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ii. 8. Neither shall one thrust another; ve ish achiev, the husband shall not thrust his brother.

The words and phrase in the verse before us are exactly the same with those cited - isha el achotah, a wife or woman to her sister. If it then be asked how the term sister, and the whole phrase, a wife to her sister in this 18th verse must be understood? the answer is obvious; it cannot be in a literal, but is evidently to be taken in a figurative sense. One to another, that is one wife to another wife. Arius Montanus, in his latin version has translated all the passages in which the phrase occurs, literally, word for word, mulier and sororem ejus - that is, the woman or wife to her sister, but he adds in the margin altera ad alteram, or altera alteri, the one to the other. It is to be regretted that our accurate and faithful translators, who in all the other passages attended to the idiom of the hebrew, and rendered the phrase correctly, did not do the same in this verse. They ought to have expressed it, neither shalt thou take one wife to another. The wife was evidently the subject, and the word wife might have been added, as in numberless instances, to elucidate the meaning, when it would read: neither shalt thou take one WIFE

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to another WIFE to vex her, &c. This would have made the precept perfectly plain, and corresponded exactly with the original. But, "the Protestant translators made conscience of adhering as closely to the very phraseology of the original as could be done without destroying the sense: and as no church admitted the lawfulness of marrying a wife's sister or supposed it to be a matter of doubt, the translators never dreamed, that the passage in question would ever have been perverted to the support of such an error." Christian's Magazine.