Page:Biblical Libraries (Richardson).djvu/144

 The best English equivalent for this-work-complete-in-itself, in the case of public records, is document and in the case of literary matters, it is work or writing. The "words" of Samuel or David thus are his "acts" or "deeds" in the sense not of doings but of the individual documentary records of those doings, quite in the modern sense of the "acts and proceedings" of a convention, or the "deeds" of property. The book of the words of Solomon (as distinguished from sayings) and the book of days of Johannes Maccabeus e.g. include both their "words," acts or documentary deeds and their acts or doings (in the sense of the "Acts of the apostles"). Many of the other derived uses of davar, besides act or deed, also hark back to documentary forms, often technical legal forms, or official directions: business, matter, affair, task, dealing, event, thing, cause, case, way, manner, reason, sake, etc., etc. The