«And in thy prosperity he will be as thyself, And will be bold over thy servants : : If thou shalt be brought low, he will be against thee, And will hide himself from thy face.’
‘Be bold over’ is not a happy rendering of rappyoidceras eri, ‘will be plain-spoken with.’
Sus 52 (Bishops’ Bible, agreeing with Coverdale).
‘When they were put asunder one from another, he called one of them, and sayd ynto hym, O thou olde cankarde carle, that haste vsed thy wickednesse so long, thyne vngratious deedes whiche thou haste donne afore, are now comme to lyght.’
In this passage the interest centres on the vigorous para- phrase (‘O thou... long’) of reraAcimmive nmepay wunaly. The AV has the less forcible but terser rendering, ‘O thou that art waxen old in wickedness,’ and this is retained in the RV. At
weniehim eS ies PO * Scrivener, ib. p. 72. Some have thought that, in the RV the use of italics is overdone. See the point raised in the JQR, Vol. viii. (1895-96), pp. 322, 323, where ‘a Greek place of exercise’ is censured as the rendering of yywvéciv in 2 Mac 49.12, In Sir 223 (wrongly cited as 12%) ‘a foolish daughter is born to his loss,’ the reviewer shows good cause for omitting foolish. But it is justified by the parallelism of the passage.
the same time it should be observed that rardimtcbx: is not a mere synonym of yapécxey (cf. He 813), but involves the notion of becoming stale, decrepit, worn out (Lk 1283), Nor is ‘ wicked- ness’ quite adequate as a translation of yuepdv xaxwy. On the other hand, the rendering in the RV of 4z«01 by ‘ are come home to thee’ is excellent.
Wis 722-25 (Bishops’ Bible, here differing much from Cov.).
22 For Wisdome, whiche is the woorker of al thinges, hath taught me: for in her is the spirite of vnderstandyng, whiche is holy, one only, manifolde, subtile, quicke, moouing (marg. or liuely), vndefiled, plaine, sweete, louyng the thing that is good, sharpe, whiche can not be letted, dooing good.
23°Kinde to man, stedfast, sure, free from care, hauyng al vertues (marg. ov power), circumspect in (marg. o7 hauyng regard of) al thynges, and passing through al vnderstandyng, cleane and subtile spirits.
24 For wisedome is nimbler than al nimble thinges, she goeth through and atteyneth to al thinges, because of her cleannesse.
25 For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowyng from the glory of the almyghty [God]; there- fore can no defiled thing comme ynto her.
The spirit of Divine Wisdom is here described by a string of epithets, numbering in the Greek text twenty-one (7x3). The rendering of the AV is a great improvement on that of the earlier versions. In the RV, where further changes are made, there is a slight tendency to diffuseness. Thus voepdy, ‘intelli- gent’ (‘understanding,’ AV), becomes ‘quick of understand- ing’; edxivyrov, ‘mobile’ (‘lively,’ AV, with which compare the double sense of ‘quick’), becomes ‘freely moving’; spevoy, ‘penetrating,’ ‘distinct’ (‘clear,’ AV), becomes ‘clear in utter- ance,’ as if to harmonize with the Lat. ‘disertus.’ The render-
ing of “ovoyevés by ‘alone in kind’ also seems doubtful. On the
other hand, ‘unhindered’ is a terser rendering of &x#avroy than ‘which cannot be letted’ (AV): and there are several others of this type.
One of the minor defects pointed out in the RV of the Apocr. is a want of consistency in the spelling of proper names. The Revisers, in their Preface, show themselves aware of this, and plead in mitigation the difficulty of securing ‘ uniformity of plan in the work of the four committees.’ But the fault lies deeper. Inconsistencies are met with in the same verse. Thus in 2 Es 28, where the AV had consistently ‘Esay and Jeremy,’ the former is altered to ‘Esaias’ in the RV, while the latter is left untouched. In 1” of the same book, one solitary change is made in a string of proper names—that of ‘ Aggeus’ to ‘Agezus’; and this is left betwixt such incongruous forms as ‘ Nahum and Abacuce, Sophonias, ... Zachary and Malachy.’ In Jth 8! ‘Eleia,’ as itis in the AV, is altered to ‘Elkiah,’ which represents neither the Hebrew form of the word (7797 Hilkiah), nor the Greek (‘EAxecd), nor the Latin (Elai).
More serious is the charge brought against the
Revisers of neglecting the help which the Oriental Versions were capable of affording them.* For example, in Sir 25" they are content to reproduce the meaningless rendering of the AV, ‘There is no head above the head of a serpent,’ without any hint of a better sense being procurable. Yet help is not far to seek. The Syriac version, as Eders- heim points out, is literally ‘there is not a head more bitter than the head of a serpent.’ And this at once suggests—what Bissell and others had already perceived—that the Hebrew word, here rendered xepad, ‘head,’ in the Greek, was prob- ably wn, which in Dt 32* and elsewhere denotes ‘venom.’ The meaning then becomes simple and natural, ‘There is no poison above (more virulent than) the poison of a serpent.’
Or, again, take Sir 51” ‘I called upon the Lord, the Father of my Lord.’ If the words had been written from a Christian point of view, they would have been unexceptionable. But such was not the point of view of Jesus Ben Sirach. ‘ The Syriac shows us,’ writes Edersheim, ‘that the original text signified, ‘unto the Lord, my father, O Lord.’