Few passages of Scripture intrigued Augustine as much as the first sentence of the book of Genesis. In the Confessions, in his treatises on Genesis, in the City of God, and elsewhere he dwells on it and recurs to it, as though he felt he could not exhaust its suggestions and implications. His reflections on this sentence are ample evidence of the acuteness, force, and fecundity of his mind.

It is a commonplace that the Biblical commentators of the earlier Middle Ages were traditionalists who copied or adapted the Fathers and rarely added much of their own. At the same time there was much variation in method; for there is a world of difference between the commentaries of Bede or Paschasius, carefully integrated works bearing the impress of the writer's own mind and personality, and compilations that are no more than collectanea of Patristic passages strung together but lacking inner cohesion. Between these two extremes are works like those of Hrabanus or even Alcuin. Most of the material in them is borrowed, but its arrangement has been carried out with some skill and the compiler, besides quoting his authorities verbally, gives some variety to his exposition by reproducing part of the traditional teaching in his own words. The commentators also differ greatly in the degree to which they acknowledge their sources. Bede and Hrabanus often indicated their indebtedness to others by specific statements in the text or by a more general reference in the margin to the author cited. Even so the reader needs to be on his guard, because the commentators, by quoting the ipsissima verba of their source, may completely mislead him. A palmary example of this occurs in Hrabanus' commentary on Genesis. He introduces (PL 107, 506B) a discussion of Lamech and his seventy-seven descendants who perished in the Flood with the words: “referebat quidam Hebraeus in apocryphis eorum libris.” This might easily be interpreted as an allusion to the mysterious Jewish scholar whom Hrabanus is supposed to have consulted and to whom we shall have to return.

The Rev. H. St. J. Hart has recently put forward the interesting suggestion that the crown of thorns in John 19, 2–5, was made from the long thorns (modified leaflets) that grow on the base of the rachis, or axis, of the date-palm frond. Such a crown, with its tall spines projecting upward from a headband, was intended as a caricature of the radiate crown worn, in numismatic and other representations, by kings and emperors of Hellenistic and Roman times. In the narrative of John it was not an instrument of torture, but merely a “property” used in mockery of Jesus' pretension to be King of the Jews. Mr. Hart provides two excellent plates, which show the radiate crown as it appears on coin types, and also two improvised radiate crowns, one made from the leaflets, the other from the thorns of the date-palm.

Professor N. Glueck has discovered a good deal of evidence for the existence of a large Byzantine settlement at Aila on the Gulf of ‘Aqabah. Some fragments of a marble screening belong to the remnants of a Byzantine church, which now lies hidden underneath the gardens on the shore of the gulf. Two Byzantine capitals which can now be seen in the police-station of ‘Aqabah also seem to belong to a Byzantine church of Aila. On the one, St. Theodore is represented in relief in his full armor and above him ΘΕΟΔΩΡ can be read. The other represents a saint, also in his full armor with breast-plate, shield, and spear, and above him the letters ΟΓΓΙΝΣ can be recognized. Professor Willoughby emphasizes that the martial character of the saints and of the archangels who are seen on the capitals is a sign of the military assistance of which this outlying frontier-post of Byzantine Christianity and the Empire stood in need.