The book is not what moderns (schooled unconsciously in post-Reformation developments of Thomist ideas) expect under the name of natural theology.
The followers of Credner are literalists; the opposite school of moderns includes some literalists (as Duhm), while others (like Hilgenfeld, and in a modified sense Merx) adopt the old allegorical interpretation which treats the locusts as a figure for the enemies of Jerusalem.
The alumen of the ancients, then, was not the same with the alum of the moderns.
Charpentier in his Excellence de la langue francaise (1683) had anticipated Perrault in the famous academical dispute concerning the relative merit of the ancients and moderns.
The word Morashtite (Morashti) was therefore obscure to them; but this only gives greater weight to the traditional pronunciation with o in the first syllable, which is as old as the LXX., and goes against the view, taken by the Targum both on Micah and on Jeremiah, and followed by some moderns (including Cheyne, E.B., 3198), that Micah came from Mareshah.
