which is now no longer unfamiliar or paradoxical. I have arranged my 121 Psalms in groups, classified according to a somewhat rough and ready division into subjects. This device may, I trust, prove of some interest even for those to whom the Psalter is the most familiar book in all religious literature. In the last section of the volume, by means of selections from the first and second Books of the Maccabees, I give the story of the Maccabean movement to the death of Simon (135 B. C.). As the second chapter of this section will be found the entire Book of Daniel, which is now acknowledged on all hands to be a work of the Maccabean era, and the date of which, within a four years' limit from terminus a quo to terminus ad quem, can be fixed with satisfactory precision. The basis of the English translation of the Biblical passages is the Authorized Version, but changes and corrections are naturally more frequent in this volume (which contains such writings as Hosea and Job) than in its predecessor. It is unnecessary to mention the many scholars to whom I am under deep obligation for these corrections and changes. The result of them (including, as they do, several excellent emendations of a frequently corrupt text) will, I think, make many difficult portions of the Bible more intelligible and more interesting to the averagely attentive reader. Where, however, the translation (from whatever cause) is very doubtful, or where the meaning remains obscure, I have put the reader on his guard by an added mark of interrogation in brackets. And in the Book of Job, where many lines are in my opinion untranslatable (without perhaps a mass of highly conjectural emendations which alter too sweepingly the original text), I have not attempted the impossible, and have indicated the extent of omission by lines of dots. By the kind courtesy of the Delegates of the Oxford and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Presses (to whom I beg to tender my most grateful thanks), the selections from the Apocrypha are given according to the text of the Revised Version. To the same four friends who gave me excellent criticism and suggestions in the former volume I am again in the present part indebted for similar aid. Once more I would express to them most cordial and unstinted thanks. April, 1899. The second edition of this volume is virtually a reprint of the first, but a few misprints and errors have been corrected. The same may be said of the second and third editions of Part I. Grateful as I am for many valuable and interesting suggestions, it seemed too soon to make any material alterations in the arrangement of the work. From various encouraging letters which I have received, it would appear as if the main principles which guided me in compiling the book have on the whole commended themselves to many different readers. I am only too conscious that in the application of those principles there is room for very large improvement. But that improvement may probably be best exemplified by other workers in the same field. January, 1900. |