Page:Commentaries of Ishodad of Merv, volume 1.djvu/27

Rh is one of Theodore's identifications. It is a common method of Theodore's to interpret the Psalms in a manner consonant with historical criticism, and to explain that in these identifications David was speaking prophetically. Theodoret, who follows him closely, often removes these interpretations, but sometimes he leaves them, explaining that it doesn't matter.

Over and above these writers, whom Ishoʿdad definitely refers to, there are other books and sources of information that are more difficult to trace. For example, there are references to a Succinct Exposition of Matthew which seems to have good patristic affinities, though I do not know how to identify it. Then there is no doubt that the writer has access to a mass of Jewish and Christian traditions, explanatory of the Old and New Testaments. To take a single interesting case, he tells us that Salome, the daughter of Herodias, met with a just retribution for the part she took in the Decollation of John the Baptist, by having her own head cut off as she was dancing one day upon the ice: the passage is as follows:

The legend is in an advanced form of growth, and it seems to be made up of two separate Nemesis stories, one that Salome's head was cut off by the ice (changed after to the statement that she went through the ice up to her neck, and a great fish swallowed her submerged part), and the other that her head was cut off with the very sword that had been used for decapitating the Baptist. But whence did Ishoʿdad get all this? It is a northern legend, as the ice shows; the idea of the frozen Dead Sea in front of Herod's palace at Machaerus is pretty, but impossible. The legend interested me because I had already come across it in the seventeenth century poem on Salome by Henry Vaughan. The poem is as follows: