Ecclesiasticus “the eight and thirtieth year” being that of the writer’s life, not of the reign of Euergetes, for b.c. 133 we should probably read some earlier time. The few dates added in this volume are included in brackets, and may perhaps be regarded as at once convenient and certain: such as that on Esther xi. 1. It is not easy to approve of the boldness of the editor of 1762, who affixes to Ps. cxx. “cir. 1058,” apparently on the authority of the chapter heading that Doeg is the enemy referred to, as indeed a comparison of ver. 4 with Ps. lii. 1 renders not improbable.

The passages of the Old Testament which are cited in the New we have distinguished by printing them in spaced type, both in their original places and where they occur as quotations2. Whensoever