Transcriber’s Note:

Minor errors and omissions in punctuation and formatting have been silently corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

In this version, there several instances of Arabic or Hebrew words with more than one character. At this time such bidirectional text cannot be reliably rendered. The author provided transliterations; however a separate Hebrew transliteration has been included here based on the scheme provided by the Society of Biblical Literature. These appear in bold as yĕšārĕtû in order to indicate where these characters appear in the text. The same has been done for the few Arabic and Aramaic words.

Footnotes, which appeared at the bottom of each page, have been gathered at the end of the text, and hyperlinks provided for easy access. They have also been renumbered consecutively in order establish the uniqueness required to facilitate searches. Any references to specific notes in the text have been corrected to follow the new numbering.

The cover image has been fabricated and is placed in the public domain.