VL The Greek and other Translations of this Booh. — The Greek translation incorporated in tlie Sept. was made by the grandson of the author (6 TraTfii-oQ ^lov 'lyrrovr), who tells us that he came from Palestine into Lgy]it in his thirty-eighth year, "in the roign of Euer- getis" (h' Tifj 6y()6i;j /o«i' Tf)taK0<TT<j) tru tTri tov Ei>tp- y'fTov jiaaiKicoc). But there were two kings who have borne this name^Eucrgetes I, son and successor of Ptolemy II, Philadelphus, B.C. 247-222, and Euerge- tes II, i. e. Ptolemv VII, known bv the nickname Pliyscon, tlie Itrothcr of Ptolemy A'l, B.C. 145-116, and the question is, which of jtliese two is meant? Now, if P.en-Sira wrote B.C. cir. 290-280, when an old man, and if we take 6 tzutttvoq ^lov to mean great-
grandfiither, a sense which it frequenth' has, and that the translator was born after the death of his illustri- ous ancestor, bis arrival in Egypt in his thirty-eighth year would be B.C. cir. 230, i. e. in the reign of Eu- ergetes I. On the other hand, the manner in which the translator speaks of the Alexandrine version of the Old Testament, and the familiarity which he shows with its language (e. g. xliv, IG, 'Evi^x fifrtTtdi], Gen. v, 24 ; comp. Linde, ap. Eichhorn, p. 41, 42), is scarce- ly consistent with a date so earlj' as the middle of the third centurj'. Winer (De utr. Sirac. atate, Erlang. 1832) maintains that Simon the Just is the person re- ferred to, but that it is not necessary to conclude that the author was his contemporary. He thinks that, al- though the grammatical construction rather requires 'irti TO) tTzi rov Ertoyhov to refer to the age of the monarch's reign, Euergetes the Second was the king in whose reign the translation was made, and that the canon could not have been yet closed under the reign of the first Euergetes, as implied in the preface — "the law, the prophets, and the other books." As there appears to be no special reason for the translator's reference to his oivn age, the date has been taken to allude to that of the reigning Ptolemy by many crit- ics since Eichhorn, e. g. by Bruch, Palfrey, David.son, Ewald, Fritzsche, etc. The " thirty -eightii year of his reign," although not applicable to the first Euergetes, may refer to the second, if liis regency be included. According to this, which De Wette conceives the most probable hypothesis, the translator would have lived B.C. 130, and the author B.C. 180. But if, with most interpreters, the chronological datum in question re- fers to the translator's own age, then the grandson of the author was already past middle-age when he came to Egypt ; and if his visit took place early in the reign of Ptolemj^ Physcon, it is quite possible that the book itself was written while the name and person of the last of "the men of the great sj-nagogue" was still fomiliar to his countr^'men. Even if the date of the book be brought somewhat lower than the times of Simon the Just, the importance of the position which that functionar}' occupied in the historj' of the Jews would be a sufficient explanation of the distinctness of his portraiture ; and the political and social troubles to which the book alludes (Ii, G, 12 ; xxxvi, sq.) seem to point to the disorders which marked the transfer- ence of Jewish allegiance from Egypt to Syria rather than to the period of prosperous tranquillity which was enjoyed during the supremacy of the earlier Ptol- emies. On the whole, therefore, we may conclude that the book was probablj- written B.C. cir. 200, and translated B.C. cir. 140.
The present state of this translation, however, is very deplorable; the text as well as the MSS. are greath' disfigured by numerous interpolations, omis- sions, and transpositions. The Old Latin version, which Jerome adopted in the Vulgate without correcting it, was made from this Greek translation, and, liesides being barbarous in style, is also greatly mutilated, and in manj' instances cannot be harmonized with its orig- inal. Even in the first two chapters the following words occur which are found in no other ])art of the Vulgate : defunctio (i, 13), religiositas (i, 17, 18, 2(5), com- partior (i, 24), inhonoratio (i, 38), ohductio (ii, 2; v, 1, 10), receptihilis (ii, 5). The Syriac alone is made di- rect from the Hebrew, and contains a quotation made bj' Jose ben-Jochanan aliont 150 B.C. (comp. Ahoth, i, 5 with Ben-Sira ix, 12), which the secondary versions have not, because it was dropped from the Greek. Notwithstanding the ill treatment and the changes which this version has been subjected to, it is still one of the best auxiliaries for the restoration of the old text. The Aral)ic seems to have been made from the Syriac ; whilst the old English version of Coverdale, as usual, follows the Zurich Bible and the Vulgate, tlie Bisiiops' Bible again copies Coverdale ; the Gene- va version, as is often the case, departs from the other
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45
ECCLESIASTICUS
English version for the better. The present A. V. chiefly follows the Complutensian edition of the Greek and the Liitin Vulgate. The arrangement, however, of chaps. XXX, 2o-xxxvi, 17 in the Vatican and Com- plutensian editions is very different. The English ver- sion here follows the latter, which is supiiorted b}' the Latin and Syriac versions against the authority of the Uncial MSS. The extent of the variation may be seen in the following table :