Verse 3
Know ye that the Lord he is God: he made us, and not we ourselves.
Scitote quoniam Dominus ipse est Deus; ipse fecit nos, et non ipsi nos;
For the rousing up of the devotion which is needed in God’s house, nothing avails more than an attentive consideration of God’s greatness and His gifts. “Know ye,” he says, “that the Lord he is God,” that is, consider and with attentive reflection learn that the Lord, whom you worship, and to whom you come to offer prayer and praise, He is true God, than whom nothing greater or better can be imagined. He is also the one to whom you owe your life and all that you are. “He made us, and not we ourselves,” that is, we have no other efficient principle than God Himself: for although parents beget children, yet the first cause, without which the parents effect nothing, is God. How many there are who want children and cannot have any? How many who, on the contrary, want to satisfy their lust without having children, to whom, unsought, children are born? The mother of the holy Machabees said to her sons: “I know not how you were formed in my womb: for I neither gave you breath, nor
soul, nor life, neither did I frame the limbs of every one of you. But the Creator of the world, that formed the nativity of man, and that found out the origin of all.”
[1] St. Jerome translates the Hebrew as
ipse fecit nos, et ipsius / He made us, and we (are) His. But he appears to have corrupted the text; for our codices have
lo through
aleph which means
non / not ; and the Septuagint translators read it thus, translating the words as: He made us, and not we ourselves. St. Jerome seems to have read the Hebrew through
vau, as meaning
of Him / His, which is the dative of
ipse; and so he translates it as
ipse fecit nos, et ipsius / He made us, and we (are) His. A recent author has questioned the Vulgate edition, saying someone learned has joined together in the Latin codex two Hebrew readings,making:
And not we ourselves, and thus has confused everything; but he questions without good cause this reading, which is the best, and which is that of St. Augustine and St. Jerome himself in his
Commentary on this text, and almost all others. The Latin translator added the word
ipsi /ourselves in order to avoid the cacophony produced by
Ipse fecit nos et non nos; and they do not read
ipsi in the dative but in the nominative. And so the learned man did not join together two readings, but the Translator expressed one, which he found in the Greek, which was in accord with the more correct Hebrew. But, some say, no-one knows that he was not made by himself, since he was not then (in being), because the Holy Spirit warns us, saying: “He made us, and not we ourselves.” I reply, even if no-one can be unaware that he is not the author of his own life: yet there are many who do not consider by whom they may have been made, and who so act as if they had neither God nor any other author, hence it was most useful that men should be warned to think seriously about the fact that they are not the authors of their own life, but that they owe life and everything to the one God.
[1] She said to them: I know not how you were formed in my womb: for I neither gave you breath, nor soul, nor life, neither did I frame the limbs of every one of you. But the Creator of the world, that formed the nativity of man, and that found out the origin of all, he will restore to you again in his mercy, both breath and life, as now you despise yourselves for the sake of his laws. dixit ad eos : Nescio qualiter in utero meo apparuistis : neque enim ego spiritum et animam donavi vobis et vitam, et singulorum membra non ego ipsa compegi, [23] sed enim mundi Creator, qui formavit hominis nativitatem, quique omnium invenit originem, et spiritum vobis iterum cum misericordia reddet et vitam, sicut nunc vosmetipsos despicitis propter leges ejus. [II Machab. vii. 22-23]
Totus tuus ego sum
Et omnia mea tua sunt;
Tecum semper tutus sum:
Ad Jesum per Mariam.
