Greek

A User’s Guide to Papyri.info (Part II) – Text

I’ve said it before, but I repeat. Papyri.info is an amazing resource. In preparation to provide a Resource Review for it, I ended up writing a primer post (here). Now, I should say up front that Papyri.info is useful for a very specific niche within LXX research, and that is lexicography. So if you are not interested in lexicography, you can probably skip this review. Otherwise, read on.

To reiterate a point from my primer post, there is debate still going on as to whether the meaning of the Greek words in the LXX are to be determined primarily by reference to their Hebrew counterpart in the source text, or primarily by reference to their contemporary Hellenistic usage.

Eleazar Killing a War Elephant in the Maccabean War (1 Macc. 6:42-47), by B. Picart Broen, 1728

Generally speaking, the debate is not a neat either/or matter, but rather one of primacy. There are many good reasons to take the Hebrew parent text as primary in a number of cases. These tend to be words that have become a terminus technicus. Still, although a Greek word may come to mean something more or different than it did prior to its use in the LXX (e.g. διαθήκη, εἰρήνη), this is not particularly unique. Lexicographers have recognized for some time that word meaning is not static. What this amounts to, then, is that the new uses of Koine words in the LXX is not necessarily due to its status as a translated text. It may rather be attributable to the new socio-political-(religious) context(s).

So, as promised, I shall punt on this issue (for now), and press on.

Background to Papyri.info

As discussed on the homepage, this LXX resource consists of the papyrological navigator and the papyrological editor. Since I have no business dealing with the latter, I won’t (most likely, neither should you). The former, however, “supports searching, browsing, and aggregation of ancient papyrological documents and related materials.” The wonderful thing about papyri.info is that it is a one-stop resource for material that quite recently was scattered hither and yon. As the homepage says, the site collates material from the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS), Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP), Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens (HGV), Bibliographie Papyrologique (BP).

Most of this information was accessible by CD-Rom prior to the mid-2000s, but now it’s all free and constantly updated. To force you to appreciate how wonderful this is, consider this quote:

“Not just hours or weeks, but months were spent searching for [Greek] words in the indexes of documentary volumes and confirming occurrences. Every text had to be laboriously copied by hand in the library, then recopied into the manuscript when written, before finally being handed over for typing… Photocopying was only just beginning to be possible” (J. A. L. Lee, “A Lexical Study Thirty Years On,” 515).

So count yourself lucky to be a part of the age of xerox, email, and open-source internet. The “how-to” I’ve written up below walks through some material laid out on the papyri.info site already, and some of my own additions as well.

Using Papyri.info

Considering that this is a freely accessible website, the functionality of papyri.info/search is remarkable. The first thing you’ll notice is the main search window:

I will usually tick the “Convert from betacode as you type” button so that your keystrokes enter Greek directly. Otherwise, you have to cut-and-paste unicode Greek font from somewhere else. A good guide to betacode typing can be found here (also pdf). The other toggle buttons are self-evident: if capitalization is relevant to your search (e.g. proper nouns), you may want to un-tick “Ignore Capitalization,” and the same for diacritics/accents.

The most simple type of search is a “string” search, meaning “string” of characters. Simply entering καί into the search bar, for example, will turn up 31,604 hits. Note how the site conveniently highlights your word(s) when you click on a particular text. Moreover, you can link to that text and have the highlighting remain (see p.worp 16, below). But back to the search on καί. It is important to know that included in the massive search result number is any word in which the characters κ-α-ί occur in sequence, such as καῖσαρ or καιρός. This is where the ‘#’ code is crucial, as it breaks off a string from surrounding characters. If you wanted only καί, then, you would enter #καί#, which would return 28,138 hits.

Further, you can search for phrases using quotes. So if you were looking for instances of μὴ φοβοῦ, you’d enter “‘μὴ φοβοῦ'” and get just a single hit (p.worp 16). You’ll notice that in p.worp 16 there is a translation of the papyrus provided. This is a major boon when it happens, although in my experience that is rarely. Of course, in this case, the translation is into Italian, but it is helpful nevertheless.

You’ll also notice the group of buttons below the search bar. These buttons really amplify the capacity of the engine, so they’re worth learning to use. I will spend some time walking through the more basic button functions here, and then wait until a third (!) post to treat the more sophisticated ones… partly because I’m still figuring them out.

Firstly, the “and” “or” and “not” buttons do exactly what you would expect. When you enter any Greek word in the search window, then hit one of those three buttons, a second search window will appear below for your second criterion (or third, etc.). combo This allows you to include, alternate, or exclude certain words.

The following two buttons, “then” and “near,” deal more with sequencing of words. For example, if we wanted to see if the prepositional phrase εἰς ἀπάντησιν occurs in any papyri, we’d type, εἰς and click the “then” button and add ἀπάντησιν. The “within ___” window will become active automatically, and we’ll enter 3, for example, and then select “words” from the drop-down to the right, although you can also search by character for more refined quests. So our sample search is “εἰς THEN ἀπάντησιν within 3 words.” We get two results:

Eureka!

Note that the “then” button sets up the search for terms in the order in which they were entered (εἰς followed by ἀπάντησιν), while the “near” button searches in either direction within the limits you set, whether by word or character.

This is one of innumerable possible searches just with these first few buttons. As mentioned, I will reserve comment on the following buttons for a third installment. The last few are the most powerful (and finicky), and so take space to treat well. Disclaimer: It may take me some time to produce this final post.

Coming Soon – “An Interpretive Lexicon of New Testament Greek”

Well, one way to learn about the publication of your own material is through someone else’s blog. I can’t say it didn’t make for a nice Friday afternoon surprise to see the cover art for the first time, though.

Evidently, it’s already available for pre-order through Amazon and other booksellers.

Note that G. K. Beale is professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, and Daniel Brendsel holds a PhD from Wheaton. Lastly, I am not a doctoral student at Westminster, but will begin a doctorate elsewhere this October.

Coming Soon – “An Interpretive Lexicon of New Testament Greek”

Greek fans are sure to love this. Coming this October is An Interpretive Lexicon of New Testament Greek by G. K. Beale with William A. Ross and Daniel J. Brendsel.

“This revolutionary new aid for students of New Testament Greek functions both as a lexicon and as an interpretive handbook. It lists the vast majority of Greek prepositions, adverbs, particles, relative pronouns, conjunctions, and other connecting words that are notorious for being some of the most difficult words to translate. For each word included, page references are given for several major lexical resources where the user can quickly go to examine the nuances and parameters of the word for translation options, saving the translator considerable time.”

“This lexicon adds an interpretive element for each word by categorizing its semantic range into defined logical relationships. This interpretive feature of the book is tremendously helpful for the exegetical process, allowing for the translator to closely follow the logical flow of the text with greater efficiency. An Interpretive Lexicon of New Testament Greek is thus a remarkable resource for student, pastor, and scholar alike.”

An Interpretive Lexicon of New Testament Greek is from Zondervan. It will be a paperback with 96 pages and sell for $15.99.

A User’s Guide to Papyri.info (Part I) – Language

Papyri.info is an amazing resource. I chose it for one of my first few Resource Reviews since I have used it for a good deal of my recent research in LXX. But as I set out to write a review of it, I ended up writing enough to break the post in half (at least). In an effort to provide background to why this resource is valuable, it seemed necessary to provide the following primer post.

The Linguistic Setting of the Septuagint

Perhaps it goes without saying, but the Septuagint is (mostly) a work of translation. That is to say, it is not an “original” composition, but a derivative text. It is a translation made by Second Temple Jews of their Hebrew Scriptures into the then current lingua franca. The Second Temple Period began after the restoration of Israel to their land by Cyrus II (“the Great”) of Persia (cf. Ezra 1:2-4; 6:3-5), and it continued under the Macedonian general Alexander (also “the Great”) whose military campaign unified the Mediterranean world under a single language: Greek. Even before Alexander’s conquest, however, Greek language and culture had come to some prominence as a result of the 5th century B.C.E. Grecian victory at Thermopylae, after which trade routes opened to the Palestinian region (Law, When God Spoke Greek, ch. 2).

The Macedonian Empire

As Greek became the common language, even the Jews apparently felt a need for their own literature to be available in that language. Just what that need was, precisely, is a matter of some debate, the answer to which influences how issues discussed below are dealt with. But I digress. The Greek spoken around the Empire was not Classical Greek any longer, but Koine (“common”) Greek. Koine was a different form of the language that made commerce and cultural interaction possible among many people groups, and it was used right through the New Testament and Patristic eras. Notably, the task of translation was not novel in the 3rd century B.C.E., since in the multilingual ancient world governmental documents changed hands and languages between rulers (cf. Isa 36:11ff). Still, the magnitude of the task of translating the Hebrew Scriptures was unprecedented at that point in human history. Scholars are largely agreed that the job was done in Alexandria, Egypt, although some scholars still argue for Palestinian origins, amongst other possibilities.

The Pharos of Ptolemy in Alexandria, Egypt

All this to say that the linguistic setting of the LXX translation is primarily that of Alexandrian, Koine Greek. Still, there has been debate among LXX scholars, now settled with near certainty, as to what kind of Greek appears in the LXX. Some scholars (Winer, Hatch, Swete, Turner, etc.) thought the LXX was composed of a kind of Jewish-Greek dialect (“Jüdengriechisch”), a conclusion they came to by correctly observing that the LXX includes Greek phrases whose syntax could be categorized (rightly or wrongly) as Semitic. That frequent phenomenon is what LXX scholars call “Hebrew interference,” or a “Hebraism,” meaning “a Greek word, phrase, or syntagma which transfers certain characteristic Hebrew elements into Greek in an un-Greek fashion” (E. Tov, “The Septuagint,” in Mikra, 179). Others thought the LXX was written in Classical Greek, or was even “Holy Spirit” Greek. Later scholarship, however, (Deissmann, Thumb, Thackeray, Lee, etc.) showed that Hebraisms were in fact not a product of a supposed Jewish-Greek dialect. Again at the risk of oversimplification, the LXX is instead composed of “regular old” Koine Greek – the same Koine that was used by everyone in Alexandria at that time. The reason for the apparent Semitic syntax in the LXX is (in part) that it is, as mentioned, a translated text. Where LXX Greek appears with Hebrew syntactical characteristics rather than conventional Greek syntax, it is ordinarily due to the translator’s choice to preserve the word order of his source text (for whatever reason, and there are many possibilities!). Back to papyri.info. One great way to confirm that LXX Greek is identical to the “regular old” Koine Greek of Alexandria (and elsewhere) is to compare the two. This is what Deissmann and, later, John A. L. Lee did, and it is the first purpose I will mention for which this LXX resource can be used. The second purpose is to help determine the semantic range, or meaning, of a given Koine word. At this point we bump into yet another debate in LXX scholarship, however, namely whether the meaning of the Greek words in the LXX are to be determined primarily by reference to their Hebrew counterpart, or primarily by reference to their contemporary Hellenistic usage (cf. Tov’s discussion on εἰρήνη as a stereotyped equivalent for שׁלום [“Three Dimensions of Words in the Septuagint,” in The Greek and Hebrew Bible, 88-9]). Answering this question is complex, and requires some concept of the purpose of the LXX overall (which again runs into another controversy over the so-called Interlinear Model). But to stay on task, I will come to a stop here to anticipate a fuller discussion in my next post of how to utilize the site papyri.info (pictured above). In that post, I’ll punt on all these debates I’ve mentioned tantalizingly – a discussion for another day! – to focus on the search power of this excellent LXX resource.