But many of them also sound as if they had been originally Greek; e.g., the lines appended to Pro 9:10; Pro 13:15; the distich, Pro 6:11; the imperfect tristich, Pro 22:14; and the formless train, Pro 25:10. The value of these enlargements is very diverse; not a few of these proverbs are truly thoughtful, such as the addition to Pro 12:13 -
He who is of mild countenance findeth mercy;
He who is litigious crushes souls and singularly bold in imagery, as the addition to Pro 9:12 -
He who supports himself by lies hunts after (רעה) the wind,
He catches at fluttering birds;
For he forsakes the ways of his own vineyard,
And wanders away from the paths of his own field,
And roams through arid steppes and a thirsty land,
And gathers with his hand withered heath.
The Hebrew text lying before the Alexandrian translators had certainly not all these additions, yet in many passages, such as Pro 11:16, it is indeed a question whether it is not to be improved from the lxx; and in other passages, where, if one reads the Greek, the Hebrew words naturally take their place, whether these are not at least old Hebrew marginal notes and interpolations which the translation preserves. But this version itself has had its gradual historical development. The text, the κοινή (communis), proceeds from the Hexaplar text edited by Origen, which received from him many and diverse revisions; and in the times before Christ, perhaps (as Hitz. supposes), down to the second century after Christ, the translation itself, not being regarded as complete, as in the progress of growth, for not unfrequently two different translations of one and the same proverb stand together, as Pro 14:22; Pro 29:25 (where also the Peshito follows the lxx after which it translates), or also interpenetrate one another, as Pro 22:8-9. These doubled translations are of historical importance both in relation to the text and to the interpretation of it. Along with the Books of Samuel and Jeremiah, there is no book in regard to which the lxx can be of higher significance than the Book of Proverbs; we shall seek in the course of our exposition duly to estimate the text[1] as adopted by Bertheau (1847) and Hitzig (1858) in their
- ↑ Cf. also J. Gottlob Jäger's Observationes in Proverbiorum Salomonis Versionem Alexandrinam, 1788; de Lagarde's Anmerkungen zur griech. Ueberstezung der Proverbien, 1863; M. Heidenheim's Zur Textkritik der Proverbien, in his Quarterly Journal for German and English Theological Criticism and Investigation, No. VIII (1865), and IX, XI (1866). The text of the lxx (cf. Angelo Mari's Classici Auctores, t. ix.) used by Procopius in his Ἡρμηνεία εἰς τὰς παροιμίας is peculiar, and here and there comes near to the Hebrew original. The scholion of Evagrius in the Σχόλια εἰς τὰς παροιμίας of Origen, edited by Tischendorf in his Notitia, 1860, from a MS of Patmos, shows how soon even the Hexaplar text became ambiguous.
