A NOTE ON THIS RENDERING

THE WITNESS, AND THE COMPLETION

This is the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch — 2 Baruch — rendered from the Syriac in the public-domain English of R. H. Charles (1896), Hebraized in the House manner. Like Yehudit, Toviyah, and the Book of Baruch, its Hebrew is LOST: composed in Hebrew after the fall of the Temple, it survives whole only in a single sixth-century Syriac manuscript of the Ambrosian Library at Milan (the Epistle, chapters 78–87, in some thirty-six more). It is therefore a book RESTORED from its surviving witness. An earlier House proof of this book was left INCOMPLETE, wanting eight chapters (71–78) and lacking a ruling for the name of God. Both wants are now supplied: the eight chapters are set and harmonised to the House voice, and the divine title is ruled. We restore what was translated; we do not invent what was not.

THE MIGHTY ONE RULED — AVIR

Through all this book the standing name of God is “the Mighty One.” By the House ruling of 16 July (§VIII-f, now locked), that title is restored to AVIR (אָבִיר) — the Mighty One of Ya’akov, the Mighty One of Yisra’el (Bereshit 49:24; Yeshayahu 1:24) — the exact Hebrew title, bearing no warrior-ambiguity and not poaching EL GIBBOR, which the House reserves for the Messiah. “The Most High” is restored to ELYON, and “the Anointed One” to the MASHIACH. Where the book calls the Father “the Mighty God,” it is set “the Mighty Elohim,” not El Gibbor, honouring that reservation. This is the book for whose sake the ruling was most needed, and it is the first to bear it.

THE VISION OF THE WATERS

The heart of the book (chapters 53–74) is the vision of the cloud that rains twelve times, dark and bright by turns — the whole history of the world from Adam to the Mashiach. The six dark waters are Adam, Mitzrayim, the Kena’anim, Yarov’am, Menasheh, and the Kasdim; the six bright are Avraham, Moshe, David and Shelomoh, Chizkiyahu, Yoshiyahu, and the Second Temple — “but not as fully as before” (68:7). Then a last black water shot with fire, and after it the last bright: the reign of the Mashiach. The vision is sister to the Eagle Vision of 4 Ezra and to the beasts of Daniyel.

THE REIGN OF THE MASHIACH — THE SUPPLIED CHAPTERS

The eight chapters now supplied (71–78) carry the summit of the whole apocalypse. When the time of the Mashiach is come He summons all the nations (72:2); and when He has sat down “IN PEACE FOR EVER ON THE THRONE OF HIS KINGDOM” (73:1), “THEN HEALING SHALL DESCEND IN DEW, and disease shall withdraw, and fear and tribulation and lamentation shall pass away, and gladness shall encompass the earth” (73:2). No one shall die untimely; “THE WILD BEASTS SHALL COME FROM THE WOOD AND MINISTER UNTO MEN, and the asps and dragons shall submit themselves unto a little child” (73:6) — the peaceable kingdom of Yeshayahu 11:6–8. And that time is “the consummation of that which is corruptible, and the beginning of that which is incorruptible” (74:2; cf. 1 Korintim 15:53–54). Then the reapers shall not grow weary nor the builders be toil-worn (74:1). The House had never before been able to print these chapters; now it can.

THE RESURRECTION, AND THE CHANGED BODY

2 Baruch holds one of the clearest resurrection hopes outside the Tanakh. When the Mashiach returns in glory, “all who sleep in hope of Him shall rise” (30:1), the treasuries of souls opened (30:2). And the risen righteous “shall be made like unto the angels, and be equal to the stars” (51:10), “changed into the splendour of glory” (51:3, 5) — while the earth “shall give back the dead which it now receiveth… changing nothing in their form” (50:2). It is the seed sown in corruption and raised in glory (1 Korintim 15), and the shining of the wise as the stars of Daniyel 12:3.

EACH HIS OWN ADAM

Against the despair that Adam doomed all, the book sets its most famous line: though death came by Adam's sin, “Adam is therefore not the cause, save only of his own soul, but EACH OF US HATH BEEN THE ADAM OF HIS OWN SOUL” (54:15, 19). It is not the whole counsel of Scripture — Rav Sha’ul teaches that in Adam all die (Romim 5; 1 Korintim 15:22) — and the House prints Baruch's word as it stands, and names the tension here rather than mending it in the verse. Rule X.4.

THE LAW ABIDETH

When the people cry that their shepherds have perished and their lamps are extinguished (77:13–14), Baruch answers with the spine of the book: “Shepherds and lamps and fountains came from the Torah; and though we depart, yet THE TORAH ABIDETH” (77:15). Tziyon fell because the people forgot the Torah, and it is by the Torah that light and shepherd and fountain remain — the same charge on which the book ends its exhortation.

GRACE AND SHALOM

The Epistle of Baruch (chapters 78–87), long treasured on its own in the Syriac Church, opens with the very greeting the emissaries of the Messiah would carry into all the world: “GRACE AND SHALOM BE WITH YOU” (78:2; cf. Romim 1:7; 1 Kefa 1:2). Written to the nine tribes and a half across the Perat and sent by an eagle, it is a letter of doctrine and “a roll of hope” — comfort in exile, and the pledge that Avir “will never forget or forsake our seed, but with much mercy will gather together again all those who were dispersed” (78:7).

A NOTE ON THE STYLE OF THIS VOLUME

This volume carries the House vocabulary in the earlier manner — the Hebrew term transliterated, with its English sense in parentheses at first appearance (“Tziyon (Zion),” “Torah (the law)”) — rather than the green Hebrew-script gloss of the newer volumes. It is preserved in the form in which the body was first set, now completed and corrected; the newly-ruled divine titles carry the Hebrew script in their gloss. A future normalisation may raise the whole body to the script-gloss standard; until then it stands complete and readable in its own dress.

THE TONGUE

The Syriac-through-Charles names are set in the House manner — Baruch, Neriyah, Tziyon, Yerushalayim, Nevuchadnetzar, Chizkiyahu, Yoshiyahu, Menasheh, Yarov’am, Sancheriv — and the load-bearing Hebrew terms (Torah, Heichal, Mikdash, Mishkan, Kavod, malach, nefesh) restored to their dress. The Name YAHUAH stands for “the Lord”; ELOHIM for “God”; AVIR for “the Mighty One”; ELYON for “the Most High”; the MASHIACH for “the Anointed One.” ADONAI is held where the book sets it in address, and “the Lofty One” left as the book names Him. Counts that SIGNIFY are Hebraised; the years, the yamim, the numbers of the slain are left as they measure.

RULE X.4

The text is rendered as it stands. Its vision is printed as its vision, its “each his own Adam” left in tension with the Besorah and named only here, its historical frame (the destruction wrought by the malachim, not the Kasdim; 7:1–8:5) preserved and not harmonised. The eight supplied chapters are set in the same voice as the rest and marked as supplied. Interpretation belongs to this note; it is never smuggled into the verse.