Chalcidius

English

The Hebrews confess that hyle was generated; and the wisest of them, Moses, quickened not by human eloquence but, as they say, by divine inspiration, spoke thus from the outset in that book which is reckoned to be about the begetting of the world, according to the translation of the seventy wise men: 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth. But the earth was invisible and unadorned.' But as Aquila says: 'The head of things God founded, heaven and earth. The earth, moreover, was empty, and nothing.' Or as Symmachus: 'From the outset God founded heaven and earth. The earth, moreover, was an idle something, confused and unordered.' But Origen asserts that he was persuaded by the Hebrews that the translation is in some degree drawn away from the true property of the words; for that there was in the exemplar: 'But the earth was in a certain stupefied wonder.' Yet all these, they say, run together into one, namely that the hyle which underlies the whole body of the universe was generated; and they interpret the words themselves thus.

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

Latin

Paris 1520, fo. LVII verso (archive.org bub_gb_LxGcsxR3tWgC, page/n115.jpg) · chalcidius-1520

Notes

A page that should not exist. Chalcidius is a fourth-century Latin commentator on the Timaeus, outside the Patrologia and off this edition's Latin bench, and in the middle of a Platonist argument about whether hyle was made he turns to Genesis and prints Gen 1:1–2 four times over: the Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, and a reading Origen says the Hebrews gave him. Three things on this daf follow from it, and each is a first. The opening clause reports what the other bench holds and names it as theirs — Hebraei syluam generatam esse confitentur, the Hebrews confess that hyle was generated — which is the position Bereshit Rabbah 1:9 defends against the philosopher and Ramban states outright, attributed to Hebrew informants in Latin two centuries before Jerome's Hebrew Questions. Aquila's caput rerum is reshit rendered as 'head', which is the etymological reading no Latin witness on this daf reaches and which the rabbinic bench builds on; Symmachus's otiosum quid confusumque et inordinatum is a Greek rendering of tohu va-vohu that the Latin tradition later meets only as an anonymous alia translatio. And the exemplar reading Origen credits to the Hebrews, terra autem stupida quadam erat admiratione, is tohu read as astonishment — which is exactly Bereshit Rabbah 2:2's tohe u-bohe, bewildered and astonished, and Rashi's word for it. None of it reached the bench that needed it.

Threads

• → parallel · Jerome
  Both Latins reach for the Greek versions against the Septuagint, and only one of them is remembered for it. Jerome's Hebrew Questions argue from the fact that Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion all render bereshit 'in the beginning'. Chalcidius, fifty years earlier, prints Aquila and Symmachus in Latin with their variants intact — Aquila's caput rerum condidit Deus coelum et terram, Symmachus's ab exordio condidit Deus — so that the Latin reader can see the disagreement Jerome will later summarise away. Aquila's caput is reshit read as head, which is the reading the rabbinic bench builds on and which no Latin on this daf reaches.
• → parallel · Abraham ibn Ezra
  Aquila's Greek, in a fourth-century Latin dress, is the grammarian's reading eight hundred years early. Caput rerum condidit Deus coelum et terram takes reshit as a construct governing what follows — the head of things — which is exactly Ibn Ezra's argument at Lucca, that bereshit is a construct and must be read with what comes after it. Chalcidius prints it as one of four possible renderings and draws nothing from it; Ibn Ezra makes it the plain sense of the verse; and the reading reaches modern Bibles from the second bench and not the first.
• → contests · Angelomus of Luxeuil
  What a Latin knew about the Greek versions in the fourth century and what he knew in the ninth. Chalcidius names Aquila and Symmachus, quotes each on Gen 1:1–2, and marks off a fourth reading as coming from the Hebrews through Origen. Angelomus at Luxeuil has the etymological question — why bresith in Hebrew is rendered Genesis — and no versions at all to check it against. The philological apparatus does not develop over those five centuries; it is lost.
• ← contests · Philo of Alexandria
  Chalcidius reports that the Hebrews confess hyle was generated. Philo is a Hebrew who confesses nothing of the kind: he says the substance was of itself without order, quality or life, and he never says who made it. Chalcidius had read Philo and names him twice elsewhere in the commentary, so his generalisation about the Hebrews is made in full knowledge of the one Hebrew author he could actually read, and does not fit him. This is the sharpest place in the edition to watch a Latin report of a Jewish position round off its edges.
• → parallel · Bereshit Rabbah
  A Latin reporting the rabbinic position on this crux, correctly, and by name. Hebraei syluam generatam esse confitentur — the Hebrews confess that hyle was generated. At Bereshit Rabbah 1:9 a philosopher tells R. Gamliel that his God was a great artist but had good materials to hand — tohu and bohu, darkness, wind, water, the deeps — and is answered that Scripture says of every one of them that it was created. That is the rabbinic bench refusing coeval matter, which is exactly what Chalcidius says the Hebrews hold. He is a fourth-century Latin who knows the other bench's answer to this crux, states it accurately, and is read by nobody who argues the crux afterwards.
• → contests · Ambrose
  Ambrose sets up the hyle of the philosophers as the position a Christian must refuse, and Chalcidius had already reported the concession that dissolves it. For Ambrose, matter that the craftsman merely finds is a rival to God; for Chalcidius, the Hebrews grant that hyle itself was generated, so the Platonist account of the world's substance and the scriptural account of its origin are not in competition. Ambrose is refuting a Platonism that this Latin Platonist does not hold, forty years earlier and in the same language.
• ← contests · Paul of Burgos
  The two ends of this edition's Latin bench on the same question. Chalcidius in the fourth century reports what the Hebrews hold about hyle in order to agree with it, and takes the philosophers' vocabulary into the exposition without apology. Burgos in the fifteenth, himself born a Jew, rules that the philosophers' opinions about matter have no business determining the sense of the chapter at all. A thousand years apart, and it is the convert who fences the text off from philosophy.