When the righteous man is praised the people rejoice, for his memory is
undying, since he is acknowledged both of God and man, and his soul
pleased the Lord. Love therefore, O ye men, wisdom, and ye shall live;
desire her and you shall be instructed, for the very beginning of her
is love and the keeping of the law. Honour wisdom, that ye may reign
for evermore. I will tell you and will not hide God's mysteries from
you, for He it is that leadeth unto wisdom and directeth the wise; in
His hands is all wisdom and knowledge of workmanship; and wisdom, which
is the worker of all things, will teach you all, for in her is a spirit
understanding and holy, brightness of everlasting light, and image of
the goodness of God. She maketh people friends of God and prophets, she
is more beautiful than the sun, and above all order of stars; being
compared with the light, she is found before it. She bath freed from
diseases those that pleased her, and bath set them in the right paths;
she hath given unto them understanding to keep in holiness, saved them
from those lying in wait, and granted them strength of power, so that
all may understand that the most powerful of all is piety, and that
vice shall never prevail against wisdom, nor judgment shall pass away
without convicting the evil. But the ungodly reasoning with themselves
not aright, said: let us oppress the righteous man, let us not spare
the widow, neither need we be ashamed of the ancient gray hairs of the
aged. Let our strength be the law, and let us lie in wait for the
righteous, because he is not of our turn, and he is clean contrary to
our doings; he upbraideth us with our offending the law and objecteth
to our infamy the transgressings of our education; he professeth to
have the knowledge of God, and he calleth himself the child of the
Lord. He was made to reprove our thoughts; he is grievous unto us even
to behold, for his life is not like other men's, his ways are of
another fashion; we are esteemed of him as counterfeits, he abstaineth
from our ways as from filthiness, he pronounceth the end of the just to
be blessed. Let us see if his words be true, let us prove what shall
happen in the end of him. Let us examine him with despitefulness and
torture, that we may know his meekness and prove his patience; let us
condemn him unto a shameful death, for by his own saying he shall be
respected. Such things did they imagine and were deceived, for their
own wickedness hath blinded them. As for the mysteries of God, they
knew them not, neither did they discern that Thou art the Only God that
hast the power of life and death, that savest in the time of
tribulation and deliverest from every evil, that thou art compassionate
and merciful, granting unto the just Thy grace, and setting Thy might
against the haughty.
http://hymnary.com/ccel/anonymous/menaion.txtWisdom of Solomon (4, 10-12 ; 6, 21; 7, 15-17. 22. 26. 29; 2, 1. 10-17. 19-22).
I liked the opening sentence of the reading, and wanted to see if there was more on the subject in surrounding verses. So I looked up the verses given in my RSV...and it appears that very little of this reading is even in the Bible, at least in the verses cited. I used an online translation (KJV) so I could search for words, and "haughty" (the last word) was nowhere in the book.
I know that basically all the readings of the Church are massaged a bit to fit the liturgical context (adding "Brethren" at the start of Epistle readings, adding "The Lord said" or similar openings to Gospel readings, jumping around within stories, etc), but most of the actual text in this particular reading does not appear to be in the Bible at all. It seems to be more of a "rhapsody on a theme" than a quoted reading.
Or am I just doing this wrong? Maybe it got severely lost in translation, if the Menaion is from Slavonic, while the Bible is from Greek? But I wouldn't think it would be that incredibly different.
