Two Books of Sacred Miscellanies and a Treatise on the Jewish Kabbalah

MISCELLANIES CHAPTER I.

...it was necessary, in this place, for the flesh to be distinguished from the bones no less than from the skin; the former the flesh is utterly denied, while the latter the bones and skin is affirmed. How, then, could "flesh," which is said to no longer exist, be used as a synecdoche synecdoche: a figure of speech where a part represents the whole or the whole represents a part of the whole for the part? This would be the case even if, in other circumstances, the skin were considered a "homogeneous" uniform in structure and nature part of the flesh.

3. Furthermore, if the skin is a homogeneous part of the flesh, why is it not of the same nature and character as the flesh? Why is it said to have attained a nature halfway between nerve and flesh? This refers to the physiological theories of Johannes Magirus mentioned on the previous page, who argued skin was a hybrid tissue. According to the stated hypothesis, it must be of the same nature; it is certainly not enough if it merely shares some qualities from both sides.

10. A second passage brought forward by Drusius Johannes Drusius (1550–1616), a Flemish Protestant Old Testament scholar is found in Job 19:20 The text cites verse 13, but the Hebrew quote and context correspond to verse 20 or 18:13., where the members of my skin original Hebrew: בַּדֵּי עוֹרִי, "baddei ori" is interpreted as "the members of my flesh," with "skin" being substituted for "flesh." However, as we see, the parts of the body are bones, flesh, and skin. Therefore, in this interpretation, one part is being substituted for another part.

That most learned man Drusius objects: What compels us, in this passage from Job, to interpret "skin" as "flesh"? As if the skin itself could not also be deformed. But this response rests on a false hypothesis, as if the Hebrew word baddim original: בַּדִּים, meaning limbs, branches, or staves denoted an "excellent form," which we call beauty. Nowhere in Scripture, nor among the commentators—with the exception of the Vulgate Vulgate: the 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible which became the standard for the Catholic Church—will you find this meaning. For further study, see Rabbi Levi Ben Gersom, Vatablus, and Tremellius. Levi ben Gersom (d. 1344), François Vatable (d. 1547), and Immanuel Tremellius (d. 1580) were prominent medieval and Renaissance biblical exegetes.