The cedar is the Roman Empire, the vine is Messiah fxxxix. 5, 7) ; in the end the last great heathen ruler will be destroyed by Messiah (xl.).
Baruch again warns the people to keep the Law (xliv. 3, xlvL 5).
xlYll.-lxxYii. Second prayer of Baruch, followed by a revelation to him about the resurrection of the good and the bad, and the vision of the black and the bright waters.
The dead will rise unaltered, but the righteous will then become glorious while the wicked waste away (1. Ii.). All history is divided into 12 parts : the black waters are the six bad periods, beginning with the Fall (' O Adam, what hast thou done to all those who are born from thee?' xlviii. 42); the bright waters are the short alternating gleams of righteous- ness, beginning with Abraham (Ivi.-lxxii.). At the end the saints will have a glorious time (Ixxiiif.).
Baruch again warns the people to keep the Law : if they do so, those left in the Holy Land will never be removed (Ixxvii. 5, 6). To the captive Jews in Babylon he sends a letter by hand (Ixxvii. 17), while to the lost Nine-and-a-half Tribes he sends a letter by an eagle (Ixxvii. 19 ff.).
IxxYlii.-lxxxYii. Baruch's letter to the Lost Tribes.
Baruch tells them of the destruction of Jerusalem, announces the approaching end of all things, and exhorts them to keep the Law. ' If we set our hearts straight we shall receive everything that we have lost and more ' (Ixx.xv. 4).
2. Problems raised by the book. — The chief problems connected with the Apocalypse of Baruch are (1) its place in Jewish thought, especially in connexion with 4 Ezra (i.e. '2 Esdras ' in the English Apocr3'i)ha, which it much resembles) ; and (2) its literary liistory in Syriac and the relation of the Syriac text to the underlying Greek. It will be convenient to take this second group first.
(1) Literary history, etc. — The Ambrosian MS is the only one that contains the whole work, but the Epistle of Baruch (chs. Ixxviii.-lxxxvii., see above) is extant in several Syriac MSS and found a place in the Paris and London Polyglots. This extract must be of exclusively Jacobite origin : it appears as a sort of Appendix to Jeremiah and is included in the Jacobite Massora. Its readings are inferior to that of the full text preserved in the Ambrosian Codex,* where it is dissociated from Jeremiah and immediately precedes Jf. Ezra.
The Syriac style indicates a very early date for the translation. It is idiomatic and flowing, like the Syriac translation of Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History. So full, indeed, is it of genuine Semitic idiom that various perfectly good Syriac phrases have actually been regarded by R. H. Charles as the survival of original Hebrew idioms, persisting through the lost Greek intermediary. Especially is this the case with regard to the use of the infini- tive absolute for emphasis, which is quite good Syriac and occurs in the Ev. da-Mepharreshc, though the construction is usually avoided in later forms of the Syriac NT.t And this general im- pression has been signally confirmed by the dis- covery of the Oxyrhynchus Fragment. Short as the fragment is, it gives us enough of the Greek text of chs. xii. xiii. and xiv. to tell us in what
• Here and there the extract is better, e.g. Ixxxii. 4, where all the editors rightly prefer ' drop ' ( = aTo-yuiv, Is 4015) to ' pollution. '
t A good instance is Eus. HE iv 15. 29, where raOra ovv iiera ToaovTOv rdxovs eyeVero Barrov ri eAeyero is rendered in Syriac, 'And these things quicker than they were said were indeed done (mest'dru est'ar).' It is obvious that such a rendering, while perfectly adequate, does not enable us to reconstruct the wording of the original.
BAEUCH, APOCALYPSE UE
UAKUCH, APOCALYPSE OE 143
manner the Syriac translator has gone to -work. Especially important is xiii. 12, where the Greek has [v/xe2s yap eveplyeToiifxevoi. del 7jxa[pi.iTTetTe (det)],* but the Syriac is ' For ahvays I have been benefit- ing you, and ye have been denying beneht always.' This sentence suflBciently shows how difficult it would be to reconstruct the Greek from the Syiiac of Baruch, and how impossible to argue back to the wording of a hypothetical Hebrew or Aramaic original. At the same time ' denying benefit ' (kdphar betaibiitha) is actually used for dxdpto'7-os in 2 Ti 3- and in Lk 6^* syr.-sin. (not Pesh.): in a word, the Syriac of Baruch is akin in style to the earliest Syriac translations of the NT.
The Apocalypse of Baruch contains no formal quotations from canonical Scripture, but several sentences are obviously moulded upon the OT. As Charles has founded an argument on these for a Hebrew original, it is necessary to point out that the evidence is really indecisive. ' The quotations from the OT agree in all cases but one with the Massoretic Hebrew against the Septuagint,' says Charles. In support of this he adduces eight passages. In four of these, however (iv. 2, vi. 8, li. 4, Iviii, 1), Baruch agrees with the Peshitta, as we might expect in a work which pays so much attention to Sj^riac idiom and is so little of a word- for-word rendering of the Greek. In two otiiers (' Thy wisdom is correctness,' xxxviii. 2 ; and ' tied under Thy wings,' xli. 4) tlie Syriac does not agree with any biblical text.t The allusion in xxxv. 2 is admitted by Charles to be merely a paraphrase. The remaining passage is Ixxxii. 4, 5, where the heathen are said to be ' like a drop ' and ' counted as spittle ' : this agrees with the LXX of Is 40'^ iJjs (xrayihv . . . ws o-teXos), but not with the He- l)rew or the Sjn-iac.i Thus the biblical allusions in Baruch do not prove that the author was acquainted with the Massoretic text : they merely show that the Syriac translator was familiar with the Pesh- itta. It is possible, of course, if the Greek be a translation from Hebrew or Aramaic, that the Greek translator changed the wording of Ixxxii. 5 to agree with the Greek Bible ; but there is no actual evidence which points in that direction. The 'sirens,' the ' Lilith,' the 'devils,' and the 'jackals' of x. 8 are all found in the Peshitta of Is 1321- 22 and W^^- ^*. It should be added that there is nothing to suggest that the Sj^riac trans- lator of the Apocalypse was a Christian rather than a Jew.