Hist. is: "Dum per te natura perit rursusque resurgit." vers.1-96, though Alexandre sets this fragment as the production of the author of the anonymous preface, and written by a monk in Justinian's time; but it is more probably of a composite character, and derived from more than one source. Therefore for seventy years the country lies desolate, till a king sent from heaven, -- Cyrus, -- warned by a holy dream, restores Judah, the royal tribe, and all the kings of Persia give means to rebuild the temple. Hist. The first book sketches the history of the world from the Creation to the Flood, and subsequently up to the second generation after Noah, and passes on to the advent of Christ, His life, death, and resurrection, the foundation of the Church, and the dispersion of the Jews. There is no trace of millennarianism, or of a reign of Messiah before the final judgment, or of a first resurrection which shall affect the righteous only -- doctrines which are found continually in later books. ad Sibyllina, pp. He puts into the mouth of God some lines which are quoted by Herodotus (i.47) as a Delphic oracle: "I know the number of the sands, the measure of the sea. Their fame was spread abroad long before the beginning of the Christian era. ), rose from the dead that the elect, "washed in the waters of the immortal fount, and born again (anagennethentes anothen), might no longer serve the lawless customs of the world." ii. 57; Lactant. 1 The earliest Jewish oracles, the core of the collection, are the products of the They profess to embrace the whole history of man from the Deluge to the time of Aurelian, and contain some difficulties which are probably impossible of solution, and are certainly not worth the labour that commentators have bestowed upon them, as they doubtless arise either from the writer's ignorance, or from a vivid imagination which has played havoc with history, chronology, and geography. These are supposed to be translations of the Greek: Blaptomenes ktiseos kai sozomenes pali moires (al .moirais). Bücher (Göttingen 1858); and of Bleek in Schleiermacher's Zeitschrift, i. xxiv.30). iii.16 to Christ, not to John: "He, escaping from the fire, first shall see the sweet Spirit of God coming upon Him." This awful time shall be preceded in Egypt by the freezing of the river Nile, and an irruption of barbarians into Asia and Thrace, and shall be followed by the destruction of the Egyptian idols, Isis and Serapis, and the erection in Egypt of a temple [360] to the true God, which shall last to the end of the world, when it will be destroyed by the Ethiopians, who then, with the rest of the evil-doers, will meet with their just punishment at the hands of Almighty God. [350] De Sera Num. Mart. [351] L. lxvi. Like the Book of Daniel, the sibylline author… [329] Subsidiary aids to the elucidation of the text are found in some treatises of Ewald, e.g. [361] Lactant. It is thus excluded from the tribes of Israel whose elect are sealed in Rev. After the prosperous period at Alexandria shall have endured for some long indefinite time, "the harvest of men" shall arrive, and the dead being recalled to life, a new state of things shall be introduced. It may be divided into two sections, vers.1-35, and vers.36-96. Ad Nemes. Only fragments have survived, the rest being lost or deliberately destroyed. v. 129. 1517. [369] as contained in the apocryphal "Gospel of the Egyptians." This tribe had become a by-word for idolatry, and the serpent, which was its emblem, represented the power of evil. This gap is supplied by a later oracle. From what has been said it will be clear that they are to be regarded as literary productions, assuming the form of predictions, and taking the place of the lost books, but possessed of no claim to inspiration, conscious or unconscious, and intended to give a fictitious support to tenets which the pagans would receive with disfavour. 1 f. 36; Lact. 4 f. [359] The meaning is obscure. ii.). Then the four, archangels -- Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel -- shall bring from Hades all the souls of men to the tribunal of God, who shall clothe them again with flesh and bones. It is not worth while to waste time upon it, as the numbers given are uncertain, and differ in some manuscripts, and their interpretation is only conjectural. After the division of the Macedonian kingdom, it is said that another empire shall be established by "a toga-clad and republican nation," [336] which shall deal hardly with Macedonia until "the seventh king of Grecian origin shall reign in Egypt." He is thus to be placed in the same category as the writer of Book v., if he is not to be identified with him. dis) dekades, sun g' hepta. The last words are intended to represent the numerical value of the enigmatical name. [356] Probably Daniel 2:44 f. is meant. The old Latin. 9 (vol. Publication date 1918 Topics Oracles Publisher London : Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York, Macmillan Collection cdl; americana Digitizing sponsor MSN Contributor University of California Libraries Language English. Modern scholars have dated the various Oracles by comparing the actual historical events with what was predicted in the Oracles. We are told of a battle between the Medes and Persians at the Euphrates, which resulted in the victory of the latter; of the Trojan war, when "boastful Greece" brought ruin on the fields of Phrygia; of a famine in Egypt of twenty years' duration, the Nile withholding its crop-nourishing waters; of Xerxes' invasion of Greece, with its disastrous termination; of eruptions of Ætna, and earthquakes in Italy, in one of which Croton was destroyed; of the war which raged in Peloponnesus; and of the destiny of many other nations, the verses concerning which seem to be remnants of old heathen oracles, and are curious if not instructive. Or. ii. t. vii. the ninth line, representing the "E" of Chreistos, is absent, which shows that the spelling of the word still fluctuated. Bell. [349]. 19; August. Fourteen books and eig… and x. being either wholly lost or else once contained in some of the other books (probably in Book viii. The first two books of the Sibylline Oracles form a unit. When he flees from Rome, he is said "to leave Babylon," this name being often given to Rome in the Sibylline Oracles -- a fact which may help expositors of 1 Peter and the Revelation. The book ends with the following paragraph, which is worth quoting, as showing the belief of a Jew or a semi-Christian in the latter half of the first century: "But when all things shall be reduced to dust and ashes, and God shall have put to sleep the awful fire which He kindled, He will again change the bones and dust of men, and make them such as once they were. There is here evidently an allusion to the crucifixion of our Blessed Lord, which reminds one of the Catholic hymn, where the cross is spoken of as a tree -- "flore, fronde fertilis," and the lines in the "Lustra Sex": --. The Fathers [333] have seen in these words a wonderful advance of heathenism towards right religion. Many have fancied that St. Paul referred to Nero in speaking of "that Wicked one" who was to be revealed in time (2 Thess. v. p. 63; Ad Scap. The book closes, as we have seen above, with an epilogue containing an account of the Sibyl's origin, and asserting her claim to inspiration. Prophecies of this calamity were prevalent among the heathen. of the Sibyllines, and the editors of the latter have added the verses thus preserved to their editions, judging rightly that there is sufficient authority for the insertion. The last object spoken of is oikos, the house of God, which Lactantius and Augustine took as denoting the Logos (see Lact. iii. Zactantius (vii.15) expresses the general feeling or hope when he says: "The Roman name, which now is supreme in all the world, shall be utterly abolished, the empire shall return to Asia, and once again the East shall bear rule." When it feels death approaching, it constructs for itself a pile of frankincense, myrrh, and other aromatic herbs, and, lying there, dies. ad. The Sibylline Oracles are a very influential, but largely-forgotten, oracular compendium probably redacted in more or less the form we know it in the sixth or seventh century in late antiquity, but containing material going back no-one-knows-how-far. Eccl. The whole piece is of Christian origin, and for the most part of orthodox character, though containing some trace of Origen's opinions, and it is to be referred to the third century. Ad Autol. For the sword of the one shall devour the other; but at the last shall he fall through the sword himself." p. 566. These evils are a punishment for the idolatry which profane kings introduced into Greece "fifteen hundred years ago." First, we meet here with the use of the word "judgment" for Christ's first advent into the world. and Odenathus, A.D.264. They were often quoted by early Christians against the Pagans of their day such as the Christian Philospher Justin Martyr, and by the leader of the Alexandrian school Clement, and by Lactantius. The first 'Democracy' would be created on April 21,241 B.C., 'Autocracy' would mean 'Hereditary Rule',while 'Democracy' would mean 'Elected Rule'. This portion was that which was latest found and edited, and is last in merit as in date. [348] Here the writer evidently looks forward to the permanence and unique position of the temple at Jerusalem, once polluted by Antiochus, but now purified and restored by the piety of the Maccabees. He speaks of the New Jerusalem which Messiah shall build, a city, brighter than sun, and moon, and stars; but, in opposition to those who gave a spiritual interpretation, to such predictions, he places therein a temple, ensarkon, corporeal, material, whereas St. John says (Rev. The old Latin. There are numerous German treatises, many of which I have not seen. "the widow;" and she shall be a powerful queen, exercising a cruel tyranny, in the tenth age of man. Inst. as we have seen, in the reign of Ptolemy Physcon. The original Sibylline Books were closely-guarded oracular scrolls written by prophetic priestesses (the Sibylls) in the Etruscan andearly Roman Era as far back as the 6th Century B.C.E. This woman is no historical person, -- certainly not Julia, the wife of Septimius Severus, as some have thought, -- but the one figured in Revelation xvii., xviii., there certainly, here probably, representing Rome. The remainder of the book is not open to the same objection as the preceding portion, being founded on the New Testament, and keeping pretty accurately to the details therein narrated. It is difficult to arrive at any clear view of the sequence of events in these last days, the writer himself having but hazy notions on the subject, and not arranging his details chronologically. Friedlieb considers Book xi. When L. Vitellius had the command in Syria, he took part in a civil war among the Parthians, and on one occasion led his forces to the Euphrates, and for a short time occupied the site of Babylon. Contr. 18. xxi.22) he saw no temple there. Get Free The Sibylline Oracles Textbook and unlimited access to our library by created an account. ), it is said that the Father communicated His wise counsel concerning man to His Son alone. v. 5; Greg. Naz. These books were destroyed, partially in a fire in 83 B.C.E.,and finally burned by order of the … [328] Oracula Sibyllina, curante C. Alexandre, Paris 1841-1856. Alexandre sets it as written by an Alexandrian Jew about the time of Gallienus. 3. Here, as the seer unfolds the mighty future, he claims for his utterances the gift of inspiration. In it is comprised a paragraph from a poem on the Flood, which is also found in Book i. may be a prophecy after the punishment had fallen, as are so many of the "Oracles." 2. The latter relies on some lines in Book vii. Chron. One writer may have been a Christian, another filches occasionally from Christian sources, but has no lively faith in Christ; like many of his countrymen at this time, he suspends his judgment, and instead of making a decision expends his energies in denunciations of the hated power of Rome, and in speculations concerning the future. [354] Tacit. His words concerning the Cross have continually been quoted as confirming the doctrine of the Hypostatic union for which the Council of Ephesus contended. Jud. [344] Then follows another glowing description of the felicity of the chosen people, who shall dwell in peace and plenty under the immediate protection of God. In pagan times the oracles and predictions ascribed to the sibyls were carefully collected and jealously guarded in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and were consulted only in times of grave crises.
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