Annotatio CLV

”Their throat is an open sepulchre.” — Psalm 13:3

Jerome, in the commentaries on the Psalter which are believed to be his, admonishes that those eight verses — which [go] from this passage up to that, “There is no fear of God before their eyes”¹ — are had in the vulgate edition, but are not in the Hebrew exemplars; rather [they were] collected by Paul from various passages of divine Scripture, and, in that epistle which is to the Romans, taken up in testimony of his own opinion.² The same [Jerome], in the preface of the sixteenth [book] of the commentary on Isaiah, responding to Eustochium — who asked whence Paul had borrowed the aforesaid little verses — says that he took the two first verses (“Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they dealt deceitfully”) from the fifth Psalm; the third (“Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness”) from the ninth Psalm; the fourth (“The venom of asps is under their lips”) from Psalm 139; the fifth, sixth, and seventh (“Their feet are swift to shed blood”) from the fifty-ninth chapter of Isaiah; the eighth (“There is no fear of God before their eyes”) from the fifth Psalm. Finally he adds that these eight little verses were inserted into the thirteenth Psalm by an unknown author, because he could not find a fit place to which to refer this testimony of Paul, since in these Hebrew codices it is not had. John Cochlaeus, in the book On Canonical Scripture and the authority of the Catholic Church, disapproving this opinion of Jerome, thinks the Hebrew exemplars to be in this passage mutilated and diminished. For thus he speaks: “In the epistle to the Romans, chapter 3, Paul alleges many little verses [that are seen among the Hebrews to be omitted]: but we rather think that the Apostle Paul is to be believed than the Bibles of the Jews. I know indeed that St. Jerome, in the prologue of the sixteenth commentary on Isaiah, responded to the sacred virgin Eustochium about the passage cited from the epistle to the Romans; but I have shown elsewhere that — saving his glory and honor — he did not [fully] satisfy this question.”