Commentaries on the Old Testament: Genesis to Second Samuel

PREFATORY NOTE

Introductions to great books are written after, not before, the publication of their text. There is the less need for a special introduction to this first volume of the text of Barhebraeus’ Storehouse of Mysteries since Johann Göttsberger’s Barhebraeus and his Scholia on Holy Scripture original: "Barhebraeus und seine Scholien zur Heiligen Schrift" (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1900) contains most of the information that students of this text will need. With this our text, translation, and notes can stand on their own feet until our textual labors are finished. The undertaking of the publication of at least the Old Testament section of this great work as a whole needs no apology.

For a greater “Peshitta Project” the standard Syriac version of the Bible it furnishes the natural starting-point. We need to cite only the very moderate words of the great Theodor Nöldeke in his Sketches from Eastern History (London, 1892), page 255: “His Scholia to the Bible, which are more philological than theological (especially for the history of the Syriac text).” But the value of Barhebraeus and his scholia is far greater than this. In the Middle Ages the Holy Book, the eternal revelation of divine salvation, occupied in every respect the center of the stage and had the spotlight shining full upon it. Around it men great and small wove all they knew of science, art, culture, and life. More than one man put his all into comments on the Bible. Barhebraeus, indeed, wrote far more than this one book. There is scarcely a branch of the science and literature of his day to which he did not make some noteworthy contribution. But Göttsberger is not far from right when he says (p. 59): “Barhebraeus has here put the sum total of his learning into the service of the Holy Scriptures.”

In the case of a man like Barhebraeus this means much. Though many of his works are not yet widely known and some very important ones are either not published at all or are, at best, neither fully nor competently edited, it is easy for us to see, as others have seen before us, that Barhebraeus is by far the greatest writer in the entire history of Syriac literature. It is also true, and likewise not well enough known, that he is one of the outstanding men and scholars of his great and stirring times. Toward the end of the Crusades, when the Mongols furnished the spectacle of one more great convulsion in the affairs of Western Asia, he became by no means the smallest star in the great galaxy of scholars whom these stupendous conquerors gathered with the best library facilities then obtainable into what may well be called their imperial university at Maragha.

Any one of the great works of such a man is well worth publishing and studying with care. If his Storehouse of Mysteries is at all like Göttsberger’s carefully worded estimate of it, it is not the least of the great writer’s works. Small wonder that a number of attempts or intentions to publish it have been announced. In the seventeenth century, apparently under the auspices of the great English archbishop Ussher, one of the Loftuses contemplated such an edition. The intention issued in Excerpta paucula a few excerpts in the Waltonian Polyglot. Early in the nineteenth century Cardinal Wiseman mentions the fact that Samuel Lee intended to undertake an edition of the whole work (see Göttsberger, p. 74); his intention seems to have led to no action whatever. In 1858 a curiously pompous “specimen” of the Horreum mysteriorum Storehouse of Mysteries by Larsow (Leipzig, 1858) led no farther than Gen. 2:16. As the wish uttered with the childlike naïveté natural simplicity so characteristic of his good heart by the late Father Louis Cheikho (al-Machriq, I [1898], 451) and the despairing hope of Dr. Johann Göttsberger go herewith into at least partial fulfilment, even our present first volume will show why it is indeed small wonder that this work was not accomplished sooner.

Our first thanks in connection with this arduous task are due to the director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Professor James H. Breasted, whose generosity found