Paul of Burgos

English

On the same first chapter, where it says in the Postilla: 'Here it is asked why on the second day it is not said, And God saw that it was good, etc.' Addition 3. In this place the postillator seems to depart from rectitude in three ways: first, because he treats irreverently the authorities of doctors who hold no small authority among catholics; second, because he refutes what they say unreasonably; third, because he attributes to Rabbi Solomon the Hebrew the authority of a literal exposition which our own doctors found first. The first is plain: for the answer he calls a piece of trifling is that of the great doctor Rabanus, who in this place answers the question thus: 'Unless perhaps, as one of the fathers expounded, the double number is not good, which divides from unity and prefigures the covenants of marriage; whence in Noah's ark all the animals that enter two by two are unclean, and the odd number is shown to be clean.' So he. The Master too, in the second book, distinction 14, answering this question, says: 'Some mystery is here commended; for perhaps it is for this reason that it is not said here what nevertheless was done in the other cases, because two is the beginning of otherness and the sign of division from unity.' So he. It is therefore no small irreverence to call the exposition of doctors and fathers of such standing a piece of trifling.

Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson · cc-by

Latin

Koberger 1486-87, leaf n57, column 1 (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n57.jpg) · lyra-koberger-1487

Notes

⚠ Anchor note: Burgos is arguing about the day-two absence of the approval formula, which is Gen 1:8 and outside this edition's scope; the witness is anchored on gen.1.4 under the second clause of the anchor rule, because the question he is arguing -- what the presence or absence of Et vidit Deus quod esset bonum means -- is the question that verse raises and that this crux is built on. The single most important text in this edition for the question the whole project asks. Everywhere else on this daf two traditions read the same verses without knowing the other is there. Here a Latin bishop, born Solomon ha-Levi of Burgos and a rabbi until he was forty, is arguing in a printed Latin Bible about how much of the literal sense the Latin bench owes to Rashi -- and arguing that it owes less than Lyra says. The complaint has three heads and the third is the one that matters: the authority of a literal exposition which our doctors found first, he attributes to Ra. Sa. the Hebrew. An early reader of this copy underlined Ra. Sa. hebreo in ink. What Burgos then does is produce the Latin doctors who said it first, Rabanus and Peter Lombard, and quote them at length, so the page carries the evidence for its own claim. Notice what is not in dispute: neither man doubts that Rashi is worth reading or that the literal sense is where the argument is. The quarrel is over priority and credit, which is a quarrel two traditions can only have once they are in the same room.

Threads

• → contests · Rashi
  The only witness in this edition that argues about the rabbinic bench's standing rather than merely agreeing or disagreeing with it. Burgos's third charge is that Lyra attributes to Ra. Sa. the authority of a literal exposition which the Latin doctors found first. Rashi is on this daf, four hundred years earlier, doing exactly what is being fought over: giving the plain sense of the verse and being followed for it. The edge is contests because the dispute is real and named, even though the man contested is dead and the contesting is done by a third party who says he owes him less than the postillator thinks.
• → cites · Rabanus Maurus
  Burgos's defence is a citation, and it is of the witness this daf already carries. Rabanus is the doctor whose answer Lyra called truphatica, a piece of trifling; Burgos quotes him at length on the second day and calls the dismissal irreverence. What makes this worth an edge is what it shows about the Latin bench's own memory: by the fifteenth century a Latin has to argue that Rabanus said something first, and the argument has to be made against another Latin who has been reading Hebrew.
• → parallel · Augustine
  Augustine's account of why the approval is withheld -- lest both should be called good -- is the Latin bench's own answer to the question Burgos and Lyra are fighting about, and neither of them uses it. Burgos reaches instead for Rabanus's arithmetic of the unclean binary and for the Master's sacramentum, both of which make the missing formula a fact about the number two rather than about what was made on that day.
• → contests · Nicholas of Lyra
  The indictment and the page it indicts, printed a hundred leaves apart in the same volume and now on the same daf. Every charge checks out. Lyra calls the answer of Rabanus and the Master truphatica, in that word; he refutes them from Luke 10 and Gregory on the pair; and he prefers Rashi in the sentence Burgos quotes back at him, Ideo aliter respondet Ra. Sa., et magis secundum intentionem littere. What Burgos does not say is that Lyra rejected a second Latin answer too, the angels falling on the second day, on grounds that have nothing to do with any Hebrew.
• ← contests · Matthias Doering
  Doering answers Burgos point by point, and in restating the third charge he changes one word. Burgos wrote that Lyra attributes the exposition to Ra. Sa. hebreo. Doering writes that he attributes the true answer to an unbeliever, infideli, and grants in the same clause that the answer is true. The dispute is therefore not about the reading at all, but about whose it is and what honour is owed for it -- which is the question this edition has been circling from the first crux, asked out loud for the only time.