LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,111)
  • Text Authors (19,486)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,114)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Bible or other Sacred Texts
Translation by James Rendel Harris (1852 - 1941)

As the wings of doves over their...
Language: English  after the Aramaic (ܪܡܝܐ) 
   This Ode is a musical gem.

1  As the wings of doves over their nestlings;
   [and the mouth of their nestlings towards their mouths.]1
2  So also are the wings of the Spirit over my heart:
3  [My heart is delighted and exults: like the babe who exults in the womb of his mother:
4  I believed; therefore I was at rest; for faithful is He in whom I have believed:]1
5  He has richly blessed me and my head is with Him:
   and the sword shall not divide me from Him, nor the scimitar;
[6  For I am ready before destruction comes; and I have been set on His immortal pinions:
7  And He showed me His sign: forth and given me to drink,
   and from that life is the spirit within me, and it cannot die, for it lives.
8  They who saw me marvelled at me, because I was persecuted,
   and they supposed that I was swallowed up: for I seemed to them as one of the lost;
9  And my oppression became my salvation; and I was their reprobation because there was no zeal in me;
10 Because I did good to every man I was hated,
11 And they came round me like mad dogs, who ignorantly attack their masters,
12 For their thought is corrupt and their understanding perverted.
13 But I was carrying water in my right hand, and their bitterness I endured by my sweetness;
14 And I did not perish, for I was not their brother nor was my birth like theirs.
15 And they sought for my death and did not find it: for I was older than the memorial of them;
16 And vainly did they make attack upon me and those who, without reward, came after me:
17 They sought to destroy the memorial of him who was before them.
18 For the thought of the Most High cannot be anticipated; and His heart is superior to all wisdom. Hallelujah.]1

Available sung texts:   ← What is this?

•   A. Hovhaness 

About the headline (FAQ)

View original text (without footnotes)
1 omitted by Hovhaness.

Text Authorship:

  • by James Rendel Harris (1852 - 1941), "Ode 28", appears in The Forgotten Books of Eden, in The Odes of Solomon, first published 1926 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Based on:

  • a text in Aramaic (ܪܡܝܐ) by Bible or other Sacred Texts , from the Greek, 1st century A.D.? [text unavailable]
    • Go to the text page.

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Alan Hovhaness (1911 - 2000), "As the wings of doves", op. 5 no. 3 (1935) [medium voice and piano], from 3 Odes of Solomon, no. 3. [
     text verified 1 time
    ]

Researcher for this page: Jean Nandi

This text was added to the website: 2009-10-29
Line count: 23
Word count: 336

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris