in his praefatio in l. Iob, how it was accomplished. He engaged, non parvis numis, a Jewish teacher from Lydda, where there was at that time an university, but confesses that, after he had gone through the book of Job with him, he was no wiser than before: Cujus doctrina an aliquid profecerim nescio; hoc unum scio, non potuisse me interpretari nisi quod antea intellexeram. On this account he calls it, as though he would complain of the book itself, obliquus, figuratus, lubricus, and says it is like an eel - the more tightly one holds it, the faster it glides away. There were then three Latin versions of the book of Job, - the Italic, the Italic improved by Jerome, and the independent translation of Jerome, whose deviations, as Augustine complains, produced no little embarrassment. The Syrians were better off with their Peschito, which was made direct from the original text;[1] but the Scholia of Ephrem (pp. 1-19, t. ii. of the three Syriac tomi of his works) contain less that is useful than might be expected.[2]
The succeeding age produced nothing better.
Among the expositors of the book of Job we find some illustrious names: Gregory the Great, Beda Venerabilis (whose Commentary has been erroneously circulated as the still undiscovered Commentary of Jerome), Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus,[3] and others; but no progress was made in the interpretation of the book, as the means were wanting. The principal work of the middle ages was Gregory the Great's Expositio in beatum Iob seu Moralium, ll. xxxv., a
- ↑ Perhaps with the use of the Jewish Targum, though not the one extant, for Talmudic literature recognises the existence of a Targum of the book of Job before the destruction of the temple, b. Sabbath, 115a, etc. Besides, the lxx was considered of such authority in the East, that the monophysite Bishop Paulus of Tela, 617, formed a new Syriac translation from the lxx and the text of the Hexapla Published by Middeldorff, 1834-35; cf. his Curae hexaplares in Iobum, 1817).
- ↑ Froriep. Ephraemiana in l. Iobi, 1769, iv., says much about these Scholia to little purpose.
- ↑ His Postillae super Iob are still unprinted.
