10. At what season does the Saviour
rise? Is it the season of summer, or some other? In the
same Canticles immediately before the words quoted He says, The winter
is past, the rain is past and gone Cant.
ii. 11. In παρῆλθεν,
ἐπορεύθη
ἑαυτῷ the LXX. have imitated the pleonastic use of
ןֹל
after verbs of motion, corresponding to our idiom “Go away with
you,” and to the Dativus Ethicus in Greek and
Latin. See Gesenius Lexicon on this use of
לְ, and Ewald,
Introductory Grammar, § 217, l. 2.; the flowers
appear on the earth; the time of the pruning is come Cant. ii. 12: the singing of
birds. The Hebrew word (רימִזָ֯ means either “cutting,” as in
the LXX. τομῆς, Symmachus κλαδεύσεως
, and R.V. Marg. “pruning,” or as
in A.V. “singing.”. Is not then the earth full of flowers
now, and are they not pruning the vines? Thou seest how he said
also that the winter is now past. For when this month
Xanthicus Xanthicus is the
name of the sixth month in the Macedonian Calendar, corresponding
nearly to the Jewish Nisan (Josephus, Antiq. II. xiv. 6), and to
the latter part of Lent and Easter. On the tradition that the
Creation took place at this season, see S. Ambrose,
Hexæmeron, I. c. 4, § 13. is come, it is
already spring. And this is the season, the first month with the
Hebrews, in which occurs the festival of the Passover, the typical
formerly, but now the true. This is the season of the creation of
the world: for then God said, Let the earth bring forth herbage
of grass, yielding seed after his kind and after his likeness Gen. i. 11: grass, the herb yielding
seed.
The LXX.
give an irregular construction,
Βοτανὴν
χόρτου
σπεῖρον
σπέρμα.. And now, as thou seest, already every
herb is yielding seed. And as at that time God made the sun and
moon and gave them courses of equal day (and night), so also a few days
since was the season of the equinox.