“Ruskin, notablyin Sesame ’lz’es, has striven for truth in language,
by example as well as by precept. So, our Lord upon earth warred against hypocrisy almost above all
other sins (John iii. 19—21): and the New Testament, as the Old,
ever purging language of its falsities, till at length we arrive at the
point where the unjust and filthy are stamped finally as such (Rev.
xxii. 11). Seeing the fatal consequences of such falseness, it is clearly
one of the first duties of every student .of language and literature to
combat it to the utmost. 22. κεραννύντες] Spicing the wine, not diluting it as the Greeks
and Romans did, Allusions to drunkenness in Israel are frequent:
e.g., xxiv. 9, xxxviii. 1, 3, 7, Hosea iv. 11, vii. 5, Amos vi. 6. 23. τὸ δίκαιον τοῦ δικ. αἴροντες] They remove from the righteous,
or just man, all that the justice of his cause shall carry with it. We
are reminded—not that the thought is entirely the same—of
Repub. II. 361 C: γυμνωτέος δὴ πάντων πλὴν δικαιοσύνης. . .μηδὲν γὰρ
ἀδικῶν δόξαν ἐχέτω τὴν μεγίστην ἀδικίας, ἵνα ᾖ βεβασανισμένος εἷς δικαιοσύνην,
κ.τ.λ. 24. καυθήσεται] The fut. is apparently assimilated to the following
verb, which represents a Heb. imperfect; it is not the tense that
would be expected in Greek, as the comparison is clearly a general
one. Cf. lxv. 8, and see note on vii. 2. See also Vol. I. Introd. ‘On
Methods of Rendering,’ pp. 43—45.