LANGUAGE OF THE APOCRYPHA.—The A poc- rypha may with fair accuracy be described as a collection of works emanating from Jewish com- munities in the period between the close of the OT Canon and the commencement of that of the NT. Most of these books seem to have been composed in Hebrew, a few in Aramaic, and the rest in Greek ; but as they were preserved in the Chris- tian community, the Hebrew and Aramaic originals were at an early time lost or neglected, and their place taken by Greek translations ; and in the case of some, which never acquired lasting authority, the Greek translation itself has been lost, and the work preserved, if at all, in secondary versions. This has oceurred in the case of the Books of Enoch and of Jubilees, which are known chiefly, through Ethiopic versions ; while the Fourth Boo of Ezra, the Apocalypse of Baruch, and the Assumption of Moses, are known in secondary translations,—in the first case in a variety of lan- guages, in the second in Syriac, and in the third in Latin. Books 2 and following of Maccabees are known to have been written in the language in which we possess them (Greek); and the same is probably the case with the Epistle of Jeremy ;
ut the remaining books would seem to be all translations, though it is not always easy to dis- tinguish Hellenistic Greek from translated Hebrew. The most ambitious in point of style is the Wisdom of Solomon, which few even now regard as a translation ; yet the proof that it is one is difficult to elude; for 1410 ‘for that which is made shall be punished together with him that made it’ is clearly a mistranslation of a sentence that is quoted in the Midrash on Gn 48 (abba, § 96) ov ἼΣΟΣ JD ΜΒ) 73 ἼΞΙ»Π yD pyraw ‘just as the wor- shipper is punished so is that which was wor- shipped,’ the translator’s mistake being due to his giving the verb πᾶν its Aramaic sense ‘to do or make,’ whereas the author used it in its Hebrew sense ‘to worship.’ It may be added that the Greek of this verse (τὸ πραχθὲν σὺν τῷ δράσαντι κολασθήσεται), Which really means ‘that which has been done shall be punished together with him that did it,’ shows signs of mistranslation that could have been detected without the aid of the original. It is, however, certain that the trans- lator’s object was rather to provide a masterpiece of Greek rhetoric than to reproduce his original faithfully ; and in the absence of materialsit seems impossible to fix with precision the limits of the work translated, or the character of the original language, which must in any case have shown signs οἱ Greek influence.
That the book called Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom or the Proverbs of Jesus Ben-Sira was originally written in Hebrew we know from the statement of the Greek translator in his preface; but the date of the disappearance of the original is a matter of obscurity. Jerome professes to have seenit. The writings of the earlier Rabbis contain a certain number of quotations from it, which are collected by Cowley and Neubauer (A portion of the Orig. ebro of Ecclus., Oxford, 1896) ; this collection,
LANGUAGE OF THE APOCRYPHA 35
however, requires considerable reduction. The reason for its disappearance is doubtless to be found in the passage in the Gemara of B. San- hedrin (f. 1004), in which it is asserted that a Jew would risk his eternal salvation by reading it ; the passages, however, which are cited there both for and against this opinion, seem very inadequate for either purpose. From these quotations we should gather that the author used a language similar to that of the Mishnic authors, τ. 6. a highly developed New Hebrew ; and this there seems no reason to doubt, though it is likely that the quotations are not scrupulously accurate. In an essay by the present writer, published in 1890, reasons were brought forward for thinking that many of the differences between the Greek and the Syriac versions, both of which were made from the original, could be solved by the assumption that the writer used New Hebrew words; and that the writer used a nine-syllable metre, of which the base was a foot called in Greek Bacchic, consisting of a short, a long, and a short: the middle syllable being invariably long, whereas the others were cominon. Ben-Sira, however, professes to be in the main a compiler from the or (24°), which he doubtless imitated constantly ; but in this he is doing himself an injustice.
In 1896 a leaf was brought over from Cairo con- taining a portion of Ecclus. in Hebrew, followed by the discovery of other portions, published in the work mentioned above, while yet other portions await publication.* The present writer has shown grounds (The Origin of the Orig. Heb. of Ecclus., Oxford, 1899) for thinking this Hebrew a retransla- tion made in the llth or 12th cent. A.D., partly from the Syriac and partly from a Persian version of the Greek.t
The remaining poetical book in this series, the Psalms of Solomon, would seem to have been ren- dered into Greek by a Bpenally, skilful hand: had we the original, it is probable that it would reveal little difference in expression from many Psalms in the Psalter ascribed to David.