Heh. That reminds me of one of my reading challenges...
Legolas Send a noteboard - 02/02/2014 09:18:50 PM
As I recall, my reading and commenting on the Qur'an got stuck somewhere not even all the way through the second Surah (which, in my defense, is the longest of them all, but still). Good thing that you have more persistence in this sort of thing, I guess. 
Very interesting review, I have some questions/comments here and there.
View original postIn any event, Jerome’s Vulgate, which disfavored the Septuagint, served in turn the basis for all Protestant Bibles. Aside from creating some terrible translation errors – Jerome notably misread the Hebrew word for “shining” as a similar word meaning “horned”, thus creating an entire genre of horned Moses statues in the Middle Ages – created the translational disconnect between the Old and New Testaments. Luther went a step farther and decided that any book that did not exist in Hebrew should be moved to the back and labeled “Apocrypha”, the first step to forgetting about them. Certainly, Luther had his own confessional reasons for doing this. For example, the Second Book of Maccabees talks about the effectiveness of prayers for the dead, and Luther was attacking indulgences premised on providing spiritual aid for dead souls in Purgatory. Sadly, the subsequent discovery at Qumran of Hebrew originals for many of the “apocryphal” books hasn’t seemed to have any effect on their exclusion from the canon in Protestant circles.
What about modern Catholic Bibles, since you so pointedly say "Protestant"? Apart from not omitting those "deuterocanonical" apocrypha, I'm assuming they are also based on the Vulgata?
View original postIt should be noted that unlike the Latin West, the Orthodox East never abandoned the Septuagint. All translations of the Bible into the various languages of the churches of the Orthodox Communion are based on the Septuagint. Also, unlike in the West where Latin was the only permitted liturgical language, the East always translated the Bible into the vernacular of the worshippers. And, unlike in the West, the Bible wasn’t chopped up with some books swept under the rug by being relegated to an appendix.
Didn't they use Church Slavonic in the East (well, the Slavic East, obviously)? Which may at one point have been the vernacular, but certainly was quite different some time later? I won't pretend to know anything about the Orthodox church, but I'm a bit surprised by what you're saying here about always using the vernacular...
View original postI decided that it was worthwhile to read the entire Septuagint, and so I did. It was an amazing experience because, aside from reacquainting me with some of the more obscure books and passages of the Bible, each book had its own style of Greek since no one person translated the whole. The tone shifted from the extreme conservatism of the Hebraisms in the Pentateuch, generally characterized by verb-noun repetition in the manner of “he dreamed a dream” or “he cried out a cry”, to the tediously ornate and originally Greek book of 3 Maccabees. I eagerly read the elegant and beautiful poetry of the Song of Songs and noted that the translator of Ecclesiastes put the Greek preposition for “with” (συν) into the text in many places where the original Hebrew used the direct object-marking particle את.
I'm trying to figure out how that would work. How can you just randomly add "with" before direct objects?
The Song of Songs is one of the few parts of the Bible that I might still bring myself to try reading in Hebrew at some point (having read Genesis 1-2 and Jonah in class).
View original postI was amazed at the sophisticated yet entirely readable philosophy at the beginning of 4 Maccabees, and generally enjoyed many of the other stories of books derogatively labeled as “apocrypha” in the West. Because of its inclusion in the Slavonic Bible, I even read the text known in the Vulgate as IV Ezrae, which modern scholars call 4 Ezra – 6 Ezra, but I had to read that book in Latin in my copy of the Vulgate because the Greek original of the text was lost. I even read the Book of Odes, which is not properly part of the Old Testament but nevertheless found its way into the Old Testament right after the Psalms (which book included the 151st Psalm, of course).
What is so special about that 151st Psalm?
View original postMore than anything, I was struck by the way that the Greek Old Testament is in harmony with the terms that would later be used by Christians. It is no surprise that the Jewish community stopped reading the Septuagint in the first centuries of the Christian era. Because the same language and terminology is used, and because in many passages it actually sounds as though a Christian was writing the text, a translation of the Hebrew canon into Greek that was entirely serviceable one hundred years before was made suddenly unacceptable for the Jewish community. In particular, one cannot read deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah chapters 40-55) without feeling that there is an incredibly strong prophecy in favor of Christianity in the Old Testament. Ironically, Jerome attacked the Septuagint because it was not faithful to the Hebrew canonical versions of the various books of the Old Testament, yet the Hebrew canonical versions had likely been chosen because they resembled the Septuagint versions less, and were less likely to be used as polemical ammunition against Jews by Christians.
Do you have any concrete examples of how changing a few words (because I don't imagine the differences are much bigger than that?) can make such a big difference between that Hebrew version used for the Septuagint and the Masoretic text?
View original postIt is also undisputed that the pronunciation of names is clearly more authentic in the Septuagint than in the Masoretic text, since the vowel notations were not added until some 800 years after the Septuagint at the earliest. Thus, in the Book of Esther her kinsman’s name is Mardochaios, a name that is not acceptable from a conservative Jewish perspective because it is based on the name of the Babylonian deity Marduk, but which makes much more sense than an artificially constructed “Mordechai”. Moses’ sister is Mariam, a name that appears again prominently in the New Testament and lends credence to the name’s likely Egyptian origin – mari (m.) or mariah (f.) meaning “beloved”. Not only that, but in the Book of Judges Samson is seduced by Dalida, not Delilah (according to one of the two versions of Judges in the Septuagint tradition – that book, like Daniel, is presented in two separate versions that have significant differences between them).
Interesting. I had never made the link between Mordechai and Marduk, that's for sure. And that last one is quite amusing, if you're familiar with the Egyptian-Italian-French actress/singer Dalida. Who I somehow have really no problem picturing as Delilah.
I don't think anyone ever disputed that Moses' sister Myriam and Mary mother of Jesus had variations of the same name? Though to be sure the different vowel can be important for etymological reasons as you say.
View original postThe variance among the translations is also evident in the way that the Greek word πανουργος retains its original, negative sense of “someone who is willing to do anything” in the Book of Ecclesiastes, but is used in a later, alternate sense of “smart” and with positive connotations in Proverbs, Job and other books of the wisdom literature tradition. One other point that was frustrating me was that I noticed everywhere the god Baal was mentioned, it had the feminine article, thus ἡ Βααλ. I finally was able to clarify the reasoning behind this practice – the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible by Brill Publishing (the famous DDD) stated that the feminine article noted that the word was to be read aloud not as “Baal” (which would be unacceptable in a Hebrew temple) but ἡ αισχυνη (“the disgrace”).
Heh. Nice.
View original postAlthough I am attempting to review the Septuagint in particular, rather than the Old Testament generally, I do have to say a few words about the impression that I got from reading the entirety of the Old Testament in a short period of time. The overwhelming notion of righteousness was helping the poor and vulnerable, and when the authors of the Old Testament books talk about wicked people they are usually those who oppress the vulnerable and defenseless and deny help that they could readily give to those in need. There was very little said about sexual morality, and when something was said the most common topics were avoiding whoring and adultery. Aside from the two short passages in Leviticus commanding death for homosexuality the only other mention of homosexuality that I found was in the story of David and Jonathan. King Saul openly accused Jonathan of an improper relationship with David, and Saul’s daughter “despised” David because she saw him dancing and singing at a Temple ceremony, which seems to imply that he was acting in a feminine manner. There are other passages that leave strong doubts about the nature of their relationship, and interestingly enough, other than Saul and his daughter, no one really seems to care if they were more than just friends.
David really is a fascinating character - there are few in the Bible who are shown in anywhere near as many different aspects. Not surprised that homosexuality doesn't get much emphasis - but then, to play devil's advocate, I'd say that today's Christians opposed to homosexuality (the ones who aren't crazy, anyway) never claimed it held such enormous importance, merely that the Bible does ban it, and that therefore they do consider it wrong; they would also consider wrong those things that the Bible does place more emphasis on, but those aren't generally as strongly defended as being entirely right and natural by progressives.
View original postAnother point that seemed very clear was that there was no notion of legalistic Judaism at that time. People celebrated the three big holidays of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, and the one day of Yom Kippur, and other than that would take a goat or a sheep up to a temple and sacrifice it when they thought they did something wrong. Rosh Hashanah was obviously not the first day of the year, since everywhere its month is referred to as the “seventh month”, and although there are three full books describing the Maccabees (1, 2 and 4 Maccabees – 3 Maccabees is actually about supposedly oppression of Jews in Egypt under Ptolemy Philopator), including an extended passage on the rededication of the Temple and how it should be celebrated for 8 days in the fashion of Sukkot, the “Hanukkah miracle” of one day’s supply of oil lasting for eight days magically appears only about 800 years after the event. In short, it was a far simpler, relaxed religion in many ways, lacking the millions of formalistic details that were later added in the mishna and the Talmud, and after that by countless rabbis with busy pens.
Not surprised by that, either - at the end of the day it does require a certain level of wealth and prosperity to even be able to afford paying attention to all those formalistic details, which most Jews at the time of writing simply didn't have.
The Septuagint
- 02/02/2014 07:54:58 PM
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Indeed
- 02/02/2014 08:19:49 PM
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Heh. That reminds me of one of my reading challenges...
- 02/02/2014 09:18:50 PM
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