CHAPTER 15
order of priesthood: for the Body and Blood of the Lord are the rational and unbloody offerings of the Church's Eucharist.!®
CHAPTER 15 verses 2-3.
LXX read: 'Master, what shall you give me? and I am departing without a child; but the son of Masek my home-born female slave is this Damascus Eliezer.' The Hebrew phrase meSeq béti which Jerome reproduces is difficult, in that the form meSeq occurs only here in Scripture. LXX understood it as the name of Eliezer's mother, described as a home-born slave (oikogenés); but Aquila saw in it the root $qh in the hiphil form, which has the sense
'to cause to drink'. Jerome reproduced this possibly because he thought it had Christian overtones: in Im Esa. 7. 17: 1 he alludes to Eliezer as a drinker of the blood, i.e. of the Eucharist. Theodotion's translation of the word is very similar to TO, which reads 'this administrator who is over (or: in) my house'.! PJ's rendering speaks of Eliezer 'the administrator of my house', adding 'by whose hands miracles were performed for me in Damascus'. Jerome's comment, too, alludes to Damascus, and interprets the words 'I am going without children' as 'I shall die without children': so also PJ, which has 'I am going forth from the world, who am without sons'. LXX may have the same sense. The word 'steward', procurator, is chosen by Jerome as a translation of mq in Vg. In Lib. Heb. Nom. (p. 65) he explains Eliezer as meaning 'God's help'.
The final sentence of Jerome's comment is ambiguous. It may also be translated: 'By this man they say that Damascus was 19 See also Ep. 46. 2. Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogic Catecheses 23. 8, 10, speaks of the 'unbloody sacrifice'. For discussion of Melchizedek and his bread and wine as a type of Christ and the Eucharist, see J. Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre
Dame, Ind., 1956), 143-7, noting particularly his exegesis of Eusebius, Dem. 1. 10, 5. 33 and for further use of the typology by Jerome, see Jay, L'Exégése de saint
1 On this rendering, see Aberbach and Grossfeld, Targum Onkelos, 92-3; Grossfeld, Targum Ongelos to Genesis, 69-70. Cf. also Hayward, 'Inconsistencies',
36-7. According to Kamesar, Jerome, 151-3, Eusebius of Emesa may have combined a Targumic-like exposition of the phrase with LXX's reading, and Jerome may be disputing this exegetical mixture.
2 See FTP and FTV of this verse: LXX's apoluomai, 'I am departing', and Aquila's aperchomai, 'I am going away', may imply death. See also Geiger,
Commentary founded and so named.' Jewish tradition associates Eliezer with Damascus, as the note in PJ quoted earlier tells. PJ of Gen. 14: 14 notes how Abraham pursued the foreign kings who captured his brother and chose Eliezer to go with him. According to Gen. Rab.
42(43): 2 and PRE 27: 2, Eliezer alone accompanied Abraham to Damascus on the expedition to defeat the kings; cf. also Gen. Rab.
44: 9, which recalls Abraham's pursuit of the kings with Eliezer to Damascus. What none of these Jewish sources relate is the founding and naming of Damascus; and it is possible that Jerome has once more handed ona scrap of information from his Jewish sources, to the effect that Eliezer's successful raid with Abraham led him to found the famous city, named in the Bible for the first time in Gen.
14: 1§. But the foundation of Damascus by Eliezer contradicts information given by Jerome in ro: 23, and his source in this present verse may not, indeed, be Jewish at all. verse 7 See comments on 11: 28 and 12: 4. verses 10-11 For Jerome's treatment of the covenant (which he terms sacramentum, a 'solemn agreement"*) 'between the pieces', see In Esa. 6. 15: 3-9. He declines to discuss it here. The difference between LXX and the Hebrew lies in the vocalization of the verb wysb, which LXX have understood as wayyéSeb from root ysb,
'and he sat'. The present Hebrew text, which Jerome assumes, is vocalized wayyasséb, from root nb in hiphil, 'and he scared away'. Aquila's translation uses aposobein, 'scare away'; and such a meaning may also have been known to Philo, who in OG 3. 8 says that Abraham 'stopped and sat over' the birds, and interprets the verse allegorically to refer both to Abraham's sitting and his restraining wrongdoing and greed. He has a similar comment in Quis Heres 243-7. But Abraham's driving away the birds was known to Christians, as the Catena fragment G23 (Petit, i. p. 26) and Theodoret OG 67 show: according to the latter, the birds represent the Egyptians who held Israel in bondage.
Jewish sources often remark that this event symbolizes Israel's protection from trouble by Abraham's merit: thus PJ states that 'the Gentiles, who are likened to the unclean bird, came down to 3 See Kamesar, Jerome, 153 n. 202, who does not, however, record the Jewish associations of Eliezer with Damascus.
4 At 26: 17, sacramentum occurs with reference to baptism. But the word also forms part of Jerome's exegetical vocabulary: he uses it alongside mystery, sometimes with a meaning almost identical to type. It seems to stress the sacral aspect of a mystery: see Jay, L'Exégése de saint Jéréme, 269-70.