Now the questions arise — (1) How have this quo- tation and tlie codex of Metz preserved this true reading ? (2) How did the wrong te.\t find its way into all the other MSS ? Is the latter circumstance due to an intentional revision, and may this re- vision have been made through Jerome? The former may be due either to a Greek MS which pre- served the original te.\t, or to recourse to tlie Syriac ver.«ion, or to derivation from the original Hebrew. J
In all cases the importance of iL in its original form and of the early quotations is evident — the worse therefore the neglect of these studies ; but still more evident is the value of the Syriac and the Hebrew texts.
viii. The Sykiac Text. — In his edition of the Libri Veteris Tcstamcnti Apocriiphi (or dentero- canonici, as he wished to read afterwards) syriace (1861), Lagarde gave to Sirach the first place, to show that he believed with Bendtsen (Specivien exercitationum crilicarum in V. T. libros apocry- phos e scriptis patrum et antiquis versionihus, Gbttingen, 1789), that this version was not maile fiom the Greek, but from the 'Hebrew' (see Lagarde, Symm. i. 88, 17 ; Mifth. i. 191). As this view is now almost universally accepted — it was still debated by Bretschneider and I'ritzsche — it need no longer be proved. The question is only whether the translation was not influenced, like other books in the Peshitta, here and there by the Greek version, and whether its text has come down to us in good preservation.
It was first published in the great Polyglot Bibles of Paris and London, — in the latter on the basis of three MSS of Ussher and Pococke ; then by Lagarde from the cod. 12,142 in the British
•The variations are partially mere lexical: 4** 'Veritas' in. stead of 'iustitia'; 636 ' limen' instead of 'gradua'; 14l3'gj©cu- lum ' instead of ' mundus ' ; others touch the sense or even the underlying Greek text, as 3S18 * ^ectet /vrlHudiiiem' (=<^v») against ' flectet cervicein ' (»ix'*« ^)'
t Another trace of this reading is found in the 2f>th epistle of Pauliims (p. 167e): 'qui terrenas possessiones concupiscit. In illis implanabitur.' Sabatier, who quotes this paWge, remarked : 'at hsec postrema ex alio loc^ desumpta videntur.'
I For mere conjectural emendation the rendering seems too clever, or rather not clever enough, for the proper meaning of Jia?i>^='pror>erty' has not been recogTiizM- It is quite the same with the preservation of the original order in chs. 81~S6 in X. This may be due either to ttie fact that X was made from a Greek MS which was independent of the one from which our present O texta are derived, or it may have been restored after the Syriac or after the Hebrew. X shares some of the strangest miss-pellings with (3 ; see 40-^ 'dominus Jhevus' '^igr«w instead of *nf*u( ' intuias' (in the official Vulg.).
Museum, which belongs to the 6th cent, (with • collation of Walton's text), and lies before ua further in Ceriani's photo-lithographic reproduction of the codex Ambrosijinus of about the same age (Milano, 1876-83, folio). It sutlered, of course, some textual corruptions, but on the whole there are no such difficulties as arise in connexion with (S and 5L. The other question whether it was influenced by (5 must, it seems, be answered in the alhrmative. This may have been the case already when the version was made, or at a later though very early and only partial revision. The former view seems the more probable (see Ryssel, p. 253). It is a drawback for our purposes that S is rather a paraphriise than a version ; nevertheless, the great progress made in the explanation of Sirach by Margoliouth - Edersheim depends on the use made especially of S for the corroboration oi correction of G and the restoration of the original Hebrew. These two texts were, so to speak, our Rontgen apparatus, enabling us to see the Hebrew text underlying them.
ix. The Hebrew Texts. — Especially among those who knew the precarious state of the present Greek, Latin, and Syriac t<;xts of Sirach, the surjirise and joy were great when the news spread that a fragment of the original Hebrew text had been discovered, and when, after its publication, more and more parts of a Hebrew Sirach came to light, of which in the Church at least, since the days of Jerome, nobody had heard or seen any- thing, while even among the Jews few scattered quotations had survived, partially in Hebrew and partially in Aramaic (see their collection in C-N). It is impossible to notice all that has been pub- lished on these finds. Suffice it to say that after the first private communication (see above, p. 539") the first public announcement appeared in the Amdemyot 16th May 1896. (1) The first publication of the text was in the Expositor, July 1896, 1-15 (see on it D. S. Margoliouth in the same periodical, Aug., 140-157); (2) then came nine leaves, which had found their way into the Bodleian Library, published by Cowley and Neubauer, 1897, and re- published by R. Smend (Ablumdlunijen der K. Ges. der Wiss. zu Gottingcn, N.F. ii. 2) ; after this (3) the chief publication oi' Taylor-Schechter(Camb. 1899), containing, besides fourteen pages from the first MS (now called B), eight pa^-es from a new MS, now called A ; (4) in the Jewish Quarterly Review for Oct. 1899, G. Margoliouth gave four pages from MS B, acquired by the British Museum ; (5) I. Levi published in the Sevue des Etudes Juives for Janvier-Mars, 1900, two pages from a third MS (C) and two from a fourth MS (D), both in the library of the Consistoire Israelite at Paris. The JQR for April 1900, finally, gave four pages of MS A published by E. N. Adler and four of MS C by S. Schechter (6, 7), and (8) in the number for July 1900 (p. 688 IT.) two pages of C belon^g to M. Gaster. All the publications were at last brought together most conveniently — if it may be called convenient to study torn and faded leaves of Hebrew MSS — in a splendid publication. Fac- similes of the Fragments hitherto recovered of the Book of Ecclesiasticus in ZTciretr (Oxford and Cam- bridge, MDCCCCI, 60 plates in case).* C, it should be added, consists only of excerpts (see p. 548'').