The materials I have transcribed here are only a small fraction of the wealth of exegetical and apologetical materials with which the editors of the Douay Old Testament filled their two volumes, published in 1609 and 1610, during the Elizabethan-Jacobean exile. The majority of the editors' work is interspersed among the pages and chapters of the Old Testament Books themselves, and so does not easily lend itself to transcription separate from the Sacred Text itself. The complete text and commentary of the original Douay-Rheims Bible was published in photographic reprint in 1987, but is no longer available to the best of my knowledge.

Included here are the "arguments" of the different Books (the editors' introductory material) and some other portions of commentary, chief among which are the sections on the six ages of the Old Testament. In these sections the editors show the continuity of traditional beliefs and practices among God's people from Adam to the Church of the present day (concentrating especially on Catholic beliefs and practices that had lately been challenged as innovations in the editors' time). (Pre-Christian typology in the ancient Hebrew history and worship is a fascinating subject, and can be explored in even greater detail in Fr. James Meagher's How Christ Said the First Mass, reprinted by TAN Books. The book is not exceptionally well-written, but the information is worth the struggle.)

My intent has been to render the text of the Douay editors' commentary more accessible to the late twentieth-century reader, without rewriting any of their language. By eliminating the utterly obsolete spellings of words, but conserving the original syntax and most of the original punctuation and capitalization, I have attempted to make the text more legible without committing any of the overreaching to which editors sometimes fall prey (even translators of Sacred Scripture) in well-meaning attempts to make it more readable.

With regard to correcting printer's errors in the original, I have limited this to the most patent and unmistakable of cases, having learned this lesson early on in the project with the word "correption" (appearing in a quote from 1 Cor. 10). After I had thoughtlessly changed it to "correction" in reliance on Dr. Challoner's revision of the Douay-Rheims, my guardian angel prompted me to refer to the reprint of the original Rheims New Testament. There, sure enough, was "correption," and just as surely in every known edition of the Vulgate was "correptionem," a word meaning "taking hold of," which the Rheims editors did not presume to alter. I have followed the editors' cautious example in transcribing their own language: leaving intact, for instance, the word "ingraffed," which did not clearly transmogrify itself into either "engrafted" or "engraved." Similarly, I have not replaced the word "agnize" with "acknowledge," because it does not exactly correspond, being somewhere between that and "recognize." Likewise, "examplar" is not precisely the same as "exemplary," and so on regarding other odd words. (All that said, however, I am sure I have introduced some errors of my own. If you find them, please bring them to the attention of the site manager, who will berate me appropriately.)

Mindful of my American bias, I have also left intact variant spellings which are in current or recent British usage, such as honour, judgement, connexion, and the like, as these are unlikely to prove distracting to the modern reader. In addition, one antiquated form I have not updated is tentation, purely for reasons of personal preference. Not only does it carry a pleasing echo of the old "ne nos inducas in tentationem," but the easy assimilation of the consonants, without the awkward and hiccuping "mpt" cluster of the modern usage, also tends to evoke an era when the spiritual combat with the powers and principalities was a familiar thought and never far from one's consciousness. But, if you will, just call it a bit of editorial self-indulgence.

Also unchanged, for the most part, are the spellings of proper names, even when these vary within the text itself. They mainly correspond with the familiar Vulgate spellings. The Douay-Rheims Bible (the Challoner revision, that is) is available from TAN Books for a modest sum, and its text can be found online.

For those using other translations, the numbering of the Psalms will be off by one from about Psalm 10 to Psalm 147 because of different groupings of the text. The names of some of the books are different as well. 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings in the NAB, for example, appear in the Douay version as 1-4 Kings (often abbreviated "Reg." in these commentaries after the Latin). 1 and 2 Chronicles in the NAB are called 1 and 2 Paralipomenon in the Douay, and Sirach in the NAB is known in the Douay as Ecclesiasticus. Lastly, the Book of Nehemias will sometimes be referred to as 2 Esdras.

Thanks to Martin Beckman, S. Veronica, and all the folks at Catholicsource for the opportunity to send these scholarly works of faith (and faithful works of scholarship) out across the ether. May God inflame the hearts of all with love for His Word and zeal for His commandments.

Zenas Legisperitus
Feast of Saint Jerome, A.D. 1998