The Rest of the Words of Baruch
1 chapter · 3,947 words
4 Baruch, the Paraleipomena Jeremiou, which the Ethiopian canon receives as The Rest of the Words of Baruch. Jerusalem falls, Jeremiah goes into exile with the people, and Abimelech the Ethiopian sleeps sixty-six years under a tree with a basket of figs that do not spoil.
This is not the Ge'ez. No public-domain English translation of the Ge'ez exists — the standard modern one is in copyright, and Rendel Harris's 1889 edition, the earliest in English, prints the Greek text with a study of it and translates nothing. What is printed here is the Armenian recension, in the English Issaverdens published at Venice in 1901, and it is the one he says was made from the Greek that the Ge'ez also descends from. It is a witness to this work in another version, which is a different thing from the version the Ethiopian church reads, and saying so is the point of this paragraph.
Issaverdens prints no chapter divisions, so this volume adds none. The nine chapters the work is usually cited by belong to the Greek text; ruling them onto a different recension by matching what looked like the right sentence would be an editorial claim wearing the clothes of a transcription.
Every biblical book in this volume is checked verse for verse against independent reference counts. None exist for this text, so there is nothing to check it against but the scan itself, and it is marked unverified for that reason. Read it as a text recovered rather than as a text verified.
The scanner's reading was mended in 44 places. A word is only mended when this volume's own million and a half words have never seen it, when the change is a substitution this scanner is known to make, and when exactly one such change turns it into a word the volume does know. Two candidates and it is left as it is, because a visible misprint is better than a confident guess.
105 words here appear nowhere else in this volume and were left exactly as the scan has them, mended or not. Most of them are not mistakes at all — they are words this library simply never uses elsewhere, and the Ge'ez forms of names — and the rest are the scanner's worst pages, left visible rather than smoothed over.