A NOTE ON THIS RENDERING

THE WITNESS

This book was composed in Greek. It is not a Greek dress laid over a Hebrew body, as with Toviyah or the first book of Baruch; no Hebrew original ever stood behind it. It is the work of a Jew of Alexandria who thought and wrote in the Greek of the synagogue, reaching back across the centuries for Solomon’s voice. The House therefore does a thing here that it is careful to name: it does not restore this book to Hebrew — it translates it into Hebrew. Where a Hebrew word plainly means the thing the Greek says, that word is set down; but the reader should hold no illusion that a lost Hebrew Chokmat Shelomoh is being recovered. The witness-line reads Rendered from the Septuagint because the Septuagint is not a translation of this book — it is this book. The English underlying the rendering is Brenton’s public-domain Septuagint. THE KING WHO SPEAKS The speaker calls himself a king (7:5; 9:7–8), remembers being commanded to build the Mikdash upon the holy mount (9:8), and prays for Chokmah as Solomon prayed at Giv’on. Yet the name Shelomoh is never written in the book. The House does not insert it into the verse; it lets the mask stand as the author set it, and names the ascription here. Read the “I” of chapters 7–9 as Solomon; read the book as a later hand speaking beneath his crown. CHOKMAH, AND WHY SHE IS “SHE” Chokmah — wisdom — is the whole subject of the book, and the author speaks of her as a person: she enters souls, she orders all things, she was present when the world was made (7:22–8:1; 9:9). The feminine is not the House’s choice but the grammar of both the Hebrew noun and the Greek, and the poem leans upon it. She is the breath of the power of Elohim and a pure effluence of the glory of Shaddai (7:25). Chapters 7–9 press this personification to its edge — Chokmah as the craftsman of all things — and stand near the doorway through which the later teaching of the Memra and the Logos would pass. The weight of that doorway is named here and left in the note; the verse says only what it says. THE RIGHTEOUS MAN — 2:12–20 This is the brightest pre-Messianic stone in the wisdom books. The ungodly plot against the righteous man: he professes the Da’at of Elohim, he calls himself the child of YAHUAH, he boasts that Elohim is his father (2:13, 16). So they resolve — let us condemn him with a shameful death; for if the just man be the son of Elohim, He will help him and deliver him (2:18–20). The Besorah of Mattityahu sets almost these very words in the mouths of those who stood at the execution- tree (Matt. 27:43). The House prints the passage exactly as it stands and bends nothing in it toward a conclusion. Its Messianic weight is real, and it is set down here, in the note, where interpretation belongs — never sewn into the verse. THE ALMIGHTY WORD — 18:15 At the midnight of the last plague, thine Almighty word leaped from heaven out of thy royal throne, as a fierce man of war into the midst of a land of destruction (18:15–16). The Greek is logos; the Aramaic of the synagogue would say Memra. The House leaves the line as Almighty word and does not import Memra into the verse, though the reader who knows where this language travels will hear the echo. Here again the bridge is named in the note, and the verse is left to carry its own force. THE EXODUS RETOLD, AND THE UNNAMED From chapter 10 the book becomes a hymn of Chokmah moving through the history of the fathers — and it names almost none of them. It says the first-formed father of the world (Adam), the unrighteous who murdered his brother (Kayin), the righteous steered through the flood upon a little wood (Noach), the one found righteous among the confounded nations (Avraham), the righteous who fled his brother’s wrath (Ya’akov), the righteous who was sold and went down into the pit (Yosef), the servant of YAHUAH who withstood dreadful kings in wonders and signs (Moshe). The author withheld these names on purpose, and the House keeps his reticence: it does not write Adam or Avraham or Moshe into a verse that declined to. The names are restored here so the reader may follow the allusion; on the page the anonymity stands. Only what the text itself names is Hebraized — the Yam Suf (10:18; 19:7). IMMORTALITY The book turns again and again on athanasia — immortality, and the kindred incorruption. This is a Greek philosophical word and a Greek philosophical hope, and the House does not disguise it in a Hebrew coat it never wore. Immortal and immortality are left in English throughout (1:15; 2:23; 3:4; 8:13, 17; 15:3). Where the Hebrew scriptures speak of the life of the age to come they keep their own idiom; this book reaches for the Greek one, and the rendering lets it. THE MAKERS OF IDOLS — 13–15 The long derision of the idol-makers in chapters 13–15 — the carpenter who cooks his dinner over the offcuts and then prays to the knotted scrap he could not burn (13:11–19), the potter who moulds a god from the same clay as his common vessels (15:7–13) — is kin to the scorn of the Letter of Yirmeyahu, and the House renders it in the same spirit. The servants of the pagan gods are kept as plain priests, never kohanim (12:6); the idols of the goyim are named for what the text calls them. THE NAME AND THE TITLES YAHUAH stands wherever the Greek says Kyrios, and is never glossed. Elohim stands for Theos. Where the Greek reaches for a divine title with an exact Hebrew counterpart, the House restores it: Hypsistos becomes ELYON, the Most High (5:15; 6:3). Two titles the brief anticipated — EL CHAI, the living God, and EL OLAM, the Everlasting — do not in fact surface in this book as titles, and the House does not manufacture them; the everlasting light of 7:26 is an adjective, not a Name. “THE ALMIGHTY” — A JUDGMENT OF REGISTER Pantokrator, the Almighty, has no single Hebrew word, and the House judges it by register. At 7:25 the glory of Shaddai stands parallel to the power of Elohim in a hymn to Chokmah’s divine origin, and Shaddai — the patriarchs’ Almighty — fits that register and is restored. But at 11:17 and 18:15 the word is attributive — thy Almighty hand, thine Almighty word — where no title can be cleanly set, and there the dignified English is left to stand. THE COUNT AND THE DIVISIONS The book runs to nineteen chapters. Counted verse by verse against the witness it comes to 436 — one more than the round estimate the House carried in; the witness governs, and the title page follows the witness. Chapter and verse divisions follow the Greek, as the rule requires wherever the base text is Greek. THE TONGUE The vocabulary as applied in this book, each term glossed at its first appearance and standing bare thereafter: Chokmah (wisdom), Binah (understanding), Da’at (knowledge), Musar (discipline), tzedek (righteousness), Ruach (spirit), Emet (truth), Emunah (faith); YAHUAH — never glossed — with Elohim, ELYON, and Shaddai; Torah and mitzvot, Mikdash, Mishkan, mizbeach, Nachalah; goyim, neviim, malachim, gibborim; She’ol, brit, and Yam Suf. Immortality and the Almighty word are left in English by the judgments named above. The names the author withheld are not supplied; the Name he declined to write is not inserted. RULE X.4 The text is rendered as it stands. The translation is never adjusted to fit a conclusion. Interpretation belongs to the introductions and the notes — never to the verse.