Page:Historical Works of Venerable Bede vol. 2.djvu/297

 CHRONICLE.] there is a difference; for the Hebrew text makes Lamech to have lived 24 years longer than the copies of the Septuagint translation.

A.M. 1656 [2242].

In the 600th year of Noah's life came the deluge, in the second month, and the seventeenth day of the month. If any one should be disposed to taunt me with having raised new questions about the difference in the number of years between the Hebrew text and the Septuagint, let him read the treatises of the above-named fathers, and he will see that this difference was well known long ago. The origin of it has been inquired into by Augustine, who, among other remarks in the above-named thirteenth chapter, has the following:—" One may think it very likely that such a thing would happen when the work was first copied from the library of Ptolemy in one transcript, and originally copied from thence, so that it would spread more widely, and moreover there was a possibility of the writer's making an error; and this it is not unreasonable to suppose may have happened in the life of Methuselah." A little further on he adds: "I should not make the least hesitation, if I found a difference between the two copies, to give the preference to that language from which the other was only a translation, for both cannot be historically correct."

THE SECOND AGE.

In the second age of the world, and on the first day the second of it, which is the twenty-seventh of the second month, 2347. Noah went out of the ark, in which a few, i. e. eight souls, were saved by water. This is mentioned in his epistle by the holy apostle Peter, who has taken care to explain it most wonderfully, by subjoining these words.