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Friday 9 August 2013

A Georgian brain teaser - the answers

For those of you that have been wracking your brains, here are the answers to the Georgian brain teaser – an enigmatical list of books of the bible.

You can find the questions here.

The solutions were submitted by BH from Salisbury Boarding School and dated Feb 4 1774:

 

For those of you having trouble reading the excerpt from The Lady's Magazine or desirous of a fuller explanation to the trickier answers, here is my solution:

1. Genesis – 4/7 of general + 1/2 of sister
2. Proverbs – pro + verb + S
3. Job
4. Ruth – 4/5 of truth
5. Amos – A (a vowel and NOT a consonant as in the original question) + 3/4 of moss – what grows in the grass
6. Kings
7. Nahum – 2/3 of nay + ¾ of Hume
8. Joel – Joe + L
9. Hosea – hoe + sea
10. Judges
11. Psalms – P + S + alms
12. Numbers

I hope you enjoyed the puzzle.

Source:
The Lady’s Magazine or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement (1774)

2 comments:

  1. I wondered about Genesis and couldn't fit that to a Commander, which serves me right for only thinking about the Navy.. Joel, haha, what a pun! a consonant, EL! I would never have got Nahum in a million years. Not sure if the definition of Hume counts as accurate... but then my first thoughts of him are always of the Monty Python assessment. The rest were pretty straightforward, and notably all from the Old Testament. That was fun; and it's easy to see that someone would, had he been born a couple of hundred years later, have been setting cryptic crossword clues.

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  2. Thanks, Sarah, I'm glad you enjoyed the quiz.
    I looked up Hume when I was working the answers out - according to Wikipedia he was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist who lived 1711 to 1776, and I decided that in Georgian eyes, that must have qualified him as a great writer. :)

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