Origin | Discovery | Character | ManuscriptsHOME| Contents | << | The Samaritan Pentateuch | The Aramaic Targums | The Septuagint & Other Greek Versions | Other Eastern Versions | The Latin Versions | Condition of the OT Text | >> |
Origin | Discovery | Character | Manuscripts
The text of the Pentateuch which possesses the longest pedigree is that which owes its existence to the Samaritans. Strictly speaking it is not a version at all, as it is in the Hebrew tongue, though written in a somewhat degenerate form of the Old Canaanite or Phoenician script, such as it was before the adoption by the Jews of the square characters, as described in the last chapter (p. 72). The precise origin of this separate Samaritan Bible has been a subject of disputes; but the trend of events which led to the eventual separation of the Samaritans from the Jews—the culmination of an ancient rivalry which goes back centuries earlier-can be traced in the later chapters of the books of Kings and in Ezra—Nehemiah. When the Northern Kingdom fell in 722 b.c. the Assyrians deported the more responsible and well-to-do elements in the population and replaced them with foreign settlers from other parts of the Assyrian Empire (2 Kings xvii. 24). But the majority of the people were allowed to remain, and continued to practise their religion and so far as we know to remain on reasonably friendly terms with their brethren in Judah. When Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem in 586 b.c. he carried off to Babylon "the leading men of the land" (2 Kings xxiv. 15-16) and it was among these exiles, striving to maintain themselves and their national and religious identity, that the purified but also narrower and more exclusive Judaism of the late priestly laws developed. It was perhaps to be expected that when, under Nehemiah and Ezra, the exiles returned and set to work to restore the Temple and its worship, not to what they were before, but in accordance with the beliefs and ideas which had taken shape in Babylonia, hostility would break out between them and the "people of the land". The Samaritans, as we must now call them, were in the eyes of the returned exiles of mixed and somewhat dubious ancestry, and their religion contaminated with foreign and heathen practices, and in spite of offers of co-operation (Ezra iv. 2) the breach widened, leading to complete rupture and the bitter enmity between Jew and Samaritan which we find in the New Testament. Exactly when the separation or 'schism' took place it is hard to determine exactly, since no mention is made of it in the Old Testament, but it was some time during the fourth century b.c. Their Temple on Mount Gerizim is said to have been built about 330 b.c., which if true gives us the latest date for the schism. On the other hand, it is hardly likely to have been before the final editing of the Pentateuch, c. 400 b.c., since this, with certain alterations (notably the substitution of Gerizim for Ebal in Deut. xxvii. 4 as the hill on which the memorial altar should be placed), is the sacred book of the Samaritans. As we have seen in the last chapter, this was the only part of the Old Testament which at that time had been definitely recognized as inspired Scripture by the Jews themselves; and when the Prophets and Hagiographa were subsequently added to the Canon, the Samaritans refused to accept them. They refused also to accept the square Hebrew characters adopted by the Jews, and we may be quite certain that they would pay little respect to any alterations in the text which were made by Jewish scribes and scholars after the date of the original secession.
So far, then, it appears as if we had, in the Samaritan Pentateuch, an invaluable means of testing the extent of the variation which the Hebrew text had undergone since the fourth or fifth century b.c. We have a tradition quite independent of the activities of the scribes and Massoretes, kept apart from any modifications of an accidental or dogmatic kind which may have crept into the text in Jewish hands, preserving the original form of writing and thereby avoiding one considerable source of possible error and corruption. Moreover the fact that the Samaritan community has for most of its history been small, and not dispersed into many separate communities like the Jews, has made the danger of corruption so much the less. No wonder that when, in 1616, the first copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch came to light many scholars thought that they had obtained evidence for the original text of the Old Testament far preferable to that of the Hebrew manuscripts. The Samaritan community had existed since the days of Sargon of Assyria until then, and it exists still, a little community now of less than a hundred persons, settled at Nablus, the ancient Shechem, still observing the Mosaic Law and still celebrating the Passover on Mount Gerizim; but none of their sacred books had come to light until, in that year, a copy was obtained by Pietro della Valle. Other copies have since been secured by travellers and are now in European libraries. The first printed edition was issued in the Paris Polyglot Bible in 1632, and for centuries a hot controversy raged among Biblical scholars as to the comparative value of the Samaritan and Hebrew text. In 1815 it appeared to be settled by an elaborate examination of all the variations by the great Hebrew scholar Gesenius, whose verdict was wholly against the Samaritan version. But more recent views, which see the Massoretic as only one line in the transmission of the text, and notably the striking agreement of some of the Dead Sea fragments with Samaritan readings, have disposed some scholars to find in the Samaritan Pentateuch one of the best preserved traditions of the Hebrew text.
The Samaritan text has been estimated to differ from the Hebrew in about 6,000 places. The great majority of these are of very trifling importance, consisting of pronunciation and grammatical variants, the substitution of Samaritan for Hebrew idiom (though some of these may be the survival of old Northern Israelitish dialectical forms), and the like. There is also a considerable use of'vowel letters'. Others are alterations of substance so as to suit Samaritan ideas of ritual and religion, such as Deut. xxvii. 4 (quoted above), the insertion of Deut. xi. 29-30 and xxvii. 2-7 (as amended) after Exod. xx. 17 and Deut. v. 21; and in twenty-one instances the reading "the place which Jahweh has chosen" with reference to Shechem, which was already a sanctuary in the days of Abraham, instead of "the place which Jahweh shall choose" referring to Jerusalem, which became the central sanctuary in the time of David. Others contain supplements of apparent deficiencies with the help of similar passages in other books, repetition of speeches and the like from parallel passages, the removal of obscurities or insertion of explanatory words or sentences, or distinct differences of reading. In all these latter cases there may evidently be two opinions as to whether the Samaritan or the Hebrew reading is preferable. The apparent deficiency in the Hebrew may be real, the obscurities may be due to error, and the Samaritan text may be nearer to the original language. This probability is greatly increased if we find that in passages where the Samaritan version differs from the Hebrew it is supported by the Greek Septuagint version (of which we shall speak presently), as is said to be the case about 1,600 times, or by one of the other older versions, or by the Dead Sea texts. For example, the Samaritan and Hebrew texts differ very frequently as to the ages of the patriarchs mentioned in Genesis v. and xi. Gesenius classified these variations as alterations introduced on the grounds of suitability; but it is at least possible that they are not alterations at all, but the original text, and that the numbers have been corrupted in the Hebrew; and this possibility is turned into a probability when we find the Septuagint in some instances and the Dead Sea Scrolls in others supporting the Samaritan reading. There is no satisfactory proof of either the Septuagint or the Samaritan text having been corrected from the other, nor is it in itself likely; and their independent evidence is difficult to explain away. Again, in Genesis v. the Samaritan chronology agrees with that of the book of Jubilees, which in turn was familiar to the Qumran community. It is quite clear that we have here different traditions which go back to the time long before the fixing of the Massoretic text, and in such cases scholars are now disposed to weigh carefully Samaritan readings. The editors of the Variorum Bible give thirty-five variations of the Samaritan text in the five books of the Pentateuch as being equal or superior to the Hebrew readings, and later scholars would no doubt add others. Among these may be mentioned, for the sake of example, Gen. iv. 8, where the Samaritan has, "Cain said to Abel his brother, Let us go into the field"; Gen. xxi. 13, "also the son of the handmaid will I make a great nation"; Gen. xxix. 3, 8, "shepherds" instead of "flocks" ; Gen. xlvii. 21, "As for the people he made slaves of them", instead of "he removed them to cities"; Exod. xii. 40, the 430 years of the sojourning of the children of Israel are said to have been in Egypt and in Canaan (thus agreeing with Gal. iii. 17), instead of in Egypt only; Num. iv. 14, the following words are added at the end of the verse, "And they shall take a cloth of purple, and cover the laver and his foot, and put it into a covering of seals' skins, and shall put them upon a frame"; and in Deut. xxxii. 35 the first half of the verse runs, "against the day of vengeance and recompence; against the time when their foot shall slip". These are perhaps the most notable of the Samaritan variants, and it is observable that in every case the Septuagint confirms them.
The general results of the comparison of this and the other versions will be reserved to the end of the chapter; meanwhile it will be sufficient to observe that in the Samaritan Pentateuch we have preserved a form of the Hebrew text of greater antiquity than that of any Hebrew manuscript, and that when allowance has been made for deliberate alteration and the accidents of transmission, its readings must be reckoned with, and when supported by one of the ancient versions or the Dead Sea manuscripts its evidence must be taken very seriously indeed.
The Samaritans were even more stringent than the Jews in the preparation of leather or vellum for their manuscripts of the Scriptures. Only the skins of animals which had been sacrificed as peace-offerings were allowed to be used.
No manuscript of the Samaritan Bible (so far as is known) is older than the tenth century. It is true that the Samaritan community at Nablus cherishes a precious roll, which it maintains to have been written by Abisha, the great-grandson of Moses, in the thirteenth year after the conquest of Canaan; but this story, which rests on the authority of an inscription said to be found in the MS. itself, may very safely be dismissed. All the existing manuscripts of the Samaritan version are written on either vellum or paper, in the shape of books, not rolls, with the exception of three rolls at Nablus, without any vowel-points or accents, but with punctuation to divide words and sentences. The whole of the Pentateuch is divided into 964 paragraphs.
There is another Samaritan MS. which is dated according to its own testimony a.d. 1211-12, and is now in the John Rylands Library at Manchester, where older fragments of the Samaritan text are also to be found. What is probably the oldest Samaritan MS in codex-form is in the University Library at Cambridge, which contains a note that it was sold in a.d. 1149-50, and in the opinion of Paul Kahle may have been written some centuries earlier.
The most recent printed edition is that of A. von Gall (Giessen, 1914-18) in five volumes, based on eighty MSS. and fragments of varying dates. The text is in Hebrew characters.
Pentateuch | Prophets | Hagiographer
Aramaic, traditionally the language of Syria, became in Old Testament times the lingua franca of most of the peoples from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast—and indeed continued to be so until the Arab conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries a.d. As we see from the story in 2 Kings xviii. 17 ff.' the Syrian language', as it is called, was understood by the court officials in Jerusalem, to whom it was familiar as the language of diplomacy, but not by the common people. The change came with the loss of Jewish national independence. In Babylonia the exiles were forced to adopt Aramaic, and under the Persian Empire it was the official language of the western provinces, so that in Palestine also Aramaic became more and more the language of everyday life. By New Testament times the process was pretty well complete, and the ' Hebrew' which Jesus and his disciples spoke, and in which St. Paul addressed the crowd from the castle stairs after his arrest in the Temple (Acts xxi. 40) was a Palestinian dialect of Aramaic. Meanwhile the ancient Hebrew remained as the language in which the sacred books were written, and in which they were read in public worship, being studied and preserved among the educated and literary classes of the Jews, but becoming less and less familiar to the common folk. Hence arose a necessity of paraphrasing the Scriptures into the current Aramaic tongue. At first these paraphrases were simply given by word of mouth, extemporaneously and verse by verse in the synagogue service, and were quite unofficial and varied from place to place. Subsequently these paraphrases were written down and are known as 'Targums' the word itself meaning ' translation'. In the form in which we now have them they represent accumulated layers of tradition, going back to a time before the foundation of Christianity, of which they show no knowledge; but they did not reach their present form until a much later date, probably the fifth century a.d. As was the case with the Hebrew and the other versions, the fixed text was not the beginning but the end of a long process, in which differences of reading, corresponding to differences of origin and tradition, were eventually smoothed out. The earliest mention of a Targum is that on Job in the first century a.d., though whether this indicates that by this time Targums of all the earlier books were in existence, or that the books not used in public worship, like Job, were paraphrased first, is a matter of opinion. At any rate the evidence suggests that the use of written Targums in public worship was at first resisted, although their use for private reading was allowed. Moreover, since they were aids to the popular understanding of the text, they tended to be more than simply translations or even paraphrases; they accumulated more extended interpretations and illustrative exegesis, and in accordance with the theological tendencies of the time avoided direct mention of the Divine Name, anthropomorphisms and so on. The Targums are thus important evidence for Jewish theological thought in the period, quite apart from their textual interest.
The Targums exist in a number of forms corresponding to their Palestinian or Babylonian provenance,
(1) The Pentateuch: (a) The Old Palestinian Targum. From among the fragments of the Cairo Geniza, some of them as early as the sixth century a.d., Paul Kahle has demonstrated the existence of an Old Palestinian Targum of the Pentateuch which in its time enjoyed wide popularity, being copied as late as the ninth century. Here we see a Targum at an earlier stage, as it was before it became standardized as an authorized version. It is clear from a comparison of the fragments, which show important differences, that the text was not yet fixed, and it has expansions of a homiletic and interpretative kind which were later removed. Moreover the language, in contrast to that of the later Targums, which are stilted and artificial, is spoken Aramaic, (b) The Jerusalem Targum—also called the Palestinian Targum. This is a later form of the Old Palestinian Targum but virtually complete, and while it preserves a good deal of the older illustrative material, it has been assimilated to the Babylonian version. It was later wrongly ascribed to Jonathan (see below) through a misinterpretation of the abbreviated title 'Targum J', and is thus also known as 'pseudo-Jonathan', (c) The Babylonian Targum Onkelos. Here we have the official revised version of the Targum of the Pentateuch as it took final shape in the Babylonian schools in the fifth century a.d. The translation has been brought much closer into line with the Massoretic text and purged of all explanatory and paraphrastic accretions. Who Onkelos was has been much disputed, but the name is almost certainly a reference to Aquila, who made a very literal translation of the Old Testament into Greek (see below, p. 103) and was probably connected by the Babylonian scholars with the Targum they knew. At any rate, the Targum Onkelos corresponds closely in method and outlook with Aquila's Greek version—it is extremely literal, even pedantically so, abounds in Hebraisms, and is provided with a Massorah like the Hebrew Bible. Eventually it replaced all other forms of the Targum, though by the time it was completely accepted in the West Aramaic had given way to Arabic as the spoken language of Palestine.
(2) The Prophets. The Targums on the Prophets correspond to those of the Pentateuch. Fragments of manuscripts show that early and varying translations into Aramaic existed side by side, and were finally replaced by an authorized version from the Babylonian schools. This is the Targum Jonathan. And just as the Targum of the Pentateuch was connected with Aquila, the Targum of the Prophets in the second century was associated with Theodotion, who was also responsible for a Greek version of the Old Testament, and of whose name Jonathan is a Hebrew form. Later the Targum was attributed to Jonathan ben Uzziel, a pupil of the famous Rabbi Hillel in the first century a.d. Targum Jonathan is not so stilted as Onkelos, and preserves more of the older illustrations and exegetical material.
(3) The Hagiographa. The Targums of these books are of very mixed style and date. As has been mentioned above, the Targum on Job is mentioned in the first century a.d., and it is significant that in the oldest manuscripts of the Septuagint there is a note at the end of Job xlii. 17 which reads, "This is translated from the Syrian book"—i.e. from the Aramaic Targum. There is a similar relation between the Greek Proverbs and the Targum, which in turn stands in close relation to the Peshitta Syriac version. Again, the fact that Jesus, according to Matt, xxvii. 46, quoted Ps. xxii in Aramaic suggests that a Targum on the Psalter was already in existence. On the other hand the Targums on the ' Rolls' (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther) are so loosely paraphrased as to be hardly translations at all, and come from different sources and dates—e.g. that on Song of Songs is probably as late as the eighth century a.d.
From what has been said above it will be seen that it is not always possible to use the Targums as evidence for the Hebrew text of the sacred books on which they are based, since they at times paraphrase freely, inserting explanations, moderating strong expressions, and otherwise introducing alterations. It is, however, clear that the Hebrew text from which they are made (that is, the text current in Judaea about the end of the first century b.c., to which their tradition reaches back) was not identical with that which has come down to us. The student of the Variorum Bible will find many passages in which they are quoted as differing from the received text, sometimes for the better—e.g. Deut. xxxiii. 13; Joshua ix. 4; Judges v. 30; 2 Sam. xviii. 1351 Kings xiii. 12; Ps. c. 3; Isa. xlix. 5; etc. They have this advantage at least over most of the other versions, that whenever we can be sure of the Hebrew text which they represent we know that it was a text accepted by the leaders of criticism among the Jews themselves.
| Origin | Contents | Adopted by Greek Diaspora & Church | Rival Translations: 2nd Cent | LXX rejected by Jews | Revisions: Hexapla | New Editions | Present State | Septuagint MSS. | Classification | Papyri | Vellum Uncials | Miniscules | Printed Editions | Recovery of Original Text | Reconstruction | Comparison—LXX/Massoretic |
Two considerations make the witnesses to the Old Testament already discussed in this chapter less important than they would otherwise be. The Samaritan text contains only the Pentateuch, and it is just this part of the Old Testament which is best preserved in the Hebrew, and consequently needs least correction. Secondly the Targums, because of their tendency to loose paraphrasing in the earlier stages of their evolution, are less reliable than we could wish in their testimony to the older Hebrew text. It should be said at once, however, that every translation is an interpretation, and anyone who has tried his hand at this difficult art knows that he is constantly faced with the choice either of giving an exact rendering of the words (which may result in bad style or even bad sense), or of rendering the sense of the original (which may make for good style, but not exact verbal equivalence). We shall see how this applies to the Greek versions of which we have now to speak. As regards the oldest and best known of these, the Septuagint, it is a complete translation of the Old Testament, containing indeed not only the books which now compose our Old Testament, but also those which, after a considerable period of uncertainty, were finally excluded from the Hebrew Canon and now constitute our Apocrypha. Further, it is preserved in several manuscripts of very great age, the earliest, as we shall see presently, going back to the second century after Christ, not to mention a scrap which is even earlier. In every respect, both textually and historically, the Greek version of the Old Testament is by far the most important of all the ancient translations. On the one hand, it is our chief means of testing the accuracy of the Massoretic Hebrew text, and of correcting it when it is wrong; and, on the other, it has been the Bible of Greek Christendom from the earliest age of Christianity down to this present day. It will consequently require and deserve a somewhat extended notice at our hands.
The first questions to be answered are those that relate to its origin. When was it made? Why was it made? For whom was it made? Curious as it may seem at first sight, this Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was made in a land which was neither Greek nor Hebrew—namely, Egypt. After the submission of Egypt to Alexander the Great, and the introduction of Greek settlers under Ptolemy, his lieutenant, Alexandria became the headquarters alike of the commerce and the literature of the East. Its population, mainly Greek, included also a large colony of Jews. Greek became the common language of intercourse between people of different nationalities in the East, and the Jews in Egypt learnt, before long, to use it as their native tongue. Hence there arose the necessity of having their Scriptures accessible in Greek; and the answer to this demand was the version known as the Septuagint. The story which was long current as to its origin is largely mythical, but it contains a kernel of truth. In a letter purporting to be written by one Aristeas to his brother Philocrates, in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.), it is said that King Ptolemy, hearing of the Jewish Scriptures, and being urged by his librarian to obtain a copy of them for his great library at Alexandria, sent an embassy (of which the writer of the letter was one) to the high priest at Jerusalem with magnificent presents, begging him to send a copy of the sacred books, with a body of men capable of translating them. Thereupon six translators were selected from each of the twelve tribes and dispatched to Alexandria, bearing with them a copy of the Law, written in letters of gold. They were splendidly received by the king, and, after a banquet and public display of their wisdom, set about their task of translation, working separately in the first instance, but afterwards comparing their results, and finally producing the version which was thenceforth known as the Septuagint, or the Version of the Seventy. Later generations improved upon this story, until the legend ran that each of the seventy-two translators was shut up in a separate cell (or by pairs in thirty-six cells) and each produced a translation of the whole Old Testament in exactly seventy-two days; and when their translations were compared it was found that they all agreed precisely with one another, in every word and every phrase, thus proving that their version was directly inspired by God.
This, however, is merely an exaggeration of the original story, which is in itself mostly legendary, though containing a substratum of truth. First it should be noticed that Aristeas is speaking of the Greek Pentateuch, and properly the term 'Septuagint' should be confined to this, though following early Christian usage it is applied to the Greek Bible as a whole. Again, it may be accepted that a Greek translation of the Law was already in existence by about 250 b.c., or even earlier, and that it was sponsored by Jewish authorities at Alexandria. But whether this official version was promulgated at that time, or nearer to that of Aristeas himself (c. 130-100 b.c.) is a question which will be referred to later. On the other hand, it is clear that the translation was made by Hellenistic Jews, not Palestinian as the Letter of Aristeas states, and in the first instance for Jews, either for use in the synagogue in public worship or for private study. The other books were added later, by different translators at different times; the Prophets by c. 150, the Hagiographa by the beginning of the Christian era. As we have seen, the grandson of ben Sira found not only the Law, but the Prophets and "the rest of the books" in Greek c. 132 b.c., and he also notes that they "have no small difference when they are spoken in their own language "—i.e. that they differed to some extent from the Hebrew. Indeed the style of the translation differs so markedly in different books as to prove that the whole Old Testament cannot have been the work of a single group of translators. The Pentateuch itself bears evidence of different hands. The prophetic books are much freer, and this is especially noticeable in the case of Isaiah, which often defeated the translators, who took refuge in paraphrase. The 'Septuagint' text of Daniel, on the other hand, was replaced in nearly all Christian copies by the version of Theodotion (or that later revised by Theodotion) because of its divergence from the Hebrew original. In the books of Samuel the Greek text is very important, since it presupposes a better Hebrew text than that of the Massoretes. This had long been suspected by scholars, and is now shown to be so by the Dead Sea texts. The Hagiographa vary considerably; Job is treated with considerable licence, others with great literalness.
The Septuagint version—using the phrase now to cover the whole Greek Bible—contains not merely the books which now form our Old Testament, but also those which, since the Reformation, have been placed apart in the Apocrypha. Some of these books (2 Esdras, the additions of Esther, Wisdom, part of Baruch, the Song of the Three Children, 2-4 Maccabees) never existed in Hebrew at all; but the others were originally written in Hebrew and circulated among the Jews (chiefly, it would seem, in their Greek form) for some time on very much the same footing as some of the books which form the section of the Hagiographa (p. 67). They never, however, attained the same position of authority, and when the Canon of the Old Testament was finally closed they were left outside. From this point dates their disappearance in their Hebrew form; they ceased to be copied in Hebrew; and so they have come down to us only in the Greek, or in translations made from the Greek. Jerome rejected them from his Latin Bible because they were not extant in Hebrew; but the older Latin translations of them were subsequently incorporated into the Vulgate, and they have remained in the Latin Bible of the Roman Church to the present day. The Septuagint is, however, their real home, and there they take their proper places among the books of the Old Testament. The first book of Esdras takes precedence of the book of Ezra, of which it is an alternative version with some additions. After the book of Nehemiah (which, in conjunction with the canonical Ezra, is called the second book of Esdras) come, in the principal manuscript of the Septuagint, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Job, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (or the Wisdom of Sirach), Esther (including the parts now banished to the Apocrypha), Judith, Tobit. Then follow the Prophets; but Jeremiah is succeeded by Baruch, Lamentations, and the Epistle of Jeremiah (=Baruch, chapter vi.), and Daniel is preceded by Susanna and followed by Bel and the Dragon. Finally the Old Testament is concluded by the books of the Maccabees, of which there are, in some of the earliest copies, four instead of only two.
The Septuagint translation became the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews, and circulated widely in Palestine and Asia as well as in Egypt, the home of its birth. At the time of our Lord's life on earth Greek was the literary language of Palestine (in the sense that it would be known by the well-to-do classes who had contacts with the wider world, Jewish and Gentile) as Aramaic was the spoken language of the common people. Hebrew was known to the class of students headed by the rabbis and scribes, but the letters from the cave at Murabba'at do not altogether bear out the view that by this time Hebrew was to all intents and purposes a dead language. All the books of the New Testament were written in Greek; and most of the quotations from the Old Testament which appear in them are taken from the Septuagint or another Greek version, not from the original Hebrew. As Christianity spread beyond the borders of Palestine, Greek was necessarily the language in which it appealed alike to the Jew and to the Gentile; and when, in speaking to the former, it based its claim on the fulfilment of prophecy, it was in the language of the Septuagint version that the prophecies were quoted. The Christian Church adopted the Septuagint as its own Book of the Old Covenant, and looked to that as its Bible long before it had come to realize that its own writings would take a place beside it as equally sacred Scripture.
A consequence of this appropriation of the Septuagint by the Christian Church was to make it suspect in the eyes of the Jews, especially as, in some places, the text had been affected by Christian belief. Thus when the Christians in controversy pressed them with quotations from the prophets, of which the fulfilment had been found in Christ-e.g. Isa. vii. 14-the Jews, quite rightly, took refuge in a denial of the accuracy of the Septuagint translation, maintaining that the word translated parthenos ('virgin') meant simply a young girl of marriageable age. On the other hand, the Jews were accused of tampering with the text of Ps. xcvi. 10, which the Christians read (as indeed in one of our ancient codices), "Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord reigneth from the Tree", which is manifestly a Christian gloss. But there were other reasons for the dissatisfaction of the Jews. As we have seen, about the end of the first century a.d. the first steps were being taken to fix the Hebrew text in the form which has come down to us, and which was already seen to be at variance with the Greek version. Parallel with this was the rise of a new school of Biblical study and exegesis under the influence of Rabbi Akiba, to whom every word, every letter of the sacred text was of the utmost importance and charged with meaning. By contrast the frequent looseness (as it seemed) of the Septuagint was anything but satisfactory. The result was that the Septuagint was cast off by the Jews, and they ceased to copy it. With the certain exception of two fragments of Deuteronomy, and possibly a few others, all our texts of the Septuagint are Christian, and it is to the Church that we owe its preservation. Indeed since the Jews now rejected the books not in the Hebrew Canon, it is only in the Christian Septuagint that the books of the Apocrypha have come down to us. The one exception is the book of Jesus ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), which the Jews continued to copy. Indeed the Greek Bible of the Alexandrian Jews before the Christian era is, as one eminent scholar has said, an unknown entity.
Now that something like an authoritative Hebrew text was in being, what was needed was a faithful translation of this into Greek for the use of Greek-speaking Jews which would be more in accord with the new ideals of Rabbinical interpretation.
1. Aquila. The production of such a translation was the work of AQUILA, who is said by Epiphanius to have been a relative of the Emperor Hadrian and, after being converted to Christianity, later became a proselyte to Judaism. From the Jewish side he is reported to have been a disciple and pupil of Rabbi Akiba, whose methods of interpretation he applied to his version of the Hebrew text, of which it is an exceedingly bald and literal rendering. He adheres so closely to the original as to do violence to Greek idiom by imposing on it Hebrew constructions; he translates derivations from the same Hebrew root by corresponding derivations in Greek; he even attempts to render the Hebrew accusative particle which has no equivalent in Greek at all. To anyone ignorant of Hebrew the result must often have been such as to seem obscure or even nonsensical. Moreover, he followed the anti-Christian bias of his master by using, in some passages interpreted Messiani-cally by the Church, another word in place of Christos ('anointed') and, in Isa. vii. 14 neanis ('young woman') instead of parthenos ('virgin'). Nevertheless his work was held in high regard by Christian scholars like Origen and Jerome for its fidelity to the original, as well as by Jews. Most of his version has perished, apart from quotations in others writers. But the Cairo Geniza (see p. 70 and Plate XIII) has yielded up fragments which show that it was used in the synagogue, and there is the Ambrosian Hexapla palimpsest of the Psalms which gives about 150 verses (see below p. 106). In 1904 A. H. McNeile argued that the text of Ecclesiastes in the Septuagint is Aquila's version, and though it certainly bears many of his characteristic features, there are reasons for doubting whether this is entirely so. The usual view is that his translation of the Old Testament was made about a.d. 130.
2. Theodotion. Later in the same century another translation was made by THEODOTION (diversely described by Irenaeus and Epiphanius as a Jewish proselyte and by Jerome as an Ebionite Christian) said to have been a native of Ephesus. It was generally believed that Theodotion's translation was a revision of the Septuagint on the basis of the authorized Hebrew text used by Aquila, though exactly contrary in its treatment of it, being very free in its rendering of the original. But of recent years the view has been gaining ground that what Theodotion revised was not the Septuagint but another independent version. The reasons for this are that' Theodotionic' readings are found in the New Testament (notably in the book of Revelation), in the Epistle of Barnabas (c. a.d. 80-130), Clement of Rome (c. a.d. 96) and Hermas (c. a.d. 100) as well as in his contemporaries Irenaeus and Tertullian. As to its origins, many Hebrew words are simply transliterated instead of being translated, which would be reasonable enough if they occurred in a version for Jews, but would be unintelligible to Greek-speaking Christians. On the other hand Theodotion's translation does not seem to have been adopted by the Jews, although it obtained much popularity among Christians and exercised a considerable influence on the subsequent history of the Septuagint. Notably was this the case in respect of the books of Daniel and Job. Theodotion's version of Daniel was so much preferred to that of the Septuagint, that it actually took its place in the manuscripts of the Septuagint itself, and the original Septuagint version was until quite recently known only from a single Greek manuscript (the Chigi MS. in Rome) and a Syriac translation. Within the last few years, however, an early papyrus manuscript of a considerable part of it has been discovered (see p. 118). In the case of Job, the Septuagint version did not contain many passages (amounting to about one-sixth of the book in all) which appear in the received or Massoretic text of the Hebrew; and these Origen supplied in the Septuagint from the version of Theodotion. It is believed by some also that the version of Ezra-Nehemiah known as 2 Esdras is the work of Theodotion, the looser and expanded version of 1 Esdras being the original Septuagint; but this cannot yet be said to be established.
3. Symmachus. Yet one other Greek version of the Old Testament remains to be mentioned, that of SYMMACHUS, which was made about the year 200. The special feature of this translation is the literary skill and taste with which the Hebrew phrases of the original are rendered into good and idiomatic Greek. In this respect Symmachus approaches nearer than any of his rivals to the modern conception of a translator's duty; but he had less influence than any of them on the history of the Greek Bible. Curiously enough, he had more influence upon the Latin Bible; for Jerome made considerable use of him in the preparation of the Vulgate.
4. Quinta, Sexta, Septima. These three anonymous versions were known to and used by Origen in the Hexapla (see next section) for the Psalms. In addition readings from the Quinta survive for 2 Kings, Job, Canticles and Minor Prophets, and from the Sexta in Exodus, 1 Kings and the Minor Prophets. Little is known of the Septima; but in view of the recent discoveries from the Dead Sea it is noteworthy that according to Eusebius the Sexta was found together with other Greek and Hebrew books in a jar near Jericho in the time of Antoninus-i.e. Caracalla (d. 217), while the Quinta was found at Nicopolis near Actium. Whether the Sexta came from the same source as the recent Dead Sea Scrolls is a matter of opinion; the others may well, as Kahle suggests, have come from Jewish Genizas. That they were Jewish in origin, as Jerome says of the Quinta and Sexta, there can be little doubt.
1. Origen's Hexapla. At the beginning of the third century there were thus three Greek versions of the Old Testament currently in existence, besides the Septuagint itself. The next step, and one of much importance in the history of the Greek text, was taken by the great Alexandrian scholar, origen, whose life occupies the first half of the third century (a.d. 186-253). this time the text of the Septuagint had become corrupted through scribal transmission, a fact of which Origen himself was well aware. He also knew that the Septuagint was often at variance with the current Hebrew text, which he regarded as authoritative, and not unnaturally assumed that all deviations between the two were the result of scribal deterioration on the Greek side. In fact this was by no means always the case, since, as we have seen, the older Hebrew text from which the Septuagint version was made was not at all points identical with that used by the Jews in Origen's time, and which had been the basis for the translations of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. Therefore finding all these various, and often conflicting, versions about him he determined to draw them together in what was the first critical edition of the Old Testament, and to try to use them for the production of one more perfect version than them all. Accordingly with that stupendous energy which earned for him the admiration of his contemporaries and of posterity, he set about the colossal work to which was given the name of the Hexapla, or ' sixfold' version of the Old Testament Scriptures. In six parallel columns, at each opening of his book, were arranged the following six different versions: (1) the Hebrew text then current (substantially the same as the Massoretic text); (2) the Hebrew text transliterated in Greek letters (probably not his own work, but taken over from Jewish 'aids' to the pronunciation of the consonantal Hebrew text); (3) the Greek translation of Aquila (placed here as being nearest to the Hebrew in fidelity); (4) the translation of Symmachus; (5) the Septuagint as revised by Origen himself; (6) the translation of Theodotion, coming last in the series as being the furthest removed in style from the original. In addition, as mentioned above, for the Psalms he gave the anonymous versions which he called Quinta, Sexta and Septima, and the first two in other books as well. According to Eusebius the last four columns (Aquila, Symmachus, Septuagint and Theodotion) existed in a separate form, known as the Tetrapla or fourfold version, which was probably a later reproduction in handier size of the more important part of Origen's work; but in any case the Hexapla, whether earlier or later, is the complete and authoritative form of it. So huge a work as this (it has been estimated that it would cover 6,500 pages) was not likely to be copied as a whole. The original manuscript, which was preserved in the library of Pamphilus at Caesarea, was consulted by Jerome at the end of the fourth century, but it perished as a result of the Moslem conquest of Palestine in the seventh century, and of all of its columns except the fifth no complete representation has come down to us. In 1896, however, a young Italian scholar, now well known as Cardinal Mercati, found a palimpsest fragment in the Ambrosian Library at Milan containing the text of eleven Psalms in five of the six columns of the Hexapla, written about the fifth century. The Hebrew column is omitted, and the last contained not Theodotion but the Quinta, with variant readings in the margin. This gives a concrete example of what the Hexapla would have looked like, and adds something to our knowledge of the several versions. There is also a fragment at Cambridge, discovered in the Cairo Geniza, containing part of Psalm xxii. in all six columns.
It is with the fifth column, however, that we are principally concerned, since it contained Origen's edition of the Septuagint, and this edition had a considerable influence on the text of the version in subsequent ages. Unfortunately, Origen's efforts were not directed towards the recovery of the original form of the Septuagint, but at bringing it into harmony with the Hebrew text then current, and to do this he introduced alterations into it with the utmost freedom. Small differences were silently corrected either from what seemed to him to be the best reading of Septuagint MSS. or from one of the other versions. Differences of order were met by transposing the Greek into conformity with the Hebrew. Major changes in the text occasioned by omissions or additions he indicated by employing a system of critical signs used by Alexandrian scholars. Thus passages occurring in the Septuagint which were not found in the Hebrew were marked by an obelus (—); passages occurring in the Hebrew but not in the Septuagint were inserted in the latter from the version of Theodotion, such insertions being marked by an asterisk (※ or ; a metobelus (; a metobelus (X) in each case marking the end of the passage in question. For Origen's purpose, which was the production of a Greek version corresponding as closely as possible with the Hebrew text as then settled, this procedure was well enough; but for ours, which is the recovery of the original Septuagint text as evidence for what the Hebrew was before the formation of the Massoretic text, it was most unfortunate, since there was a natural tendency for his edition to be copied without the critical symbols, and thus for the additions made by him from Theodotion to appear as part of the genuine and original Septuagint. This has certainly happened in some cases; it is difficult to say with certainty in how many. Fortunately we are not left without some means of discovering these insertions, for in the year 617, shortly before the disappearance of the original manuscript of the Hexapla, Bishop Paul, of Telia in Mesopotamia, made a Syriac translation of the column containing the Septuagint, copying faithfully into it the critical symbols of Origen; and a copy of part of this, written in the eighth century, is still extant in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, containing the Prophets and most of the Hagiographa. For the Pentateuch the chief authority is a Greek manuscript at Leyden, written in the fifth century, and known as the Codex Sarravianus (see p. 123); and a few other manuscripts exist, likewise containing an Origenian text, some of which will be described below. There are thus fair means for recovering the Septuagint column of Origen's great work.
The versions of Aquila, Theodotion and Symmachus have, however, for the most part perished. In 1897, among a quantity of fragments brought to Cambridge from the Cairo Geniza were found three palimpsest leaves which were identified by Dr. F. C. Burkitt as containing the Aquila text of 3 Kingd. xx. 7-17 and 4 Kingd. xxiii. 11-27, in a hand of the sixth century. One curious feature is that the Divine Name is written in the old Hebrew (i.e. Phoenician) characters, which for ordinary purposes had gone out of use 600 years before. This confirms an express statement of Origen, which modern scholars had causelessly doubted. Another fragment, containing Ps. xc. (xci.) 6b-13a and xci. (xcii.) 3b-9, apparently from the same MS., was separately edited by Dr. C. Taylor; and a tiny papyrus scrap, containing Gen. i. 1-5, is described below (p. 119). Otherwise no continuous manuscripts of any of these versions have survived, except those parts of Theodotion which were incorporated in the received text of the Septuagint; but a very large number of individual readings have been preserved in the margin of Septuagint MSS. (especially the Codex Marchalianus, see p. 124), and these have been collected and arranged with great skill and care in the two portly volumes of Dr. Field's edition of the Hexapla, published by the Oxford University Press in 1875.
Origen's own colossal work went to the ground, but the part of it which was most important in his eyes, and the ultimate object of the whole-the revised text of the Septuagint-survived, and had a most noteworthy influence on the subsequent history of the version. At the beginning of the fourth century we find a sudden crop of new editions of the Septuagint, all more or less affected by his work. Three such are known to us, and they are of great importance for our present purpose, as we shall see when we come to describe the form in which the Septuagint has come down to us. These three editions are those of
(1) Eusebius, (2) Hesychius, (3) Lucian.
1. Eusebius of Caesarea, the first great historian of Christianity, with the assistance of his friend Pamphilus, reproduced Origen's text of the Septuagint (the fifth column of the Hexapla) as an independent edition complete with the critical signs. In spite of the fact that the fifth column represented a mixture of the Septuagint with Theodotion and other versions, it was accepted by Jerome (as by its editors) as being the Septuagint in its purest form. But the critical signs, in the absence of the Hebrew and the other versions, had lost their significance, and they were omitted by later copyists.
2. Hesychius. Little or nothing is known of hesychius (except that he probably died as a martyr in the persecution of Maximus in 311) or of the methods on which he based his recension. On the question of the identification of his version, and of the MSS. in which it is probably to be found, more will be said below.
3. Lucian. lucian of Samosata, a leading scholar of Antioch, who is also said to have suffered martyrdom in 311, produced another edition of the Greek text of the Old Testament. Among the characteristics usually attributed to his work are a tendency to combine alternative readings into composite form, thus preserving both; the substitution of synonyms for words in the Septuagint; and lucidity of style. Jerome thought that Lucian's text was a revision of the koine (the common or popular text), but other ancient writers believed it to be another version of the Hebrew text, comparable with those of the Hexapla. The fact that 'Lucianic' readings are found in Josephus and other early authors—i.e. long before the time of Lucian himself—as well as in the Old Latin version, has led some scholars to believe that the latter view is not far from the truth, and that what Lucian in fact revised was not the Septuagint text but another and independent Greek translation.
These three editions were practically contemporary, and must all have been produced about the year 300. Each circulated in a different area, but the texts reacted on one another, and the confusion is now very difficult to disentangle. The edition of Eusebius and Pamphilus (called the 'Hexaplaric') was generally used in Palestine; that of Lucian had its home in Antioch, and was also accepted in Constantinople and Asia Minor; while Hesychius was a scholar of Alexandria, and his edition circulated in Egypt.
After the beginning of the fourth century the Septuagint, so far as we know, underwent no further revision, and it is unnecessary to trace its history beyond this point. In one form or another, and gradually becoming corrupted in all by the errors of copyists, it continued to be, as it is to this day, the Old Testament of the Greek or Eastern Church. We have now to begin at the other end, and ask in what form it has come down to us, and what means we have of ascertaining its original text.
First, a word may be said about the evidence for the different books, or parts of books, being translated at various times by divers hands. The criteria arc, of coursc, grammatical and stylistic, the degree of closeness to the Hebrew text, translation of proper names, etc. To give but one example, it can be shown that there is remarkable consistency in translating the same Hebrew word by the same Greek word throughout a particular book, while in other books different renderings are given. Sometimes this is seen to be the case within a single book: in one series of chapters one Greek word is consistently used, elsewhere a different rendering appears, though the Hebrew is the same. In the latter case (e.g. in the Prophets) it is probable that to begin with those parts of a book were translated first which were read in the synagogue in the course of the 'second lesson'. Later the translation would be completed, the earlier parts being incorporated in the finished work. At any rate it is clear that different translators were engaged. The question then arises whether, besides diversity of translators, there may also have been diversity of translations.
It is at this point that in recent years scholars have become sharply divided in their views: namely, as to whether it is either possible or proper to speak of an 'original text' of the Septuagint. As in other departments of Old Testament textual studies, the lead has been taken by Paul Kahle, who sees the history of the Septuagint as corresponding in all its essentials to that of the Targums. Indeed in the Jewish stage of its history, he would say, this is exactly what the Septuagint version was: a Greek Targum, beginning as an oral and becoming later a written translation of the Hebrew text for synagogue and private use in different localities. The time came when the need was felt for an authorized version of the Pentateuch in Greek, which was revised and standardized by the Jewish authorities in Alexandria. It is this to which the Letter of Aristeas refers, the Letter itself being propaganda designed to command the new revised version which was contemporary with it. Thus the Septuagint proper is this authorized Jewish recension of the Pentateuch, which even so did not entirely replace the older versions. Apart from it there was no standard Jewish text of the Greek Bible; the other books existed in a variety of translations. In their turn the Christians took over the authorized Jewish Pentateuch and adopted one or other of the Greek versions of the remaining books, which in the course of the second century a.d. became the canonical text of the Old Testament for the Church. At the same time the title of 'Septuagint' was given to the complete Greek Bible, thus casting over it the aura of antiquity and sacredness which the Letter of Aristeas had given to the Greek Pentateuch. Meanwhile the Septuagint ceased to belong to the Jews, who cast it off in favour of the new translations made in accordance with the Rabbinical Hebrew text.
Such in brief outline is the picture drawn by Kahle. On what evidence is it based? There is, first of all, that provided by the Hexapla itself: the Quinta and Sexta columns, described as Jewish by Jerome, which must have differed considerably from the Septuagint to have been given a separate representation; then there is the version revised by Theodotion, which has left its traces in the New Testament and in early Christian writers; Aquila too probably used earlier non-Septuagintal translations, traces of which may also be reflected in the Greek Minor Prophets of c. a.d. 50 from the Dead Sea area (see p. 34) which frequently agrees with Aquila as well as with Justin Martyr against the Septuagint. There is also the fact that several books have survived wholly or partly in more than one version: for example, Lagarde, the great protagonist of the 'original text' admitted this to be the case in Judges; some papyrus fragments of Job of about a.d. 200 clearly belong to a different translation, and represent a better Hebrew text than the Massoretic; and the differences between the two recensions of Tobit contained in the great codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are so considerable that the question arises whether they can both be derived from the same 'original' translation. Finally we may mention again the Old Testament quotations in the New Testament and in various early writers which appear to be derived from a version or versions different from the Septuagint, as well as the old version which it is assumed was revised by Lucian. It must be admitted that Kahle makes out a very strong case, which if substantiated will bring the Greek Old Testament into line with the Latin Bible and the Targums as illustrating his rule that a fixed authorized version of a translation is not the beginning but the end of a long process. It will also mean that the attempt to find an 'original text' of the Septuagint is impossible, since there was no 'original text'. There are various points, such as the authorized Greek Pentateuch of the Aristeas Letter and the canonical text of the Christian Church, which it is possible to arrive at; but otherwise the task of scholars is " a careful collection and investigation of all the remains and traces of earlier versions of the Greek Bible which differed from the Christian standard text".
This may give the impression that the value of the Septuagint as a witness to the Hebrew is less than it otherwise would be. In fact, Kahle would say, this is not so. Instead we must now think not of one Greek version, but rather of the whole of the Greek evidence in a plurality of versions, most of them, it is true, fragmentary, but in so far as they are diverse increasing rather than decreasing the total witness.
It should, however, be said that Kahle's conclusion has not been accepted on all hands, and that the older view of a single translation is still tenable. Here the evidence of the scroll of the Greek Minor Prophets from the Dead Sea area, already referred to, may well prove to be decisive. As we have seen, it is claimed that this MS. of about a.d. 100 shows close affinities with the quotations of Justin Martyr (d. c. 165) where he departs from the Septuagint; and it has also other variants which agree with Aquila's version. But this is not all: Symmachus also seems to show some knowledge of it, and fragments of the Quinta covered by the scroll appear to have much in common. In the opinion of Barthelemy this scroll of the Minor Prophets is a recension of the older Septuagint text by Jewish scholars, with the object of bringing it into closer conformity with the prevailing Hebrew text. The fact that it was found in the Dead Sea region may indicate that it was a product of Palestinian Rabbinical scholarship such as is associated with Rabbi Akiba. It appears to have had a wide circulation, since this or a similar recension was known to Justin Martyr and Symmachus, and was also apparently used by Aquila as a basis for his own version. It would perhaps be going too far to identify it with the Quinta in the present stage of the evidence. But it is at least possible to maintain that what Kahle has taken to be rival translations might instead be different recensions of the basic Septuagint text, which had been revised at various times so as to bring it into closer agreement with the Hebrew as it was received in the Jewish communities. On this reading of the evidence it would be quite reasonable to speak of an 'original' or 'proto-Septuagint' text. Meanwhile it is clear that the merits of the rival views will be keenly debated by scholars.
We have seen in the last chapter that apart from the material from the Dead Sea Caves no copy of the Hebrew Bible now extant was written earlier than the ninth century, while those of the Samaritan Pentateuch only go back to the tenth. The oldest copies of the Greek Bible are, however, of far greater antiquity than this, and take rank as the most venerable, as well as the most valuable, authorities for the Bible text as a whole which now survive. The oldest and best of them contain the New Testament as well as the Old, and will have to be described again in greater detail (since the New Testament portion has generally been more minutely studied than the Old) in a subsequent chapter. But a short account of them must be given here.
It has already been explained in Chapter I that Greek manuscripts fall into three classes: Papyri, Uncials and Minuscules. The papyri (a class which for practical purposes has only come into existence since the first edition of this book was published) extend from the date at which the books of the Septuagint were first produced to the seventh century of the Christian era, when the Arab conquest of Egypt (in 640) put an end to the export of papyrus from Egypt; though Graeco-Coptic copies of the Scriptures continued to be produced after that date. The vellum uncials cover the period from the fourth to the tenth century, while the minuscules begin in the ninth and go on until the end of the fifteenth century. In the earliest list of Septuagint manuscripts (that of Holmes and Parsons, see p. 127) all were comprised in a single numerical series, but the uncials were distinguished by Roman numerals I to XII, and the minuscules by Arabic numerals from 13 onwards. Modern editors, however, have usually followed the New Testament custom of denoting the uncials by capital letters, and this practice will be followed here. The papyri and minuscules will be given the numbers under which they appear in the list of Rahlfs (continued by Dr. W. Kappler of Gottingen). It will be convenient, however, to describe the papyri separately, as forming a class by themselves of much earlier date than the vellum minuscules, and, indeed, than most of the vellum uncials.
The total number of papyrus fragments, great and small, is now considerable. A list compiled in 1933 contained 174 Old Testament items, including vellum fragments from Egypt, and ostraka (inscribed potsherds) as well as papyri, and more have come to light since then; but most of these are not of great importance. The few that are of substantial value will now be described. The first two are indicated in the official list by capital letters, the others by Arabic numerals.
U. British Museum Papyrus 37. This was the first Biblical papyrus to be discovered, having been acquired by the Museum in 1836 from Dr. Edward Hogg, who stated that it had been discovered among the rubbish of an ancient convent at Thebes. It consists of thirty-two leaves of a papyrus codex of the Psalms, containing the text of Ps. x. (xi.) 2-xviii. (xix.) 6; xx. (xxi.) 14-xxxiv. (xxxv.) 6. Written in a sloping hand, probably of the seventh century. Edited by Tischendorf (Monumenta Sacra Inedita, nov. coll. i., 1855), and used by Swete and Rahlfs in their editions. The text belongs to the Upper Egyptian family, with the Sahidic version.
X. Freer Greek MS V at Washington. Acquired by Mr. C. L. Freer in 1916 as a mass of cohering fragments, which after skilled treatment and mounting in the library of the University of Michigan were added to the Freer Collection at Washington (see pp. 126, 214). The fragments form portions of thirty-three leaves, out of a probable total of forty-eight, of a codex of the Minor Prophets, probably of the later part of the third century. Of Hosea and the first verses of Amos (which follow) only a few letters are preserved; but from Amos i. 10 it is continuous (with some local mutilations) to the end of Malachi. Edited by Prof. H. A. Sanders of Michigan, with 911.
905. Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 656, now in the Bodleian. Parts of four leaves of a codex, containing Gen. xiv. 21-23, xv. 5-9, xix. 32-xx. 11, xxiv. 28-47, xxvii. 32, 33, 40, 41, in a text rather different from any other MS. Early third century.
911. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Gr. fol. 66, I, II. A codex of thirty-two leaves, of which the first and last (the latter being blank) are lost, and the others more or less mutilated. The hand is not a literary one, but such as is found in documents of the early part of the fourth century. The writing is very irregular, and the first nine leaves are in double columns, while the remainder is in single columns with long lines. It contains (with many mutilations) a great part of Genesis as far as xxxv. 8, where it breaks off, the title ("Creation of the World") being appended, which shows that the rest of the book must have been contained in another volume. (The codex was no doubt copied from a roll, and Gen. i.-xxxv. is about as much as a single roll would hold.) The text shows many agreements with the two papyri of Genesis described below (961 and 962). Edited by H. A. Sanders and C. Schmidt, with X.
919. Heidelberg Septuagint Papyrus 1. Twenty-seven leaves, all more or less mutilated, of a codex of the Minor Prophets, written in a large, rough hand of the seventh century, by which time papyrus MSS. were generally poor examples of book production. Contains portions of Zechariah (iv. 6-v. 1, v. 3-vi. 2, vi. 4-15, vii. 10-x. 7, xi. 5-end) and nearly all Malachi, in a text akin to that of the vellum uncials A and Q,. Edited by A. Deissmann.
952. British Museum Papyrus 2486. Acquired in 1922. Two conjoint leaves of a codex of which one leaf contains Song of Solomon v. 12-vi. 10, and the other the Apology of Aristides, chapter xv. The latter is important as confirming the Syriac version of the Apology, as against the rather shortened Greek text preserved in Barlaam and Josaphat. Early fourth century.
957. John Rylands Library, Papyrus Greek 458. The earliest extant fragment of a Bible MS., consisting of portions of four columns of a roll of papyrus extracted from the cartonnage of a mummy acquired in 1917 by Dr. Rendel Harris. It is written in a fine book hand, which can be assigned with confidence to the second century b.c., and contains Deut. xxiii. 24-xxiv. 3, xxv. 1-3, xxvi. 12, 17-19, xxviii. 31-33. Small though these fragments are, their great age gives them a special interest, and it is noteworthy that they concur with the next earliest extant Septuagint MS. (963, described below) in agreeing with the vellum uncials 0 and A rather than with B. Identified and edited by C. H. Roberts (Two Biblical Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 1936). See Plate XIV. '
961. Chester Beatty Papyrus IV. The most remarkable discovery of Greek Biblical manuscripts since Tischendorf's finding of the Codex Sinaiticus (see below, p. 191) was made about 1930, when Mr. A. Chester Beatty, an American collector of manuscripts resident in London, acquired from a dealer in Egypt a group of papyrus leaves, which on examination proved to be portions of codices of various books of the Greek Bible, ranging from the second to the fourth centuries. Several leaves from the same find were disposed of to other owners, as will be described in their place below. It is these manuscripts that have contributed most to our knowledge alike of book production and of the history of the text of the Greek Bible for the previously obscure period before the great vellum MSS. of the fourth century. The find, which is said to have come from the region of Aphroditopolis, on the right bank of the Nile, about thirty miles above Memphis, and presumably represents the library of some early Christian church, comprised portions of seven MSS. of the Old Testament, three of the New, and one which contained part of the lost Greek original of the book of Enoch and a homily on the Passion by Melito, bishop of Sardis in the third quarter of the second century. The texts of all the Biblical texts have been edited by the present writer (The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, fasc. i.-vii., 1933-7), and full photographic facsimiles by Messrs. Emery Walker have also been published. The Enoch text has been edited by Prof. Campbell Bonner, of Michigan University, who also has edited the homily of Melito, which he was the first to identify. The New Testament portion of the collection is described below (pp. 187-189). Of the Old Testament MSS. the two first contain large portions of the book of Genesis, which are particularly welcome because the two oldest vellum MSS., the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus, lack all except a few verses of this book. 961 consists of fifty leaves, all more or less mutilated, out of an original total of sixty-six, written in double columns in a rather large and thick uncial hand of the fourth century. Subject to many mutilations, it contains the text of Gen. ix. i-xliv. 22.
962. Chester Beatty Papyrus V. Twenty-seven leaves (seventeen of which are nearly perfect) out of an original total of eighty-four, written in a document hand of the second half of the third century, with a single column to the page. Contains (with mutilations) Gen. viii. 13-ix. 1, xxiv. 13-xxv. 21, xxx. 24-xlvi. 33. From the three papyrus MSS. 911, 961 and 962, which show many affinities with one another, we now have substantial evidence for the text of Genesis circulating in Egypt about the end of the third century.
963. Chester Beatty Papyrus VI. Portions of fifty leaves (of
which twenty-eight are substantially preserved) out of an original total of 108, of a codex containing the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy, written in a small and good hand which cannot be later than the middle of the second century, with two columns to the page (Plate XV). It is thus the earliest extant MS. of the Greek Bible with the exception of 957 and Fouad 266 (p. 118), and the earliest example of a papyrus codex at present known. It contains portions of Numbers from v. 12 onwards (principally xxv.-xxxvi.) and of Deut. i. 20-xii. 17, xviii. 22-end. A few fragments of this MS. are in the possession of the University of Michigan. It is noteworthy that while the text of Numbers is most akin to that of B, in Deuteronomy it is conspicuously not in agreement with B, but rather with G and 0.
964. Chester Beatty Papyrus XI. One complete leaf and one incomplete of a codex of Ecclesiasticus containing Ecclus. xxxvi. 28-xxxvii. 22, xlvi. 6-11, 16-xlvii. 2. Written in a large rough hand, probably of the fourth century.
965. Chester Beatty Papyrus VII. Fragments of thirty-three leaves, out of an estimated total of 112, of which the last eight were blank, of a codex of Isaiah, written in a beautiful hand, apparently of the first half of the third century. Two of the leaves are the property of Mr. W. Merton, and several fragments were originally acquired by the University of Michigan, but were courteously ceded to Mr. Chester Beatty. The text of all has been edited together. It contains scattered fragments between Isa. viii. 18-xix. 13, xxxviii. 14-xlv. 5, liv. i-lx. 22, with a few marginal notes in Coptic (a very early example of this writing, without the additional letters which were eventually adopted). The text agrees with Q,and T and less with A, א and B, in that order.
966. Chester Beatty Papyrus VIII. Small portions of two leaves of a codex of Jeremiah, containing Jer. iv. 30-v. 1, 9-14, 23, 24, written probably about the end of the second century. Has affinities with Q.
967, 968. Chester Beatty Papyri IX, X. Twenty-nine imperfect leaves of a codex containing the books of Ezekiel, Daniel and Esther. The Daniel leaves were originally described as a separate MS., hence the double numeration. Subsequently an American collector, Mr. John H. Scheide, acquired twenty-one perfect leaves of the Ezekiel portion of the MS., with the page numeration preserved intact. When complete, the manuscript seems to have consisted of 118 leaves, Ezekiel occupying the first half of the codex, and Daniel (including probably Susanna and Bel) and Esther the second, which was written by a different scribe. The date is probably in the first half of the third century, though. C. H. Roberts prefers the borderline of the second and third centuries. The Chester Beatty leaves (which have lost nearly half their height) contain portions of Ezek. xi. 25-xvii. 21, Dan. iii. 72-viii. 27 (chapters v. and vi. follow vii. and viii., and the preserved portion ends at vi. 18), Esther ii. 20-viii. 6; while the Scheide leaves contain Ezek. xix. 12-xxxix. 29, with gaps of five leaves. The Ezekiel and Esther texts agree markedly with B rather than with A. In Daniel the MS. is remarkable for containing the original Septuagint text, hitherto known only in a single late Greek copy and in a Syriac translation, instead of the version of Theodotion (see p. 104 above). The Scheide leaves have been deposited by their owner at the University of Princeton, and have been edited by Prof. A. C. Johnson, with the assistance of Dr. H. S. Gehman and Dr. E. H. Kase.
2013. Leipzig Papyrus 39. Portions of a roll, about 13 feet 6 inches long, with the Bible text written on the back of a document bearing a date equivalent to a.d. 338. It may therefore be safely assigned to the later part of the fourth century. Contains Ps. xxx.-lv., but the first five Psalms are much mutilated. The text is akin to that of U. Edited by C. F. Heinrici (1903).
2019. British Museum Papyrus 230. Acquired in 1893 with a parcel of papyri from the Fayum. Two columns, apparently of a roll, written about the end of the third century. Contains Ps. xi. (xii.) 7-xiv. (xv.) 4. A second hand has marked off the syllables by dots, presumably for singing or reading. On the back is a portion of a speech by Isocrates, similarly marked, which seems to show that the book was used for school instruction. The Psalter text was edited by the present writer in Biblical MSS. in the British Museum (1900).
2055. Papyrus Societa Italiana 980. Two leaves of a codex, containing Ps. cxliii. (cxliv.) 14-cxlviii. 3. Late third or fourth century. Its text agrees in several instances with that of the corrector of the Codex Sinaiticus known as א c. a. Edited by G. Vitelli (1927).
Papyrus Fouad 266, at Cairo, containing parts of two columns of the Song of Moses (Deut. xxxi. 28-xxxii. 7) written by a Jew in a fine uncial hand. The Divine Name is written in the square Hebrew characters. The date is second or first century b.c., and in point of age may be compared with the Rylands fragment of Deuteronomy, 957 above.
In 1950 C. H. Roberts published the first volume of a new series of papyrus fragments which were found by Dr. John Johnson in the winter of 1913-14 at Sheikh Abadeh in Egypt, the site of the ancient Antinoopolis. Six of them are Biblical, ranging from the second to the fourth centuries. No. 7 contains fragments of Psalm lxxxi. 1-4 and lxxxii. 4-9, 16-17 from the second century. No. 8, the most important, comes from the third century and contains numerous fragments of Proverbs, Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus which belonged to a codex probably containing the other sapiential books as well. The Proverbs fragments constitute the first substantial papyrus contribution to this book, in a text remarkable for "a large number of readings which are either unique or found only in the Hebrew or translations other than the Septuagint". It also has a marked tendency to agree with the much later manuscript N-V (see below) against the Greek uncials. In Roberts's view it is a pre-Origen text considerably influenced by other translations, perhaps accommodated to the Hebrew, and probably sharing a common ancestor with N-V. The few Wisdom fragments are "highly eccentric", while Ecclesiasticus is unremarkable. No. 9 also contains fragments of Proverbs (ii. 9-15, iii. 13-17) in a text differing considerably from the main uncials and with a tendency to go with N-V, though not so much as No. 8. It is probably of third-century date. No. 10 comes from the fourth century and contains Ezekiel xxxiii. 27-31, xxxiv. 1-5, 18-24, 27-30, in a text which, at this stage, is remarkably independent. Its support of unique readings in the Scheide papyrus (968 above) suggests a common ancestry, though it has peculiarities of its own.
Several other small fragments appear to be assignable to the third or fourth century, but they are too small to be of much importance. Among them, however, may be mentioned as a curiosity Amherst Papyrus III, on the back of which are written, in a hand of the first half of the fourth century, the first five verses of Genesis, first in the Septuagint version and then in that of Aquila (see p. 108 above), our knowledge of which is thus slightly increased.
Next follow the vellum uncial manuscripts, in the alphabetical order of the letters by which they are commonly indicated, with fuller descriptions of the most important.
א (Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet) stands for the famous Codex Sinaiticus (sometimes designated by the letter S),
one of the two oldest copies, apart from the papyri just described, of the Greek Bible. The story of the romantic discovery of this, manuscript in the last century, when part of it was in the very act of being consumed as fuel, must be reserved for Chapter VIII. For the present it must suffice to say that it was first seen by the great German Biblical scholar, Constantine Tischendorf, in 1844, in the monastery of St. Catherine, at Mount Sinai. At his first visit he secured forty-three leaves belonging to the Old Testament, and presented them to his patron, King Frederick Augustus of Saxony, who placed them in the Court Library at Leipzig, where they still remain, with the name of the Codex Friderico-Augustanus. A subsequent visit brought to light 199 more leaves of the Old Testament and the whole of the New Testament; and these ultimately found a home in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, until in 1933 the whole MS. was sold by the Soviet Government to the British Museum, where it is now Add. MS. 43725. Parts of three more leaves were subsequently discovered in the bindings of other manuscripts in the library of Mount Sinai; these were also acquired for St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) where they still remain. The manuscript was written in the fourth century, in a beautiful uncial hand; and it is extremely unfortunate that so much of the Old Testament has been lost. The parts which survive include fragments of Gen. xxiii., xxiv., and of Num. v., vi., vii.; 1 Chron. ix. 27-xix. 17; 2 Esdras (i.e. canonical Ezra-Nehemiah) ix. 9-end; Esther, Tobit, Judith, 1 Macc., 4 Macc., Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lament, i. i-ii. 20, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Nahum to Malachi, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Job. Three different scribes were employed on the writing of it, besides several correctors, the most important of whom were some scholars (indicated by the symbol א c.a or א c.b) who seem to have worked on the MS. at Caesarea at the end of the sixth or beginning of the seventh century. In notes in this hand at the end of Esdras and Esther it is stated that the MS. was collated with an exceedingly ancient MS. which itself had been corrected by the martyr Pamphilus and had an autograph note by him, saying that he had corrected it in prison from Origen's own copy of the Hexapla. The text is similar in type to B, except in Tobit, which has a different recension. A facsimile of a page of this beautiful and most valuable manuscript is given in Plate XXIII.
A. Codex Alexandrinus, in the British Museum. This was probably written in the first half of the fifth century, and contains the whole Bible, except Gen. xiv. 14-17; xv. 1-5, 16-19; xvi. 6-9; 1 Kingdoms [=i Sam.] xii. 18-xiv. 9; Ps. xlix. (1.) 20-lxxix. (lxxx.) 11, and some parts of the New Testament, which have been lost through accidental mutilation. It includes all four books of the Maccabees, for which it is the principal authority. Before the Psalms are placed the Epistle of Athanasius to Marcellinus on the Psalter, and the summary of the contents of the Psalms by Eusebius. At the end of the Psalms is an additional psalm (the 151st), which is found in some other early manuscripts, and a number of canticles, or chants, extracted from other parts of the Bible (for instance, the songs of Moses, in Deut. xxxii., of Hannah, in 1 Kings. ii. 1-10, and the Magnificat), which were used in the services of the Church. The apocryphal Psalms of Solomon were originally added at the end of the New Testament, but the leaves containing them have been lost. Two scribes were employed on the Old Testament portion of the MS., one of whom wrote the Octateuch (i.e. Genesis-Ruth), Prophets, Maccabees, and the poetical books Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, and the other the historical books (1-4 Kingdoms, 1-2 Chronicles, Esther, Tobit, Judith, 1-2 Esdras) and Psalms. For the history of the manuscript and a specimen of its writing, see pp. 198-202 and Plate XXIV.
B. Codex Vaticanus, in the Vatican Library at Rome. It contains the whole Bible, written in the fourth century, and is (apart from the papyri) the oldest and generally the best extant copy of the Septuagint. It is nearly perfect, wanting only Gen. i. i-xlvi. 28; 2 Kingd. [=2 Sam.] ii. 5-7, 10-13; cv- (cvi-) 27~ cxxxvii. (cxxxviii.) 6 of its original contents, so far as the Old Testament is concerned; but the Prayer of Manasses and the books of Maccabees were never included in it. The text of the current editions of the Septuagint are mainly derived from this manuscript. Its quality differs in different books. In Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Chronicles and 1-2 Esdras, it seems to be inferior to A, but elsewhere on the whole superior. In Judges it has quite a different text, which is found also in the Sahidic version and in Cyril of Alexandria (both, it will be observed, from Egypt, where B was probably written); but in Job it differs from the Sahidic in having the additions from Theodotion made by Origen in his Hexapla In other books, e.g. Psalms, its text is believed to be pre-Hexaplar. (See pp. 202-6 and Plate XXV (i).)
C. Codex Ephraemi, in the National Library at Paris. (See pp. 206-7 and Plate XXV (ii).) This is a palimpsest', that is, the original writing has been partially washed or scraped out in order that the vellum might be used again to hold some other work-in this case a theological treatise. The result is that only parts of the original writing can now be read; and, in addition, most of the leaves containing the Old Testament have been lost. The sixty-four leaves which remain contain parts of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus and the Song of Solomon, written in the fifth century.
The manuscripts hitherto mentioned were originally complete Greek Bibles, containing both the Old and the New Testaments. Those which follow do not appear ever to have included the New Testament, and many of them only a portion of the Old.
D. The Cotton Genesis. One of the most lamentable sights in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum is that of the charred remains of many manuscripts of the greatest value which were burnt in the fire among Sir R. Cotton's books in 1731. Perhaps the most valuable of all the volumes then destroyed was this copy of the book of Genesis, written in a fine uncial hand of the fifth century, and adorned with 250 illustrations in a manner evidently derived directly from the ancient Greek style of painting. The remains of this once beautiful manuscript still show the general character of the writing and the miniatures, but in a lamentably shrunken and defaced condition. Fortunately the manuscript had been examined and its text carefully collated by Grabe before the fire; and from this collation its evidence for the text of Genesis is now known.
E. The Bodleian Genesis, at Oxford. Written in the tenth century, but, though thus considerably later than the copies hitherto mentioned, it contains a good text. The following passages are wanting, owing to mutilation of the manuscript: Gen. xiv. 7-xviii. 24, xx. 14-xxiv. 54. The manuscript at Oxford, which is commonly known as the Bodleian Genesis, ends at xlii. 18, but a leaf at Cambridge contains xlii. 18-xliv. 13, one side of the leaf being written in uncials, like the Oxford leaves, while the other is in minuscules, which shows that it is part of a volume which carries on the text as far as 3 Kingd. xvi. 28. Most of this is at Leningrad, but some portions are lacking, of which the largest (Joshua xxiv. 27-end of Ruth) is in the British Museum. It was Tischen-dorf who disposed of the Oxford, London and Leningrad portions to their respective owners; but the tell-tale leaf which connected the uncial and minuscule portions was kept in his own possession till his death, when it was acquired by Cambridge University and identified by Dr. H. B. Swete and H. A. Redpath. The minuscule portion has the number 509 (a2 in the large Cambridge Septuagint).
F. Codex Ambrosianus, at Milan. Written in the fifth century, with three columns to the page, and having (what is very unusual in early manuscripts) punctuation, accents, and breathings by the original scribe. It contains Gen. xxxi. 15-Joshua xii. 12, with many losses, however, from mutilation, and small fragments of Isaiah and Malachi. Its evidence is valuable, and where A and B differ it generally agrees with A.
G. Codex Sarravianus: 130 leaves at Leyden, twenty-two at Paris, and one at Leningrad. A very fine manuscript, probably of the fifth century, though it has sometimes been attributed to the fourth. It is written with two columns to the page, and (like the Vatican and Sinaitic MSS. above) has no enlarged initials. It contains portions of the Pentateuch, Joshua and Judges, and its special characteristic is that it contains a Hexaplar text. It is provided with Origen's asterisks and obeli; but, unfortunately, as in all other MSS. of this class, these symbols have been very imperfectly reproduced, so that we cannot depend absolutely on it to recover the text as it was before Origen's additions and alterations. Plate XVI shows (in reduced form) the page containing Deut. xvi. 22-xvii. 8. Asterisks will be seen in the margins of both columns. That near the bottom of the first column indicates that words corresponding to "and thou hast heard of it" in xvii. 4 were not found in the original Greek of the Septuagint, but were inserted by Origen to make it correspond with the Hebrew. Similarly the asterisks in the second column show that in xvii. 5 the words "which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman" were not in the original Septuagint, but were inserted by Origen from the Hebrew. Both passages occur in our Authorized Version, which of course follows the Hebrew; but they are not in the best MSS. of the Septuagint, though A and F have the second passage, which is a sign that they have been affected by Hexaplaric influences.
H. Codex Petropolitanus, a palimpsest at Leningrad, of the sixth century; contains portions of the book of Numbers.
I. A Bodleian MS. of the Psalms (including, like A, the canticles) of the ninth century. It was wrongly included by Holmes and Parsons among the cursive MSS., and numbered 13. In its margin many readings are given from Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, and from the' fifth' and' seventh' versions (see p. 105).
K. Codex Lipsiensis. Twenty-two palimpsest leaves at Leipzig, of the seventh century, containing fragments of Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges.
L. The Vienna Genesis: a splendid MS. at Vienna, written in silver letters upon purple vellum, and adorned with illustrations, which, like those of D, recall the classical style of painting. It is of the fifth or sixth century, and contains portions of the book of Genesis on twenty-four leaves.
M. Codex Coislinianus, at Paris: a handsome MS. of the seventh century, containing the earlier books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to 3 Kingd. viii. 40, though mutilated in places. This MS. belongs to the same class as G, containing a Hexaplar text with the signs in the margin.
N—V. Codex Basiliano—Vaticanus, at Rome and Venice; written in sloping uncials of the eighth or ninth century. It consists of two volumes, both of which have, unfortunately, been much mutilated. In their present condition, the first (N, at Rome) contains from Lev. xiii. 59 to the end of Chronicles (with some lacunae), 1 Esdras i. i-ix. 1, 2 Esdras (i.e. the canonical Ezra-Nehemiah) v. 10-xvii. 3, and Esther; the second (V, at Venice) begins with Job xxx. 8, and contains the rest of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom, Ecclesiasdcus, Minor Prophets, Major Prophets, Tobit, Judith and the four books of the Maccabees. Until quite recently the two volumes were regarded as different MSS. In conjunction with B, V was used for the Roman edition of the Septuagint, published in 1587, which has been the edition in common use until the appearance of Swete's edition in 1887-94. The person who examined it for Holmes and Parsons omitted to tell the editors that it was written in uncials, and it consequently appears in their list among the cursives, with the number 23, while its first volume takes its proper place among the uncials. The text is Lucianic.
O. Codex Dublinensis Rescriptus, at Trinity College, Dublin. This is a palimpsest, like C, but consists of only eight leaves, containing portions of Isaiah, written early in the sixth century. Its special value is due to the fact that it was written in Egypt and apparently provides us with information as to the text of the edition by Hesychius, which circulated in that country.
P. Fragments of Psalms, at Emmanuel College, Cambridge; originally reckoned by Holmes and Parsons among the cursives, as No. 294, but subsequently placed among the uncials (No. IX).
Q,. Codex Marchalianus, in the Vatican Library at Rome. This is a most valuable copy of the Prophets, written in Egypt in the sixth century, in a fine bold uncial hand. The editor of this manuscript, Dr. Ceriani, believed that the text, as originally written, is that of Hesychius; and its value is still further increased by the fact that an almost contemporary hand has added a great number of various readings in the margin from a copy of the Hexaplar text. These marginal readings include the additions made by Origen, generally accompanied by the proper critical marks (the obelus or asterisk), together with readings from Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. Plate XVII gives a representation of a page of this manuscript (the whole of which has been published in a photographic facsimile) containing Ezek. v. 12-17. In the margin will be seen several asterisks, which are repeated in the line itself at the point at which the insertion begins (e.g. lines 6, 10) and before the beginning of each line of the passage affected, while the meto-belus, indicating the close of the inserted passage, is represented by a sort of semicolon (e.g. lines 2, 7). In most cases the name of the version from which the inserted passage was taken is indicated by an initial in the margin, α standing for Aquila (e.g. line 1), Θ for Theodotion (lines 6, 11, 15, 17, 22), and σ or συ for Symmachus. Where Hesychius has introduced words on his own account which were not in the original Septuagint, the asterisk indicating such words has been written by the original scribe, and has ample space allowed it in the writing; but the great majority of the critical signs have been added by the reviser, and show that the insertion had already been made by Origen in his Hexaplar text, which Hesychius often followed. The small writing in the margin consists of notes added in the thirteenth century, of no textual importance.
R. Verona Psalter, containing both Greek and Latin versions of the Psalms, written in the sixth century. Several canticles are added, as in A, and the 151st Psalm has been supplied by a later hand. The Greek is written in Latin letters.
T. Zurich Psalter, in its original state a splendid manuscript, written in silver letters with gold initials upon purple vellum. Several leaves are now missing. The canticles are included. Written in the seventh century, and often agrees with the readings of A, and even more with א c.a. Readings of the Gallican version are found in the margin.
U. See above, p. 114.
V. Codex Venetus; see N—V above.
W. Fragments of Psalms, at Paris, of the ninth century. Included by Holmes and Parsons among the cursives, as No. 43.
X. A MS. in the Vatican at Rome, containing most of Job, of the ninth century. Included by Holmes and Parsons among the cursives, as No. 258. Hexaplaric notes are frequent at the beginning.
Y. Codex Taurinensis, at Turin, of the ninth century, containing the Minor Prophets.
Za, Zb, Zc, Zd, Ze, are small fragments of various books, of slight importance.
Γ (Gamma, the third letter of the Greek alphabet, those of the Latin alphabet being now exhausted). Codex Cryptoferratensis, at Grotta Ferrata, in Italy; palimpsest fragments of the Prophets, written in the eighth or ninth century. Much of the original writing has been hopelessly obliterated. It is remarkable that most of the Greek manuscripts in the monastery of Grotta Ferrata are palimpsests, showing how scarce vellum was there, and how the literary activity of the monks caused them to use the same sheets twice over, and sometimes even thrice.
Δ (Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet). Fragments of Bel and the Dragon, according to the version of Theodotion, written in the fifth century, if not earlier; in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Θ (Theta, the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet). Codex Washingtonianus I, in the Freer Collection at Washington, containing the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua, of the sixth century. The quire-numeration shows that it originally included the previous books of the Pentateuch, and Judges and Ruth may have been appended. In text it agrees more with A than with B, and even more closely in Deuteronomy with G and Chester Beatty VI (963 above) and the minuscules 54 and 75. The manuscript was acquired in Egypt by Mr. C. L. Freer in 1906, together with 1219 and two New Testament MSS. (see below, pp. 214, 215).
Π (Pi, the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet). Fragments of 4 Maccabees, of the ninth century, at St. Petersburg.
1219. Codex Washingtonianus II, in the Freer Collection; 107 fragmentary leaves of a Psalter, of the sixth or seventh century. The last quire, from Ps. cxlii. 5 to cli. 6, is a later addition, of the ninth century. The earlier part of the codex is particularly incomplete. The text is akin to that of A.
The catalogue above given shows the material now available in the shape of uncial manuscripts. The most important of them are, no doubt, B, A and (where it is available) K, and, in their own special departments, G and Q.
The cursive manuscripts of the Septuagint are far too numerous to be described in detail. In the great edition of Holmes and Parsons no less than 278 such manuscripts are described, and their various readings quoted. It may be of some interest, however, as showing the amount of evidence available for each part of the Old Testament to indicate which manuscripts contain, in full or in part, each of the chief groups of books. The following sixty-four MSS. contain the Pentateuch, or part of it: Nos. 14-20, 25, 28-32, 37-8, 44-7, 52-9, 61, 64, 68, 71-9, 82-5, 105-8, 118, 120-2, 125-36, 246. Sixty-one contain the historical books: 15, 16, 18, 19, 29, 30, 38, 44, 46, 52-60, 63, 64, 68, 70-7, 82, 84, 85, 92, 93, 98, 106-8, 118-23, 125-8, 131, 134, 158, 209, 236, 241-9. The Psalms are preserved in no less than 121 copies-viz.: 21, 55, 65-7. 69, 80, 81, 99-102, 104, 106, ui-15, 124, 140-3, 145, 146, 150-2, 154, 155, 162-187, 189, 191-7, 199-206, 208, 210-19, 221-3, 225-7, 251, 263-75, 277-93. The Prophets appear, more or less perfectly, in sixty-two manuscripts-viz.: 22, 24, 26, 33-6, 40-2, 46, 48, 49, 51, 58, 62, 68, 70, 86-91, 93, 95-7, 104-6, 109, 114, 122, 131, 147-9, 153, 185, 198, 228-335, 238-40, 301-11. Finally there are thirty-nine manuscripts containing books of the Hagiographa: 55, 68, 70, 103, 106, 109, 110, 137-9, 147, 149, 155, 157, 159-61, 248-61, 295-300, 307a, 308a. This classification, it will be observed, applies only to MSS. in the Holmes and Parsons list; but it does not seem worth while to carry it further. The value of the cursives only appears when they can be divided into groups, showing common descent from one or other of the ancient editions of the Septuagint which have been described above. How far this is at present feasible will be shown presently.
Such are the manuscripts on which scholars must depend for elucidating the text of the Greek Old Testament. It will be useful to describe briefly what has been done in this direction, as showing the kind and the amount of labour which scholars have bestowed on the task of making the text of the Bible as accurate as possible in every point. The first printed edition of the Septuagint was made by the Spaniard Cardinal Ximenes, who combined the Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Bible in the four volumes known as the Complutensian Polyglot (dated 1514-17, but not actually issued until 1522). His Greek text was mainly based on two late MSS. in the Vatican, now known as 108 and 248, which were sent from Rome, together with other MSS. in Madrid. Meanwhile in 1518 the great printer Aldus had issued an edition based on MSS. then at Venice, which accordingly has the honour of being the first printed Septuagint in order of publication. But the most important edition in early times was the Roman, published under the patronage of Pope Sixtus in 1587. This edition rests mainly on the great Codex Vaticanus (B), though with many errors and divergences, and uses a considerable number of other MSS., including N-V; it remained the standard text of the Septuagint until the appearance of Swete's edition, mentioned below. In 1707-20 a very good edition of the Codex Alexandrinus (A), supplemented from other MSS. where A is deficient, was published by the Anglo-Prussian scholar Grabe. But the greatest work on the Septuagint up to quite recent years was that which R. Holmes and J. Parsons produced at Oxford in 1798-1827. In this colossal work the Roman text of 1587 is reprinted without variation, but in the critical notes are given the various readings of no less than 300 manuscripts, as above described. Unfortunately many of these MSS. were very imperfectly examined by the persons employed for the task by the editors, so that much of the work has had to be done over again; but the edition of Holmes and Parsons remains the only complete one which gives a general view of the manuscript evidence, and has been the basis of all study of the Septuagint text since their day. Of later editors it is only necessary to mention Tischendorf, who between 1850 and 1869 produced four editions based on the Roman text, with variants from K, A, C, and in part B (seventh edition in 1887, by Dr. Nestle); Field, who edited the remains of
the Hexapla in 1875 '> Lagarde, who in 1883 published an attempt to recover the edition of Lucian, besides many other valuable contributions to the criticism of the Septuagint; and Dr. Swete, of Cambridge, who in 1887-94 produced an edition giving the text of the Septuagint according to the best MS. extant in each part (B, wherever it is available, elsewhere K or A), with all the variants in three or four of the next best manuscripts. This was the first stage in a project envisaging eventual production of a full critical edition, which would replace Holmes and Parsons in the light of all the information accumulated since their day. The editorship of this larger Cambridge edition was entrusted to Dr. A. E. Brooke, Dr. N. McLean, and later H. St. John Thackeray, who since 1906 have produced nine parts, containing the Octateuch and the later historical books (1-4 Kingdoms, 1-2 Chronicles, 1-2 Esdras and Esther, Judith and Tobit). In this edition the text is in the main the same as that of Swete, but the critical apparatus includes the readings of all the papyri and uncials and a large selection of minuscules specially collated, together with all the principal versions and the quotations in the Fathers.
Another large critical edition was planned by the Septuaginta-Kommission of Gottingen, but has been seriously delayed by adverse conditions. The German scholars have wisely devoted their attention primarily to books which have not been reached by the Cambridge editors. The Psalter was published by Rahlfs in 1931, and 1 Maccabees by Kappler in 1936; since when have appeared Isaiah (1939), Minor Prophets (1943), Ezekiel (1952), and Susanna, Daniel, Bel and the Dragon (1954), Jeremiah (1957), all edited by Ziegler. Further, an edition of Genesis, on a reduced scale, was published in 1926; and in 1935 Rahlfs produced a handy edition of the whole Septuagint in two volumes, with a revised text based upon s AB and a short apparatus with variants from these and a few other MSS. As compared with the smaller Cambridge edition, this gives a reconstructed text (instead of merely reprinting the text of a selected MS., right or wrong), but a smaller critical apparatus.
Much has thus been accomplished, yet the work that remains to be done in connexion with the text of the Septuagint is still very considerable. One line of attack, which has much engaged scholars in Germany, is the attempt to disentangle the early recensions of the Septuagint and then, by reconstructing the pre-Hexaplaric text, to push back farther still to the original text. It was with this hope that the great German scholar Lagarde as a first step published in 1883 his edition of the Lucianic text as far as Esther. But it was not successful, since it became clear that the manuscripts which he regarded as Lucianic were only partly so; and although this method has been carried on by Lagarde's pupil Rahlfs and others, the result does not seem to justify the immense amount of labour that has been bestowed upon it. Indeed, if Kahle is right, the method is doomed to failure, since even if it were possible to crystallize out the recensions of Origen and his successors, behind them we should find not the 'original text' of the Septuagint, or anything approaching it, but only another prospect of varying textual forms derived from the indiscriminate revision and mixture of the early Greek versions. But although it is impossible-or at any rate an excessively complicated and laborious business-to produce definitive editions of Origen or Lucian or Hesychius, it is possible to find manuscripts with characteristics of one or other of these recensions and to group them accordingly, if sometimes rather tentatively. In this we are helped by the evidence afforded by quotations in the writings of the early Fathers whose places of residence we know, from which it is possible to localize the varieties of text and say that one group represent the Antiochian edition of Lucian, and another the Alexandrian edition of Hesychius.
1. Eusebius. The most recognizable of the three editions is that of Eusebius and Pamphilus, which in fact reproduced the text fixed by Origen. For this the leading authorities are the Syriac translation by Bishop Paul of Telia, which contains the Prophets and Hagiographa, with Origen's apparatus of asterisks and obeli; the Codex Sarravianus (G), containing large parts of the Pentateuch, Joshua and Judges; the Codex Coislinianus (M), containing the same books, together with those of Samuel and Kings; the cursive MSS. 54 and (except in Genesis) 75 in the Octateuch, and 86 and 88 in the Prophets; and the copious marginal notes in the Codex Marchalianus (Q), which give Hexaplar readings with an indication of the author (Aquila, Symmachus or Theodotion) from whom they were taken.
2. Hesychius. The edition of Hesychius and its identification is still involved in some uncertainty. As the edition which circulated in Egypt, it seems likely that it would be found in MSS. written in that country, in the Coptic versions, which were made from the Septuagint for the use of the native Egyptians, and in the writings of the Alexandrian Fathers, such as Cyril. Good authorities differ, however, as to the Greek manuscripts in which this edition is to be looked for. Ceriani assigned to it the Codex Alexandrinus (A), the original text of the Codex Marchalianus (Q), the Dublin fragments of Isaiah (O), and the cursives 26, 106, 198, 306 (all of the Prophets). The German professor, Cornill, however, also dealing with MSS. containing the Prophets, found the Hesychian version in 49, 68, 87, 90 (Ezekiel only), 91, 228, 238, with the Coptic, Ethiopic, Arabic, and Old Latin versions. These are akin to the above-mentioned group represented by A, 26, etc., but have (in his opinion) more of the appearance of an authorized edition, in which marked peculiarides of text, such as there are in A, are not to be expected. The question cannot be solved without further investigation, to which it may be hoped that the large Cambridge edition will considerably contribute.
3. Lucian. Next to the Hexaplaric edition of Eusebius the most recognizable is that of Lucian. Certain direct references to it in early writers, and the statement that it was the standard text in Antioch and Constantinople, have disposed modern editors to recognize it in certain extant manuscripts and in the copious Biblical quotations of Chrysostom and Theodoret. The first suggestion to this effect seems to have been made by Dr. Ceriani, of Milan, and it was simultaneously worked out by Field, in the Prolegomena to his Hexapla, and by Lagarde, who produced a text of half the Old Testament (Genesis-Esther) according to this edition, the completion of it being prevented by his lamented death. No uncial MS. contains a Lucianic text, with the exception of the Codex Venetus (N—V). In the books Genesis-Judges it appears in the cursives 19, 108, 118; in the historical books, 19, 82, 93, 108, 118; in the Prophets, 22, 36, 48, 51, 62, 93, 144, 231, 308. The text of the Hagiographa has not yet been investigated. A Lucianic text also appears in the Old Latin, Gothic and old Slavonic versions, and in the first printed edition of the Septuagint-the Complutensian, which was mainly taken from the MS. known as 108.
It will be observed that only a comparatively small number of manuscripts can be definitely assigned to one or other of the ancient editions, and even as to these it has to be remembered that any manuscript may have texts of different character in different books. All manuscripts eventually go back to a period when each book was contained in a separate roll or rolls; and when they were combined into single codices, there could be no guarantee that all the rolls copied into a single codex were of the same textual type. Thus 75, which is Origenian in Deuteronomy, is said to be Lucianic in Genesis; and the papyrus 963 has quite different textual affinities in Numbers and Deuteronomy.
The majority of the minuscules are later copies containing mixed and corrupt texts, which will be of little use towards the recovery of the original form of the Septuagint. There remain, however, some of the early uncial manuscripts, including the oldest of all, the great Codex Vaticanus (B). Cornill at one time suggested that B was based on the edition of Eusebius, with the omission of all the passages therein marked by asterisks as insertions from the Hebrew; but this view has been abandoned, and it is more probable (as stated by Dr. Hort) that it is akin to the manuscripts which Origen used as the foundation of his Hexapla. Origen would, no doubt, have taken as his basis of operations the best copies of the Septuagint then available; and if B is found to contain a text like that used by Origen, it is a strong testimony in its favour. Hence it is commonly held to be, on the whole, the best and most neutral of all the manuscripts of the Septuagint; and it is a happy accident that it has formed the foundation of the commonly received text-that, namely, of the Roman edition of 1587. It is becoming clear, however, that the character of B is not uniform throughout (see above, p. 121). Between B and A the differences of reading are sometimes very strongly marked, and the divergences have not yet by any means been explained. All conclusions are at present tentative and provisional, and the best scholars are the least positive as to the certainty of their results. Of the other great manuscripts, א seems to contain a text intermediate between A and B, though in the book of Tobit it has a form of the text completely different from both. In the Psalms the seventh-century corrector is said to have done his work on the basis of a Lucianic text. Ceriani considers that s shows some traces of Hesychian influence. He makes the same claim for C; but of this the fragments are so scanty that it is difficult to arrive at any positive conclusion.
But although many points of detail still remain obscure, we yet know quite enough about the Septuagint to be able to state broadly the relation in which it stands to the Massoretic Hebrew text. And here it is that the great interest and importance of the Septuagint becomes evident. Rightly or wrongly, it is certain that the Septuagint differs from the Massoretic text to a very marked extent. Words and phrases constantly differ; details which depend upon figures and numbers, such as the ages of the patriarchs in the early chapters of Genesis, show great discrepancies; whole verses, and even longer passages, appear in the one text and not in the other; the arrangement of the contents of several books varies very largely. The discrepancies are least in the Pentateuch, the words of which were no doubt held most sacred by all Jews, and so would be less likely to suffer change either in the Hebrew or in the Greek. But in the books of Kingdoms, the Septuagint departs frequently from the Massoretic text; the student of the Variorum Bible may be referred for examples to i Kingd. iv. i; v. 6; x. 1; xiii. i, 15; xiv. 24, 41; xv. 13; 2 Kingd. iv. 6-7; xi. 23; xvii. 3; xx. 18, 19; 3 Kingd. ii. 29; viii. 1; xii. 2, 3, 4-24. In the narrative of David and Goliath the variations are especially striking; for the best MSS. of the Septuagint omit 1 Kingd. xvii. 12-31, 41, 50, 55-8, together with xviii. 1-5, 9-11, 17-19, and the rest of the references to Merab. In the book of Job the original text of the Septuagint omitted nearly one-sixth of the whole (see p. 137). In Jeremiah the order of the prophecies differs greatly, chapters xlvi.-li. being inserted (in a different order) after chapter xxv. 13, while the following passages are altogether omitted: x. 6-8, 10; xvii. 1-4; xxvii. 1, 7, 13, and a great part of 17-22 ; xxix. 16-20; xxxiii. 14-26; xxxix. 4-13. Even if we reduce the number of minor variations as much as possible (and very many of them may be due to mistakes on the part of the Septuagint translators, to different methods of supplying the vowels in the Hebrew text, to different divisions of the words of the Hebrew, or to a freedom of translation which amounts to paraphrase), yet these larger discrepancies, the list of which the reader of the Variorum Bible may easily increase for himself, are sufficient to show that the Hebrew text which lay before the authors of the Septuagint differed very considerably from that which the Massoretes have handed down to us. What the explanation of this difference may be, or which of the two texts is generally to be preferred, are questions to which it would be rash, in the present state of our knowledge, to pretend to give a decided answer. Some statement of the case is, however, necessary for those who wish to understand what the evidence for our present Old Testament text really is; but it will be better to postpone the discussion of it until we have completed the list of the versions from which some light upon the question may be expected. Some of them help us to reconstruct the text of the Septuagint; others tell us of the condition of the Hebrew text at dates later than those at which the Greek versions were made; all in some degree help forward our main purpose-the history of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament.
| Syriac | Coptic | Ethiopic |
Syriac was the language of Syria and Mesopotamia, sometimes called East Aramaic to distinguish it from the closely related West Aramaic which was spoken in Palestine in the time of our Lord's life on earth. In the case of the New Testament, as we shall see, several translations into Syriac were made; but of the Old Testament there was (apart from Paul of Telia's version of Origen's Hexaplar text mentioned above, p. 107, and some other late translations from the Septuagint of which only fragments remain) only one, and that the one which is and always has been the version of the Syriac Churches. It is known as the Peshitta, or 'simple' version, but whether this was to distinguish it from Paul of Telia's with its apparatus of signs and variant readings is uncertain. The origins of the Peshitta Old Testament have also not been satisfactorily cleared up, since some of the evidence indicates that it was the work of Christians, some that of Jewish translators. Thus although in many cases the text agrees with the Hebrew, and, what is more remarkable, with the Palestinian Targum, there are other passages which seem to presuppose the Septuagint.
The Pentateuch was the first part of the Old Testament to be translated, and the relation to the Hebrew and the Targum has been accounted for in various ways: that it was the work of Jewish Christians; that the Christian translators employed Jewish Targums; or that the Syrian Christians commissioned Jewish scholars to do the work for them. But the view has been gaining ground that the Syriac Pentateuch, if not the rest of the Old Testament, was made by Jews for a Jewish community. It would be natural to think of Edessa as the headquarters of the translation, but Kahle has suggested the little kingdom of Adia-bene, east of the River Tigris, whose royal house was converted to Judaism about a.d. 40. Here the need for a version of the Jewish Law was met, if not by an adaptation into East Aramaic of the Palestinian West Aramaic Targum, at any rate by drawing heavily on its help. As for the rest of the books of the Old Testament, they show very considerable variety both of style and method, and are clearly the work of different hands at different times. Thus Proverbs is close to the Targum, as is Ezekiel; Isaiah and the Minor Prophets are somewhat freely translated, while Ruth is a paraphrase and Job and the Song of Songs are very literally rendered.
The Peshitta version originally omitted the books of the Apocrypha, which were added from the Greek, and the Syriac version is often useful in correcting errors which have found their way into the Septuagint text-except in the case of Ecclesiasticus, which was translated from the Hebrew and then revised from the Greek. The Peshitta was also originally without Chronicles, which was supplied from a Jewish Targum. At a later date the whole version was revised by comparison with the Septuagint, but here again the work is very uneven: Genesis, Psalms and the Prophetic books showing most evidence, and others like Job and Proverbs scarcely any. Hence the value of the Peshitta for the textual critic is variable also. Later still another Syriac translation of the Old and New Testaments was made by Philoxenus of Mabug at the beginning of the sixth century a.d. from the Septuagint, and the version of Paul of Telia early in the seventh century from the Hexapla has already been mentioned (see p. 107). Neither had any great influence in the Syrian churches, and of the Philoxenian Old Testament little survives. More important for the history of the Peshitta was the effect of the Nestorian heresy, which rent the Syrian Church, and caused the Nestorians to move eastwards into Persia. They were active missionaries, and from their headquarters at Nisibis penetrated into China, as well as into India, where in the Church of St. Thomas the Syriac Bible and liturgy continued in use down to recent times. The ecclesiastical as well as geographical isolation of the Nestorian Church preserved its Bible from further revisions, and consequently Eastern MSS. are regarded as having a better text.
A considerable number of Peshitta manuscripts are known, most of them forming part of a splendid collection of Syriac manuscripts which were secured for the British Museum in 1842 from the monastery at St. Mary Deipara, situated in the Nitrian Desert in Egypt. Among these is one dated in the year a.d. 464, which has the distinction of being the oldest copy of the Bible in any language of which the exact date is known. We thus have direct evidence of the text of this version in the fifth century, and in the century before that we find copious quotations from it in the writings of two Syrian Fathers Ephraem (d. a.d. 373) and Aphraates (middle of the fourth century). Unfortunately no good printed edition of the text has yet appeared. The first, that of Gabriel Sionita, was prepared for the Paris Polyglot of 1645, but was made on the basis of a very inferior manuscript; it was reproduced (with further errors) in Walton's Polyglot. Subsequent editions have not been much better, apart from W. E. Barnes's Psalter according to the West Syriac text.
Coptic is the language which was used by the natives of Egypt at the time when the Bible was first translated for their use. It is indeed a modified form of the language which had been spoken in the country from time immemorial; but about the end of the first century after Christ it began, owing to the influence of the great number of Greeks settled in Egypt, to be written in Greek characters, with six additional letters, and with a considerable admixture of Greek words. It is to this form of the language that the name of Coptic was given, and it continues to the present day to be used in the services of the Christian Church in Egypt. There were, however, differences in the dialects spoken in different parts of the country, and consequently more than one translation of the Scriptures was required. The number of these dialects is still a matter of uncertainty, for the papyri discovered in Egypt of late years have been, and still are, adding considerably to our knowledge of them; but it appears that four or five different versions of the New Testament have been identified, and four of the Old. Two of these stand out as of real importance, the others being mere fragments.
The Coptic versions of the Bible are more important for the New Testament than for the Old, and it will consequently be convenient to treat of them at greater length in the chapter dealing with the versions of the New Testament. In the Old Testament they were made from the Septuagint, and consequently their evidence is mainly valuable for the purpose of restoring the Greek text, and only indirectly for the Hebrew text which lies behind the Greek. For the student of the Septuagint, however, they should be of considerable service.
Much will depend on the date at which we may suppose the native Church to have been founded, but it was certainly in existence by the second half of the third century, and some would take it back into the second. The two most important of the Coptic versions are: (a) the Sahidic or Thebaic version, current in Upper or southern Egypt, which is the oldest, and (b) the Bohairic, current in Lower or northern Egypt which eventually became the Bible of the whole Coptic Church, and is the most complete. The Sahidic exists in very considerable fragments, which have been much increased by recent discoveries. The British Museum alone has acquired a complete MS. of Deuteronomy and Jonah (with Acts) of the fourth century (edited by Wallis Budge, 1912, revised by Thompson, 1913), a seventh-century palimpsest of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Judith and Esther (edited by Sir Herbert Thompson, 1911), sixty-two leaves of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, of the same date (also edited by Thompson, 1908), and a complete Psalter, also of the seventh century (edited by Budge, 1898). An incomplete manuscript of the Psalter of about a.d. 100 at Berlin has been edited by Rahlfs (1901), and another of the sixth century in the Freer Library by W. N. Worrall (1916, 1923), who has also edited the Sahidic Proverbs (1931). Mr. Pierpont Morgan has MSS. of 1 and 2 Kingdoms, Leviticus-Deuteronomy, and Isaiah; and there are other valuable fragments elsewhere. One portion of the Sahidic version is of especial interest, for copies of the book of Job in this version have been discovered which are shorter than the received text by about one-sixth, omitting in all some 376 verses. Some scholars have thought that this represents the original form of the Hebrew, and that the passages omitted were later Jewish insertions into the book. But since the pre-Hexaplaric Greek text was also a short text, and was filled out by Origen from Theodotion, it is more likely that the Sahidic version is related to the older form of the Greek text, or that some of the material marked by Origen with an asterisk was omitted by the Coptic translators. Indeed the Sahidic Old Testament seems to have been at first free from Hexaplar additions, but to have been subsequently revised from MSS. containing these additions, presumably copies of the Hesychian text which was current in Egypt. The Sahidic version was probably made about the middle of the third century, the Bohairic somewhat later. Of the other versions in Middle Egyptian, Memphitic (a name formerly given to Bohairic) and Akhmimic, only fragments have been discovered.
With the versions of Egypt may naturally go the version of Ethiopia; but it will require only a brief notice. The Ethiopic manuscripts (many of which were acquired by the British Museum at the time of the Abyssinian War in 1867) are of very late date, the oldest being of the thirteenth century. Christianity probably reached Abyssinia in the fifth century, but whether from Syria or Egypt is not clear. The version was, for the most part at any rate, made from the Greek, and the frequent agreements with the Hebrew are probably best explained as being due to the Hexaplaric Septuagint, or perhaps to the influence of Aramaic-speaking missionaries from Syria. Scholars have variously dated it fourth to fifth centuries (Dillmann), fifth to sixth (Guido), or before the seventh (Charles). It is likely too that the translations of the various books were made at different times during two centuries or more. The fact is that at present not a great deal is known about the version, and it has even been questioned whether the extant manuscripts really represent this translation, or a much later one, made in the fourteenth century from the Arabic or Coptic. Both Old and New Testaments are preserved entire, and critical editions of most of the books published. One special feature of the Ethiopic Old Testament deserves to be noticed. For while it lacks 1 to 4 Maccabees as well as Ezra and Nehemiah, it includes besides the ordinary books contained in the Septuagint two apocryphal books which have no place in either our Old Testament or our Apocrypha-namely, the book of Jubilees and the book of Enoch. The latter book is of special interest, from its having been quoted in the Epistle of Jude; but it was wholly lost, except for some extracts in Syncellus, until James Bruce brought back some manuscripts of it from Abyssinia in 1773, from one of which it was edited by Archbishop Laurence in 1821. The original Greek remained unknown until 1886, when a little vellum volume was discovered at Akhmim in Egypt, containing the first thirty-six chapters, along with portions of the Gospel and Apocalypse of Peter. Still more recently, the last eleven chapters have been recovered from one of the papyri in Mr. Chester Beatty's collection. A new edition of the Ethiopic Bible, with the modern Amharic text in parallel columns, has been produced by the native Abyssinian Church; but this is not a critical edition.
The remaining Oriental versions may be dismissed in a few words. A few fragments remain of the Gothic version, made for the Goths in the fourth century by their bishop, Ulfilas, while they were still settled in Moesia, the modern Serbia and Bulgaria. Its chief interest lies in the fact that it was taken from a copy of the Lucianic edition of the Septuagint.
The Armenian, Arabic, Georgian and Slavonic versions were all made from the Septuagint, but they have been little studied.
Old Latin | The Vulgate | Jerome | - his Psalters | - his OT | Reception of his Version | Its Character
When Christianity reached Rome the Church which was founded there was more Greek than Latin. St. Paul wrote to it in Greek, the names of its members, so far as we know them, are Greek, and its earliest bishops were Greek: one of them, Clement, wrote an epistle to the Corinthians in Greek (c. a.d. 96) which is found along with the books of the New Testament in one of the earliest Greek Bibles, the Codex Alexandrinus. The first Roman author who is said to have written theological treatises in Latin is Pope Victor (c. a.d. 190). On the other hand it would be a mistake to assume that conditions in Rome, with its cosmopolitan population, applied equally to the rest of Italy, especially the countryside. Once Christianity pushed out from the metropolis, if not before, the need for a Latin vernacular translation would make itself felt. In the Roman province of Africa, which comprised the habitable parts of that continent lying along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the language of Church and State alike was exclusively Latin. It is in Africa that the earliest evidence for the Latin Bible is to be found.
The importance of the Old Latin version (or Vetus Itala) as it is called to distinguish it from the later versions of St. Jerome, is much greater in the New Testament than the Old. In the former it is one of the earliest translations of the original Greek which we possess, and is an important witness for the state of the text in the second century. In the latter it is only the version of a version, being made from the Septuagint, not from the original Hebrew. Historically, moreover, it is of small importance, for it was almost entirely superseded by Jerome's Vulgate, and it exists today only in fragments. No entire manuscript survives of the Old Testament in this version; a few books only, and those chiefly of the Apocrypha, exist complete. For the rest we are indebted for most of our knowledge of this version to the quotations of the early Latin Fathers. Nevertheless, in the oldest form it represents the Septuagint text before Origen's revision, and its value for the reconstruction of the pre-Hexaplaric text, and from this to the pre-Massoretic Hebrew, cannot be minimized. The material, both manuscript and patristic, was collected by the Benedictine P. Sabatier and published at Rheims in three folio volumes in 1743-9, and again at Paris in 1751. Since then further evidence has accumulated and better patristic texts are available, and a new edition of Sabatier has been begun by the Benedictine Fathers of Beuron in Germany on an enormous scale. So far only Genesis in the Old Testament has appeared (1951-4). A convenient presentation of the Old Latin evidence is at present in preparation in this country, under the auspices of the British and Foreign Bible Society, by A. V. Billen, H. F. D. Sparks and A. W. Adams, and it is hoped that this too will shortly begin to appear.
As has been said, the Old Latin version is first known in Africa, and is quoted by Tertullian (d. c. 220) who certainly had a partial if not complete Latin Bible. Our best authority, however, is Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (d. c. 258), who quotes copiously and accurately from all parts of both Old and New Testaments, and thus gives us both locality and date for his type of text. Whether the first translation was made in Africa it is impossible to say, for want of positive evidence; but the view is commonly held, and is at least probable. What is an even more difficult question is whether in the Old Latin we have to do with one or a plurality of versions. St. Augustine, at about the time when Jerome was translating the Vulgate, took the latter view, and the many and striking variations in the text make it quite possible. Indeed it has been suggested that in the earliest stages translations made by Jews in Africa (on the lines of the Aramaic and Greek Targums) may have been used by Christians in view of some unusual agreements with the Hebrew. But it is equally possible that the variants are due to frequent and localized revision from the Greek in what was essentially a popular and, at first, a decidedly 'unliterary' text. What is quite clear is that this version was not made all at one time, but as was the case with the Greek, haphazardly and according to local and other needs, with such books as Isaiah and the Psalms first and the less-used books later. That different translators were at work can be demonstrated by the way in which the same Greek words are rendered differently, and consistently so, in different parts of the Bible.
It is usual to distinguish two main families or recensions of the Old Latin text, the African and the European, but the former is not restricted to that continent, since Spain derived its text partly if not wholly from Africa. Indeed it has been said that "the history of the African translation is its Europeanization". Unfortunately the version is available only to a limited extent. The apocryphal books of Esdras, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees, together with the additions to Daniel and Esther, were not translated or revised by Jerome, and consequently the Old Latin versions of these books were incorporated in the later Latin Bible and remain there to this day. The Psalter survives in a very slightly altered form, as explained below; but the historical and prophetical books have disappeared almost completely. The Octateuch is in better case. Codex Vindobonensis 17, a palimpsest manuscript now at Naples, contains fragments of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, as well as portions of Samuel and Kings. There has long been a fine manuscript of the fifth century at Lyons, containing portions of Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus, the whole of Numbers, and the first ten chapters of Deuteronomy. To this M. Delisle, Director of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, was able to add in 1895 the rest of Deuteronomy, the whole of Joshua, and Judges as far as xi. 21. Probably Ruth was originally included, so that the whole MS. would have been an Octateuch. Ruth has come down in another MS. at Madrid; and Esther, Judith and Tobit are also preserved in that MS. and in others. For the rest we are dependent on a few fragments and quotations in the Fathers.
It is very different when we come to the great work of St. Jerome, which, in the main, continues to be the Bible of the Roman Church to this day. Its origin is known to us from the letters and prefaces of its author; its evidence is preserved to us in hundreds and even thousands of manuscripts of all ages from the fourth century to the fifteenth. Its historical importance is enormous, especially for the Churches of Western Europe; for, as we shall see in the progress of our story, it was the Bible of these Churches, including our own Church of England, until the time of the Reformation. We shall have to trace its history in the later chapters of this book; for the present we are concerned with the story of its birth.
By the end of the fourth century the imperfections of the Old Latin version had become evident to the leaders of the Roman Church. Not only was the translation taken from the Greek of the Septuagint, instead of the original Hebrew, but the current copies of it were grossly disfigured by corruptions. The inevitable mistakes of copyists, the omissions and interpolations of accident or design, the freedom with which early translators handled the text of their original, the alterations of revisers, and the different states of the African and European forms of the version, all contributed to produce a state of confusion and distortion intolerable to an educated churchman.
Hence about the year 382 Pope Damasus appealed to the most capable Biblical scholar then living, Eusebius Hieronymus, whom we know better under the abbreviated form of his name, Jerome, to undertake a revision of the Latin Bible. Jerome was born in 346, a native of Stridon in Pannonia, not far from the modern Trieste. Throughout his life he was devoted to Biblical studies. In 374 he set himself to learn Hebrew, then a very rare accomplishment in the West, taking as his teacher a converted Jew. His first Biblical undertaking, however, was not connected with his Hebrew studies. The existing Latin Bible was a translation from the Greek throughout, in the Old Testament as well as in the New, and all that Pope Damasus now invited Jerome to do was to revise this translation with reference to the Greek. He began with the Gospels, of which we shall have to speak later; but about the same time he also made his first revision of the Psalter.
He produced eventually no less than three versions of the Psalms, all of which are still extant. The first was this very slight revision of the Old Latin version, with reference to the Septuagint, and is known as the Roman Psalter; it was officially adopted by Pope Damasus, and still remains in use in the cathedral of St. Peter at Rome. The second, made between 387 and 390 in Bethlehem, was a more thorough revision, still with reference to the Septuagint; but Jerome attempted to bring it into closer conformity with the Hebrew by using Origen's Hexaplar text and reproducing his asterisks and obeli; this version was first adopted in Gaul, whence it is known as the Gallican Psalter, and it has held its place as the Psalter in general use in the Roman Church and in the Roman Bible from that day to this, in spite of the superior accuracy of the third version which Jerome subsequently published. This is known as the Hebrew Psalter, being an entirely fresh translation from the original Hebrew. It is found in a fair number of manuscripts of the Vulgate, often in parallel columns with the Gallican version, but it never attained to general usage or popularity.
About the time when Jerome produced his Gallican Psalter, he also revised some of the other books of the Old Testament, such as Job (which alone now survives in this form), with reference to the Hexaplar text; but it would appear that this undertaking was not carried to completion. It is probable that Jerome, as his knowledge of Hebrew increased, grew dissatisfied with the task of merely revising the Old Latin translation with reference to a text which itself was only a translation. He had completed the revision of the New Testament on these lines; but with the Old Testament he resolved to take in hand an altogether new translation from the Hebrew. He appears to have felt no doubt as to the superiority of the Hebrew text over the Greek, and in all cases of divergence regarded the Hebrew as alone correct. This great work occupied him from about the year 390 to 404; and separate books or groups of books were published as they were completed. The first to appear were the books of Samuel and Kings, next the Prophets, then Ezra, Nehemiah and Genesis, then (after an interval) the books of Solomon, and finally the rest of the Octateuch and Esther.
In the prefatory letters prefixed to these books, Jerome tells us much of his work and its reception. In spite of much individual support which he received, the general attitude towards it was one of great hostility. The sweeping nature of the changes introduced, the marked difference in the text translated, alienated those who had been brought up to know and to love the old version, and who could not understand the critical reasons for the alteration. Jerome felt this opposition keenly, and raged against what he regarded as its unreasonableness; and his sensitiveness, not to say irritability, finds vigorous expression in his prefaces. We who have seen the introduction of a Revised Bible in our own country, intended to supersede the version to which England has been devotedly attached for centuries, can understand the difficulties which surrounded the work of Jerome. Gradually, as we shall see in a later chapter, the superior accuracy and scholarship of his version gave it the victory, though not in a perfect or complete form. The Gallican Psalter continued to hold its own, and was never replaced by the version from the Hebrew. The apocryphal books he wished to reject entirely, because they found no place in the current Hebrew Bible. He did indeed consent reluctantly to make a very hurried translation of the books of Judith and Tobit; but the remaining books he left untouched. In spite of this, they continued to find a place in the Latin Bible; and the Vulgate, as finally adopted by the Roman Church, contains these books in the form in which they had stood, before the days of Jerome, in the Old Latin version. In the rest of the Old Testament, Jerome's version ultimately superseded the Old Latin, and in the New Testament his revision of the Old Latin held its ground. To this composite Bible, consisting partly of unrevised translations from the Greek, partly of revised translations from the same, and partly of translations from the Hebrew, was given in later days, when it had been generally accepted in Western Europe, the name of the 'Vulgate', or commonly received translation; and of this, the Bible of our own country until the Reformation, and of the Roman Church until today, we shall have much to say hereafter as we trace its history through the centuries. We shall also reserve for later chapters an account of the chief manuscripts in which it is now preserved. In the present chapter we have to do with it only as it affords evidence which may help us to recover the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament.
In this respect its importance is not to be compared with that of the Septuagint. The Hebrew text accessible to Jerome was practically identical with that which is accessible to ourselves; for although the Massoretes themselves are later in date than Jerome by several centuries, yet, as we have seen, the text which they stereotyped had come down practically unchanged since the beginning of the second century after Christ. Hence the version of Jerome is of little help to us in our attempt to recover the Hebrew text as it existed in the centuries before the Christian era; on the other hand, if the Massoretic text is in itself superior to the Greek version as a whole, then the Vulgate is a more satisfactory national Bible than the Septuagint. The translation itself is of unequal merit; some parts are free to the verge of paraphrase, others are so literal as to be nearly unintelligible; but on the whole the work is one of very great merit, and justifies the commanding position which Jerome holds among the Fathers of the Roman Church. Jerome was indeed for the West what Origen was for the East-the greatest Biblical scholar which the Church produced before the revival of learning at the end of the Middle Ages.
| Most Versions too late to Help | Evidence of the Samaritan Pentateuch | LXX v Massoretic | Hebrew Text sure to be corrupt | - certainly in some places | LXX not always Trustworthy | LXX Additions | Ecclesiasticus- Hebrew Text | Minor Corruptions | Deliberate Falsification of Hebrew not Proven | Summing-up |
The Vulgate is the last of the versions of the Old Testament which need be mentioned here; and now we come back to the question with which we ended the preceding chapter. What light, after all, do these versions throw on the text of the Old Testament? Do they help us to get behind the Massoretic text and see what the words of the Scriptures were when they were first written down? And, if so, does this earlier evidence confirm the accuracy of the Massoretic text, or does it throw doubt upon it? With the answer to this question we can close our examination of the Old Testament text.
A diagram may serve to summarize, in broad outline, the information which has been given above.
In the first place it will be clear that some of the versions we have described must be excluded on the ground that they are not translations of the Hebrew at all. Thus the Coptic, Ethiopic, Gothic, Armenian, Arabic, Georgian, Slavonic and Old Latin versions were made from the Greek of the Septuagint; and they can only indirectly help us to recover the original Hebrew. Their value is that they help us to restore the original text of the Septuagint; and from the Septuagint we may get on to the Hebrew. In the next place, the Peshitta Syriac and the Latin Vulgate, though translated from the Hebrew, were translated at a time when the Hebrew text was practically fixed in the form in which we now have it. The Peshitta Pentateuch may be as early as the first century, but the rest of the Old Testament is later-second, perhaps some of it third century, while the Vulgate comes at the end of the fourth; but we have already seen that we can trace back the Massoretic text to about the beginning of the second century. In some cases, when the Hebrew has been corrupted at a comparatively late date, these versions may show us the mistake; but their main value arises from the fact that, at the time when they were made, the Hebrew vowel-points were not yet written down, but were supplied in reading the Scriptures according to the tradition current among the Jews. Hence the Peshitta and the Vulgate show us in what way the absent vowels were supplied at a date very much earlier than any of our existing manuscripts. The same is the case with the Greek versions of Aquila, Theodotion and Symmachus. They were made from the Hebrew, but from a Hebrew text too late to be of much service to us in our present inquiry.
There remain the Samaritan and the Septuagint versions. Of these the Samaritan is the oldest; and as it is not really a translation into a different language, but a direct descendant of the original Scriptures in the same language and written in the same characters, its evidence might be expected to be of exceptional value. Unfortunately, however, it relates only to the Pentateuch; and we have seen (p. 97) that it is exactly here that help is least required. With the Septuagint it is quite otherwise. It contains all the books of the Old Testament, including those which the Jews finally refused to accept as inspired; and its variadons are, in many of the books, both numerous and important. The real question to be debated, then, is this: Does the Septuagint or the Massoretic text represent most accurately the words and form of the Old Testament Scriptures as they were originally written?
So far as the weight of authority goes, the preponderance is decidedly in favour of the Hebrew. Origen and Jerome, the two greatest Biblical scholars of antiquity, deliberately abandoned the original Septuagint and its descendants, the translations made from it, in order to produce versions which should correspond as nearly as possible with the Hebrew. So, too, in the modern world, all the translators of the Bible whose scholarship was equal to it went to the Hebrew for their text of the Old Testament, while those who could not read Hebrew fell back upon the Vulgate, which was itself translated from the Hebrew. Our own Authorized and Revised Bibles, as well as nearly all the translations which preceded them, rest almost entirely upon the Massoretic text, and only very rarely follow the versions in preference to it. And this is very natural; for the Old Testament books were written in Hebrew, and it seems reasonable to suppose that they would be best represented in the Hebrew manuscripts. In the case of no other book in the world should we look to a translation rather than to copies in the original language for the best representation of the contents of a work. Since the last century, however, there have been scholars who have maintained that the Septuagint, the origin of which goes back to a date far earlier than that to which the Massoretic text can be traced, comes nearer to the original Hebrew than do the Hebrew manuscripts of the Massoretic family. It would be absurd to attempt to decide the point authoritatively in such a work as this; but the conditions of the problem can be stated, and the apparent course of the controversy indicated in brief.
In the first place it is only natural that the Hebrew text should have suffered considerable corruption. If we take the year 100 after Christ as representing the date to which we can trace back the existence of the Massoretic text, there is still a gap of many centuries before we reach the dates at which most of the books were composed. Nearly a thousand years separate us from the earliest of the prophets, and even if we accept the latest date which modern criticism assigns to the composition of the Pentateuch in its present form, there are still more than five hundred years to be accounted for. And if, on the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we push back the Massoretic text another hundred or hundred and fifty years, the situation is not vastly different. It would be contrary to reason to suppose that the text had been handed down through all these centuries without suffering damage from the errors of scribes, the alterations of correctors, or the revision of editors, especially when we remember that in the course of that period the whole style of writing had been changed by the introduction of the square Hebrew characters, that the words were not divided from one another, and that the vowels were not yet indicated by any marks. It is thus natural in itself that the Hebrew text as we have it now should need some correction. It is also natural that the Septuagint version, which we can trace back to an origin more than 300 years earlier than the Massoretic text, should in some cases enable us to supply the needed correction. The text of the Septuagint may itself have suffered much corruption between the time of its composition and the time to which our direct knowledge of it goes back; but it is contrary to reason to suppose that it has always been corrupted in those places where the Hebrew has been corrupted, and that it does not sometimes preserve the right reading where the Hebrew is wrong.
A partial confirmation of this conclusion is provided by the Targums, the earliest portions of which go back a century or more before the formation of the Massoretic text. In these there are indications that the text on which they are based, though very like the Massoretic text, was not identical with it. We can, however, go farther, and show that there is a much larger number of passages in which corruption has almost certainly taken place between the date at which the Septuagint was written and that at which the Massoretic text was formed. It would need an entire treatise to do this thoroughly, but the reader of the Variorum Bible will find a considerable number of places noted in which the reading of the Septuagint makes better sense than that of the Hebrew. In not a few passages the Hebrew gives no natural meaning at all; for instance, Exod. xiv. 20; 1 Sam. xiii. 21; xxvii. 10 (where even the Authorized Version departs from the Massoretic text); much of 1 Kings vi. and vii.; Job iii. 14; xxxv. 15, and many other passages indicated in the Variorum Bible. In other places verses are supplied by the Septuagint which are not in the Hebrew; in these it will be a matter for critics to decide in each case whether the Hebrew has wrongly omitted words, or the Septuagint wrongly inserted them, but it is not likely that the answer will always be the same. A list of some such passages has already been given on p. 133. Again, take the larger variations there mentioned in the book of Jeremiah. The arrangement found in the Septuagint is by many scholars considered preferable to that of the Hebrew, and its text in many doubtful passages appears to be superior. Once more, in the Pentateuch we find the Septuagint and the Samaritan version often agreeing in opposition to the Hebrew; and since there is no reasonable ground for asserting that either of these translations was influenced by the other, we can only suppose that in such passages they represent the original reading of the Hebrew, and that the Massoretic text is corrupt. Here again confirmation is forthcoming from the Dead Sea fragments, which in the books of Samuel and elsewhere are found agreeing with the Septuagint against the Massoretic Hebrew. To this it may be added that the 'Book of Jubilees', a Jewish work written not long before the fall of Jerusalem (a.d. 70) and containing a modified version of the story of Genesis, frequently supports the Septuagint and Samaritan readings in preference to those of the Hebrew.
It seems, then, reasonable to conclude that in many cases the Septuagint contains a better text than the Hebrew; and if this is so, it is likely that it is often right in passages where we are not able to decide with certainty between alternative readings. Can we go further and say that it is generally so, and that wherever the two differ, the presumption is in favour of the Septuagint? Certainly not, without considerable qualifications. There can be no doubt, first, that the Septuagint as originally written contained many mistakes; and, secondly, that the text of it has been much corrupted in the earlier course of its history. It must be remembered that the Septuagint was translated from a Hebrew text in which the words were not clearly separated from one another and were unprovided with vowels. Hence some of the differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew do not imply a difference of reading at all, but simply a difference in the division of the letters into words or in the vowel-points supplied. Sometimes the one may be right and sometimes the other; but in any case the difference is one of interpretation, not of text. Then, again, there can be no doubt that the authors of the Septuagint made many actual mistakes of translation. Hebrew, it must be remembered, was not their habitual language of conversation; it was a matter of study, as Old English is to scholars today, and it was quite possible for them to mistake the meaning of a word, or to confuse words which were written or spoken nearly alike. The possibility of such mistakes must be borne in mind, and only a good Hebrew scholar can warn us of them. But when we find the Septuagint siding with the Samaritan, or with the Dead Sea Scrolls against the received Hebrew text, then its reading must be considered very carefully indeed.
It is a more difficult point to decide whether the authors of the Septuagint made deliberate additions to the text. Translators held a different view of their rights and duties from that which would be accepted today. They thought themselves at liberty to add explanatory words and phrases, to paraphrase instead of adhering closely to their original, to supplement what they believed to be omissions (often by incorporating words from other passages where the same or similar events were recorded, as from Kings into Chronicles, and vice versa), even to omit passages which they regarded as unnecessary or unedifying, or insert incidents which they believed to be true and edifying. This would seem to be the case with the additions to the books of Daniel and Esther, which the Jews refused to accept as part of the inspired Scriptures, and which have been banished to the Apocrypha in the English Bible. In smaller details, the authors of the Septuagint seem at times to have softened down strong expressions of the Hebrew, no doubt from a feeling that the more refined literary taste of Alexandria would be offended by them.
A welcome and valuable contribution to our comprehension of the relation between the Septuagint and the Massoretic Hebrew was made in 1897 by the publication of a portion of the Hebrew original of the book of Ecclesiasticus, previously believed to be wholly lost. The Hebrew text was known to Jerome, and there is evidence that it was still in existence early in the tenth century; but thenceforward, for a space of more than 950 years, no traces of it could be met with. In 1896, however, Mrs. Lewis, the fortunate discoverer of the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript of the Gospels, brought back from the Cairo Geniza a single leaf, which, on being examined at Cambridge, was found to contain part of the original Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus; and almost simultaneously Dr. Ad. Neubauer at Oxford, in examining a mass of fragments sent to England by Prof. Sayce, discovered nine more leaves of the same MS., following immediately after the Cambridge leaf. The total amount of text thus recovered includes chapters xxxix. 15-xlix. 11; and the whole was edited by Sir Arthur Cowley and Dr. Neubauer, of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The manuscript is on paper, and was written about the end of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century. Soon afterwards Dr. Schechter of Cambridge also visited the Cairo Geniza, and amongst the vast amount of material he brought back other fragments of Ecclesiasticus were found and edited by him. Since then further discoveries have brought the Hebrew text up to about two-thirds of the whole, and now come reports of fragments from the Dead Sea.
The most striking feature about the discovery is the extent of the divergence between the Hebrew and the Greek versions; and the character of the divergence shows that it is generally due to the mistakes or omissions of the Greek translator. It is a most instructive exercise to read the newly recovered original side by side with the notes in the Variorum Apocrypha, which indicate the passages previously suspected of error in the Greek, the variations found in the other versions, and the conjectures of editors. Sometimes the suspicions of scholars are confirmed; often it is seen that they could not go far enough, nor divine the extent to which the Greek departed from the original. A small instance may be given here, from Ecclus. xl. 18-20:
| GREEK TRANSLATION | HEBREW
ORIGINAL |
||
|---|---|---|---|
(From the Revised Version of 1895) |
|||
18 |
The life of one that laboureth, |
A life of wine and strong drink is sweet, |
|
And he that findeth a treasure is above both. |
But he that findeth a treasure is above them both. |
||
19 |
Children and the building of a city establish a man's name; |
A child and a city establish a name, |
|
But he that findeth wisdom is above them both. |
|||
Offspring (of cattle) and planting make a name to flourish, |
|||
And a blameless wife is counted above both. |
But a woman beloved is above them both. |
||
20 |
Wine and music rejoice the heart; |
Wine and strong drink cause the heart to exult, |
|
And the love of wisdom is above both. |
But the love of lovers is above them both. |
The divergences in verses 18 and 20 are evidently due to a desire to improve the sentiments of the original by removing the laudatory mention of 'strong drink', and the substitution of 'the love of wisdom' for 'the love of lovers'; while the omission in verse 19, whether it be accidental or intentional, distorts the sense of the passage. That the Hebrew text is the more authentic cannot be questioned; and this is but a sample of what is found throughout the book. It is clear, both that the translator took considerable liberty of paraphrase, and that he sometimes did not understand the Hebrew before him. This latter fact might seem strange, since we know (from the translator's preface) that the original was probably written about 200-170 b.c., and the translation (by the author's grandson) in 132 b.c., so that the interval of time between them was short; but it is accounted for both by the fact that the translator was no scholar, and by the transition through which the Hebrew language passed during this period. The moral to be drawn from this discovery is consequently one of caution in assuming that variations (even considerable ones) in the Septuagint from the Massoretic Hebrew necessarily imply a different original text. They may do so, no doubt; but we must be prepared to make considerable allowances for liberty of paraphrase and for actual mistakes, especially in the case of the books which are likely to have been the latest to be translated. When the earliest parts of the Septuagint were translated, a competent knowledge of classical Hebrew must have been much commoner, and a higher standard of accuracy, though not necessarily of literalness, may be expected.
As to the minor corruptions of the Septuagint text, the history of it in the preceding pages explains these sufficiently. It is no easy task, in many places, to be sure what the true reading of the Septuagint is. Some manuscripts represent the text of Origen, in which everything has been brought into conformity with the Hebrew as it was in his day; many are more or less influenced by his text, or by the versions of Aquila and Theodotion. Some represent the edition of Lucian, others that of Hesychius. Even those which belong to none of these classes do not agree among themselves. The great manuscripts known as A and B frequently differ very markedly from one another, and K sometimes stands quite apart from both. It is clear that in many cases it is impossible to correct the Hebrew from the Greek until we have first made sure what the Greek reading really is.
One further possibility remains to be considered, that of deliberate falsification of either Greek or Hebrew for party purposes. Such accusations were made, both by Christians and by Jews, in the early centuries of the Church's history, when the Jews held to the Hebrew text as it was fixed about a.d . 100, and the Christians to the Septuagint. But the proof for so serious a charge is wholly lacking. It is true that the Hebrew Bible as we know it assumed its present form at a time when the antagonism between Jew and Christian was strongly marked, and probably under the direction of the Rabbi Akiba, the great leader of the extreme party of the Jews at the end of the first century. At such a time and under such a leader it might seem not impossible that an attempt would be made to remove from the Old Testament those passages and expressions to which the Christians referred most triumphantly as prophecies of Christ. The best answer to such a charge is that these passages have not been removed, and that the differences between the Massoretic text and the Septuagint are by no means of this character. The books of Judith and Ecclesiasticus, which were ejected from the Hebrew text and retained in the Greek, do not testify of Christ more than the undisputed books which remain in both. The Christians had less reason to feel special interest in the books of the Maccabees than the patriotic Jews. Indeed it is untrue to say that the books of the Apocrypha were at this time ejected from the Hebrew Bible; the fact being that they had never formed part of it, and were never quoted or used on the same level as the books recognized as inspired. It is true that one verse has dropped out of a long list of towns (after Joshua xv. 59) in which was contained (as the Septuagint shows; see Variorum footnote) the name of "Ephratah, which is Bethlehem", by the help of which the reference to Ephratah in Ps. cxxxii. 6 might be interpreted as a prophecy of our Lord's birth at Bethlehem; but seeing that the same identification is repeated in four other places, including the much more strongly Messianic passage in Mic. v. 2, the omission in Joshua alone would be perfectly useless for party purposes, and may much more fairly be explained as an accident. It is needless to add that the greater prophecies of the Messiah, such as the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, stand quite untouched in the Hebrew, and that the vast majority of the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek throughout the Old Testament could have no possible partisan motive whatever.
The authors of our Revised Version of the Old Testament, while recognizing the probable existence of earlier editions of the Hebrew differing from the Massoretic text, yet declare that "the state of knowledge on the subject is not at present such as to justify any attempt at an entire reconstruction of the text on the authority of the versions", and have consequently "thought it most prudent to adopt the Massoretic text as the basis of their work, and to depart from it, as the Authorized Translators had done, only in exceptional cases". There can be no doubt that they did rightly. The versions have as yet been too insufficiently studied to justify a general use or a rash reliance upon them. When the text of the Septuagint, in particular, has been placed on a satisfactory footing (to which it is to be hoped the large Cambridge edition will greatly contribute) it will be time enough to consider how far its readings may be taken in preference to those of the Hebrew. It is probable that eventually a much fuller use will be made of the Septuagint than has hitherto been the case, and those have done good work who have called attention, even in exaggerated tones, to the claims of the ancient Greek version; but no general substitution of the Greek for the Hebrew as the prime authority for the text of the Old Testament will be possible unless the assent of students be won to the change. If the Massoretic text is ever to be driven from the assured position of supremacy, which it has held since the days of Origen and of Jerome, it will only be when the great bulk of sober criticism and the general intelligence pf Biblical students have been convinced that the change is necessary. It is very doubtful whether such a conviction will ever be reached; but it is probable that increasing use will be made of the Septuagint evidence, particularly in view of the Dead Sea fragments, and students will do well to keep an eye on it in their work on the Old Testament.