The Theologian who performs his office well is a debtor to Greeks and Barbarians, to the wise and the foolish, to Philosophers and Grammarians. And therefore various [matters] must be handled by him from time to time, even with his own labor and trouble — especially at this time, when the heretics catch at every handle for carping at and plucking at either the ancient fathers or the Church, and some Catholics too easily lend their ears to the words of certain word-artificers [Logodaedali]. There are, then, two [reasons] on account of which some think that iubilaeum is not rightly said from iobel. For, first, from “o” an “u” is not rightly made in the first syllable; then, in the second, an “i” is not rightly made from “e”; and therefore one should rather say iobelaeum, or, with at least one error, iobilaeum. So argue and write Eugubinus (on Leviticus 25 and Numbers 37), John Baptist Paulianus (in the book On the Jubilee), Sabellicus (Ennead 3), Polydore [Vergil] (book 8, On Invention), Cajetan (on Leviticus 25), Antonius Cordubensis (book 5, On Indulgences, q. 11), Victorius (in the Hieronymian Index), and finally Navarrus (in the commentary On the Jubilee, and on the Canon “Siquis aliquando,” § “in Leviticum,” On Penance, first distinction) — although it is strange to want to fetch this Latin word from the Hebrews, yet to deny the thing itself; for he [Navarrus] denies that our Jubilee year has anything in common with the Israelite one. I say briefly: first, that iubilaeus is rightly derived and said from iobel. 1. because it is most well known to all who have tasted the Greek and Hebrew tongue even with the tips of their lips, that the two vowels about whose permutation the quarrel here is — “e” & “i”, “u” & “o” — are very frequently interchanged among themselves, both when they are transferred to another language, and in the same language too. The examples are six hundredfold; but, that I may not wander far afield: in the passage about Lamech cited in the previous question (Genesis 4:19), “Sella” [Zillah] stands in our text and the Greek, but in the Hebrew “Silla” (v. 22); her son, in the Hebrew and our [Vulgate], is “Tubalcain,” but in the 70, in Greek, “Θόβελ” [Thobel]. And what is more usual today among them, even in Greece itself, [than] for the Greeks — as I have very often heard from them — to pronounce the Greek “u” [upsilon] as “i”? So that hence Josephus’s ἰώβηλος [iōbēlos] is pronounced “iobilos.” What in the German tongue? Is not “e” pronounced for “i,” and the reverse, by very many, according to the variety of dialects? In the Ripuarian Law, Count Nuenarius (I, On the Franks) notes that fredum is read for “peace,” which today is frid, whence also “Frederici” [Frederick]. 2. because our elders — among whom this word began to be used in the Church — so judged. For in the author of the book On the Sacrament in [pseudo-]Cyprian, and in our [Vulgate] interpreter, it is always Iubilaeus; whence in D. Jerome it seems, by the mere arbitrary choice of copyists, that today iobilaeum is read (Galatians 1; Epistle 125 to Damasus, q. 1; Epistle 127). 3. So all expositors and Popes hitherto — as St. Gregory (book 1 on Job, ch. 6) and others — wherever they name or announce the jubilee years. 4. So iubilum, as I said above, the Latins said. 5. So too some of the more recent [scholars] — most fond of novelties, and most zealous for the Latin tongue and for correct pronunciation — as Scaliger (On the Emendation of the Times, book 7, f. 737) often; and at last he says: “The rest of the Jubilee-matters are fabrications.” I would add Beza too (2 Thessalonians 2:4), had he not, with sycophantic slanders, added “in that jubilee-year, as they call it.” 6. the Christian German peoples approve the same word in their vernacular tongues, when they say iubeliar, and the French iubilet.
Secondly. I say, however, that those who say iobel, or iobelaeum, or iobilaeum do not seem to be blamed either; because thus, perhaps, it was their purpose to point the finger at the origin of this word, lest it perish. And so I too sometimes do. Thirdly. Yet it is more convenient to follow the common usage of the Church — meanwhile by no means denying or spurning the etymology — as Cicero advises in his Orator; and, on [the preface to] Galatians, the divine Jerome: “If those,” he says, “who are accustomed to read the eloquent [authors] of the age begin to mock us for the novelty and cheapness of [our] speech, let us send them to Cicero’s books which are prefaced ‘On the Questions of Philosophy,’ and let them see by how great a necessity he was compelled to bring forth such portents of words as the ear of no Latin man ever heard — and this, when he was translating from the Greek, which is a neighboring tongue, into ours. What, [then,] do those suffer who try to express the properties [of things] out of the Hebrew difficulties? And yet far fewer [words] that sound of novelty are in such great volumes of the Scriptures than those which he [Cicero] heaped up in a small work.”