THE MERITS AND THE DEMERITS

OF THE REVISED APOCRYPHA.

A1

LTHOUGH the apocryphal books of the Old Testament did not belong to the Hebrew canon, are not quoted in the New Testament, and the most authoritative of the Christian Fathers, such as St. Jerome, excluded them from the canon in its strict sense, yet, none the less, they possess an exceptional interest and value as a necessary link between the Old Testament canonical Scriptures and the New Testament, not merely historically, as in the books of the Maccabees, but ethically.

In the first place, they bear testimony to the Old Testament Scriptures. They speak "of the Law and the Prophets and the other Books," and in a remarkable passage in the first Book of Maccabees, referring to the proposed alliance with Sparta, it is stated, "We have no need of these things, seeing we have the holy books in our hands to comfort us." Again, we find in the apocryphal books much on religious teaching and on practice to be found in the New Testament, such as the exorcism of devils from the souls and bodies of men, solemn injunctions for fasting and almsgiving, a distinct enunciation of the doctrine of the resurrection from the dead and a day of judgment, and the prediction of the conversion of the heathen. "Besides," to quote the eloquent words of Dr. Bissell, the Prince of Apocryphal Commentators, "they are the repository of not a few philological and grammatical treasures, furnish many a term and form employed by Christ and His Apostles, as the vehicle of the grandest revelations, so that no thorough student of the New Testament can afford to overlook or despise them. And there is good in them, too, of another sort. No one can help being attracted and charmed by the picture of Wisdom drawn for us by the Alexandrian Solomon; and there are succinct, well-worded proverbs to be found here and there in the Son of Sirach that shine with the beauty and speak with the power of the deepest moral truth. It is related of John Bunyan that, being greatly comforted by a certain passage which occurred to him, he was, nevertheless, perplexed that he could not find it within the four

corners of the Bible. It was this: 'Look at the generations of old and see; did ever any trust in the Lord and was confounded?' He says in regard to it: 'Then I continued above a year and could not find the place; but, at last, casting my eyes upon the Apocrypha books, I found it in the tenth verse of the second chapter of Ecclesiasticus. This at the first did somewhat daunt me; because it was not in those texts that we call holy or canonical. Yet, as this sentence was the sum and substance of many of the promises, it was my duty. to take the comfort of it, and I bless God for that word, for it was good to me. That word doth still oft-times shine before my face." "

In any fair estimate of the merits and the demerits of the Revised Apocrypha,' the great work of the foremost English Biblical scholars of the century, in the Church of England and out of it, account must be taken of the very grave and numerous difficulties under which they laboured with respect to the manifestly corrupt text which they translated. The materials for correcting the Greek text were inadequate and scanty, and the Revisers felt they could not, under such circumstances, undertake "any complete revision." The outcome is that some passages in the revision are obscure, a few misleading, and a few unintelligible; but as a rule it must be admitted that in the majority of cases the Revisers have, by happy emendations, overcome their most formidable difficulties, and brought sense out of nonsense. The unsatisfactory renderings, in some cases, are due to the unsatisfactory readings, which are beyond the powers of textual criticism at present to deal with. The renderings in such cases are only evidence of the too faithful adherence of the Revisers to the incurably corrupt readings of the text. With respect to the Latin text, that of St. Jerome's Vulgate, it may be as well to bear in mind that, to a very considerable extent, as in the Book of Judith, St. Jerome himself confesses that he had given little attention to the work, as it deserved little, and had not translated word for word, but only given the sense.

The gains of this revision are not only many, but their value is considerable. In the unrevised Apocrypha we have, to use a Scriptural simile, apples of gold in a basket of pewter; in the revised, "apples of gold in a basket of silver."

Amongst the gains we must count the presentation of the poetical books of the Apocrypha in a poetical form, with the parallelisms so characteristic of Jewish poetry. This is conspicuous in the admirable versions of the Book of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, but more espe cially in the latter, which abounds in practical lessons of everyday

' London: Henry Frowde.

life, and presents a singularly vivid picture of contemporary Jewish society. Its maxims find many parallels in the Book of Proverbs, and in no portion of the Apocrypha do we find the antithetical parallelism of Hebrew poetry drawn out more fully in detail. In chapter xxvi., for example, may be noted a remarkable contrast of the good woman and the bad woman, part of which we quote from the Revised and the unrevised versions by way of comparison.

Authorised Version, 1611.

"Watch over an impudent eye, and marvel not that she trespass against thee."

"She will open her mouth as a thirsty traveller when he hath found a fountain, and drink of every water near her: by every hedge will she sit down and open her quiver against every arrow."

"The grace of a wife delighteth her husband, and her discretion will fatten his bones."

"A silent and loving woman is a gift of the Lord; and there is nothing so much worth as a mind well instructed."

"A shamefaced and faithful woman is a double grace, and her continent mind cannot be valued."

"As the sun when it ariseth in the high heaven, so is the beauty of a good wife in the ordering of her house."

The Revised Version, 1895.

"Look well after an impudent eye;

And marvel not if it trespass against thee.

She will open her mouth, as a thirsty traveller,

And drink of every water that is near :

At every post will she sit down,

And open her quiver against any arrow."

"The grace of a wife will delight her husband;

And her knowledge will fatten his bones.

A silent woman is a gift of the Lord,

And there is nothing so much worth as a well-instructed soul." "A shamefast woman is grace upon grace,

And there is no price worthy of a continent soul.

As the sun when it ariseth in the highest places of the Lord,
So is the beauty of a good wife in the ordering of a man's house."

The Douay version in English from the Latin Vulgate gives the passage in terms very similar to the English unrevised version, with

the exception of "A silent and loving woman is a gift of the Lord," where the Roman Catholic version renders "Her discipline is the gift of God." It is impossible to lay these three versions side by side and to compare them with the text without perceiving the great and manifest superiority of the Revisers' version in clearness and in phraseology. Happily the Revisers of the Apocrypha were allowed a freer hand in changes than in the case of the Old and New Testaments, where the decisions were arrived at by a majority of twothirds, but in the case of the Apocrypha by a bare majority, so careful were the Revisers to change as little as possible the language of the Old and New Testaments, which had become almost sacred and unalterable in the mind of English-speaking Christendom.

It will be noticed that in the passage above quoted the Revisers give us :

"As the sun when it ariseth in the highest places of the Lord,

So is the beauty of a good wife in the ordering of a man's house," where we should have preferred husband's house; while the Authorised Version gives "high heaven" and "her house." Here the Greek requires "highest heaven," and also his (i.e. the husband's) house. The comparison also requires such a change for bringing out its fulness of beauty and force. The "house of the Lord" is here "the heavens above," and the sun, the servant of the Lord, when it arises, fills it with light and heat and beauty; and so the good wife, who manages her husband's house below as the minister of her husband, fills it with bright sunshine, the light and warmth of her love, in the management of his house-a comparison, by the way, that reminds one of Campbell's lines:

Without the smile from partial beauty won,

Oh what were man—a world without the sun!

It is, by the way, almost impossible to exaggerate the immense indebtedness of English poetry and Italian poetry to the Apocrypha. The beautiful lines of Young in his "Night Thoughts"

But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,

Soon close; where passed the shaft no trace is found,

are evidently to be traced to the verse in the Book of Wisdom, "As when an arrow is shot at a mark, it parteth the air, that immediately cometh together again, so that a man cannot know where it went through." The famous Hymn of Praise in Milton's "Paradise" is clearly modelled after the "Benedicite," or the Song of the Three Children, in the Apocrypha, as in the lines

His praise, ye winds, that from four quarters blow,
Breathe soft or loud, and wave ye tops, ye pines,

With every plant, in sign of worship, wave.

It is also to the Apocrypha, as to the Book of Proverbs, we owe many maxims which have become household words in our language and in the language of all civilised nations. In the first Book of Esdras, for example, chap. iv. 41, we find, as the Revisers correctly render it, "Great is truth, and strong above all things." Here the Latin Vulgate has it, "Magna est veritas, et prævalet," which last word has been, in the process of time, converted into "prævalebit," and become proverbial in the civilised world.

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In many cases the conservatism of the Revisers has brought a distinct gain, especially in conserving archaic terms, which find so conspicuous a place in our older literature, such as "weening,” 2 Maccabees v. 21. So Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI., "weening to redeem." Again, submissly" is retained, as in Ecclesiasticus xxix. 15, "and for his neighbour's money he will speak submissly," which reminds one of Browne in "Britannia's Pastorals":

Some time in speech and then began
Submissly prayer to the name of Pan.

On the other hand, we regret the absence of a few expressive archaic terms, used by our poets, which now disappear from the Apocrypha as revised, and in some cases to the loss of force and aptness of expression, as, for instance, Wisdom v. 22 is rendered by the Revisers "And as from an engine of war shall be hurled hailstones full of wrath," where the Authorised Version gave us "And hailstones full of wrath shall be cast as out of a stone-bow." Here "stone-bow" reminds us of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," ii. v. "O, for a stone-bow," and, what is more, the stone-bow is not only more in harmony with hailstones, but is a term definite and distinct, whereas "engine of war " is indefinite and indistinct. Lastly, in some few cases there appears a comparative neglect of the authorised Oriental versions, especially the Syriac, in elucidating the text. In Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 14 we have a typical case: "I was exalted as a palm-tree on the sea shore," as the Revisers render it. Here the Greek word is in form very like the term En-gedi, given in the Authorised Version and in the Syriac. Now En-gedi was famous for its palm-trees, as we see from the Second Book of Chronicles. Again, its original name was Hazazon-tamar, "the pruning of the palm "-called so, according to Josephus, because of the palm groves that surrounded it.

T. H. L. LEARY.