Lexicography

Two Recent Book Reviews, and Some On the Way

I’ve been working on reviewing books pretty steadily over the last year or so. It’s a good discipline to keep you reading texts closely, keep up with topics of interest that are not immediately connected with my dissertation, and get my hands on some free premium volumes.

Two of my reviews were recently published in the Bulletin for Biblical Research, the journal of the Institute for Biblical Research (IBR). At the moment BBR is holding first place in my review contributions, mainly because they publish so many and there is plenty of opportunity to do it.

Here are the two that I reviewed in BBR 25.3 (2015).

The Hebrew Bible (BHS) Reader’s Edition

It’s an odd task to review a Reader’s Edition. In case you don’t know, a Reader’s Edition is simply a primary text – in this case Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia – reproduced with vocabulary helps included throughout. In this case, any word that occurs seventy times or fewer in the Hebrew Bible is given a note in the text that corresponds to a footnote, where the parsing (where appropriate) and a contextual gloss appears. This allows you to read your Hebrew as easily as you like, whenever you hit an unknown word it’s there for you to check and/or parse.

I really like this volume. It’s very well produced by Hendrickson, one of the highest quality publishers in the industry in my opinion when it comes to primary sources. The German Bible Society teamed up with Hendrickson to allow them to use the BHS 5th edition text (’97), so aside from the Masorah Parva and textual apparatus, you’re also getting a high quality scholarly source also. In terms of kethiv/qere variants, the editors of the Reader’s Edition have smoothed things out using their apparatus at the bottom of the page.

There are a few drawbacks. For the most part, this consists of the parsing system used throughout. It is based on LaSor’s system, and takes some getting used to. Ideally, you can parse everything yourself anyway so you won’t need it much!

You can read my review here.

Adams and Socio-Economics of Second Temple Judaism

A lot of my research includes reading about Judaism. That may sound surprising if you know I work in Septuagint studies. But believe it or not, the Septuagint was produced by Jews. Ta-da! Although I tend to read a great deal more about Jewish life in Ptolemaic Egypt, where most of the translation work likely occurred, I am also interested in other diaspora communities and, of course, Palestinian Judaism.

That’s why I picked up Adams’ volume Social and Economic Life in Second Temple Judea to review. I was astounded to read that there is no other volume specifically focused upon this subject-matter, something I am still somewhat inclined to doubt (although I have yet to find proof otherwise). Naturally many of the other tomes on Second Temple Judaism treat socioeconomics in passing or so some extent, but it is not the main focus.

A variety of topics are covered: family and the household, the lives of women and children, the marketplace, the state, and the ethics of wealth and poverty. There is the natural challenge of lack of sources in many parts of this study (especially women and children), so Adams makes up for it by contemporary anthropological studies. This can be problematic, as you can read in my review. More so, however, is his use of almost the entire Old Testament as “evidence” of life in the Second Temple period. If you’re not aware of higher critical assumptions, they more or less allow Adams to presume that most/all of the OT was written or finalized in the Second-Temple period, thus allowing him to use it as a primary source. I find this approach specious, but it’s a different kettle of fish for a different day.

You can read my review here.

Some Reviews in the Pipeline

I have a few reviews that will be coming out soon, and some I’m looking forward to producing. I have two reviews coming out in the Westminster Theological Journal that I will post here in time. I’m more interested in reading these three volumes, however:

LXX Translations Part II.2: BdA Continued

La Bible d’Alexandrie – Post 2 of 2

Time for part three of my series on modern language translations of the Septuagint. Thus far we have covered the NETS translation, and begun a discussion of La Bible d’Alexandrie (BdA) in an initial post, which is continued here. I am drawing out BdA’s treatment because, armed with a basic understanding of the NETS approach, we can understand both NETS and BdA better as they are set in contrast. To that end, bear in mind that the methodological contrast assumed in the quotes below is specifically directed towards NETS.

In the first post we talked about the BdA methods to translate 1) “according to the Greek,” and 2) with attention to the divergences between the Hebrew and Greek. Without further ado, let’s pick up with the third and fourth translation principles of BdA.

3. Understanding the Divergencies in the LXX Context

There are two ways to understand a divergence between the Hebrew and Greek versions of the OT. First, it might be that the LXX rendered a different Hebrew text (Vorlage) than what we now have in the Masoretic Text, thus his translation differs. Secondly, however, if that was not the case – if the LXX translator had the same (unpointed) Hebrew text as our MT – the divergence still could have diverged from the Hebrew due to a number of other factors.

This man is clearly a textual critic.

For example, divergences may be due to the translator misunderstanding the Hebrew. Or, he may have vocalised the unpointed text differently than the Masoretes eventually did. Or, it could be an exegetical “actualisation” on the part of the translator by making the Greek text more “relevant” to his audience in some way. If there are in fact actualisations in the Greek version, these divergences could be contextual or intertextual interpretations, perhaps even within the Greek version. It may also be that a divergence is caused by scribal error in Greek transmission history as well (often called “inner-Greek corruption”). Furthermore, the translator may have had many Greek words that would have worked to render his Hebrew text, but none quite synonymous with it. In sum, these and other reasons for possible “incongruities of the two biblical texts” lead BdA away from using the MT as its “phraseological and lexical foundation” as NETS tends to do (Harl 2001, 193).

As such, BdA aims to translate the Greek text “as it is.” It is worth quoting Harl directly here:

[We render the] meaning that a “divergency” receives in the LXX context and translate the new meaning acquired by the verse or by the whole pericope … We refuse to translate a text corrected according to the Hebrew, where a word judged aberrant would be replaced by a conjecture restoring the Hebrew meaning. (ibid., emphasis added).

In short, wherever the LXX says something apparently different from the Hebrew, BdA carries on with translating the Greek anyway, without trying to make it “fit” the Hebrew somehow. This is because there are so many reasons for why the Greek translation could say something different from the Hebrew (intentionally or not) even if the translator was staring at the exact same Hebrew text as what we have in the MT.  In this way, BdA does not assume at every point that the Greek is meant to represent the Hebrew, identical Vorlage or not.

 4. Consulting Ancient Readers of the LXX

Some of the NETS team

Because of their approach in steps 1-3, the editors of BdA “think it useful to consult the reception of the LXX by its ancient audience” (Ibid., 194). Recall here the NETS distinction between LXX “production” and “reception.” NETS cries foul at this point, countering by saying that it doesn’t really matter what later readers thought the LXX “was” or said, but how the translators themselves conceived of their translated text. Nevertheless, BdA consults early reception history precisely because those sources “show us the understanding the Greek speakers had of the LXX syntax and vocabulary” (Ibid.).

Furthermore, studying early Christian commentaries on the LXX alerts us to how the peculiarities of the text contributed to the growth of Christianity, which Harl characterizes as “semantic changes owing to the ‘typological’ reading of biblical books and to the exegesis guided by faith in Jesus” (Ibid.). With reference to the French translation of the LXX, then, BdA avoids using any NT sense for words that in their understanding are not part of the LXX usage (e.g. πίστις as confiance, “trust,” rather than foi, “faith”).  Nevertheless, says Harl, “[t]he Septuagint is the soil which has nurtured the Christian tradition” (Ibid., 195). In that way LXX commentaries of the Church Fathers, for instance, constitute “one among other testimonies” of early interpretation of the Hebrew Old Testament (Ibid.).

Not Done Yet: (5. Revision of the French Translation)

As a fifth step, BdA revises their initial translation of the Greek “with a view to correcting its exceeding literalism and to incorporate the results of the text analyses” (Ibid.).  While making the translation read well in French, BdA also aims to preserve the unique traits of the LXX, thus allowing unusual French word order “to let transpire the traces of the strangeness of the Hebrew text” underlying the Greek (Ibid.). This too is motivated by the reality that the Septuagint was considered holy and even divinely inspired to both Jewish and early Christian communities, and so BdA wishes to “preserve somehow its character as a religious text,” which they do by giving the French a “noble, traditional, ancient ring” (Ibid., 197).

More to Come in the Series

Having overviewed the approaches of NETS and BdA (in two parts), we are halfway through the series on modern LXX translation projects. Still to come is the Septuaginta Deutsch and La Biblia Griega.

 

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Harl, Marguerite. “La Bible d’Alexandrie I. The Translation Principles.” Pages 181-97 in X Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. Edited by B. A. Taylor. Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint and Cognate Series 51. Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001.

LXX Translations Part II.1: BdA

La Bible d’Alexandrie – Post 1 of 2

9782204069014Quite a while back I began writing about modern Septuagint translation projects. As I explained there, my aim is to overview the methodologies of the four major modern language translations of the LXX, one of which I already discussed. These are:

1) NETS, 2) BdA, 3) LXX.D, and 4) LBG.

Today, we focus on number two, La Bible d’Alexandrie, which I will treat in two separate posts. I decided to cover BdA in a more extended format since BdA and NETS are best understood when set in contrast. With a brief intro to NETS in my former post, we are in a better position to understand it and BdA as well.

[As an aside, I’m pleased to announce that Cameron Boyd-Taylor, who was involved with the NETS project and is an advocate of the Interlinearity model, will be in the hotseat of one of my upcoming LXX Scholar Interviews.]

Textual Commentary

BdA is a French publication by Éditions du Cerf and is an ongoing project, although it has been in process for almost thirty years already. One of the reasons that it has taken so long – aside from maintaining a high standard of scholarly rigor and the dearth of qualified LXX specialists – is the inclusion of extended running commentary on the text throughout, both on the French translation and the Greek. Indeed, this is a primary difference from NETS, which only presents an English translation (although the IOSCS Septuagint Commentary Series will have a similar role in that respect, and NETS has a brief introduction to each biblical book).

Through the mechanism of the translation principles, discussed below, BdA aims in its commentary give three types of notes. Firstly, linguistic notes, dealing with text-criticism and their translation rationale. Secondly, exegetical notes, studying the divergences from the Hebrew and possible reasons for them. And thirdly, historical notes, discussing the later reception of the LXX text and its interpretation, particularly in the Apostolic Church and in early Jewish literature.

Furthermore, each volume includes a valuable introduction that discusses a given book’s composition, themes, and relationship to its source text.

Purpose and Translation Principles

Marguerite Harl states that the purpose of BdA is “to offer as exact a translation of the Greek text of the LXX as possible [in French],” which is driven by the conviction that the Septuagint has “importance and interest in its own right: it is a part of the Hellenistic Jewish literature” (Harl 2001, 181-82).

As such, BdA has four major guidelines/steps in producing its translation, the first two of which I will discuss below. I’ll treat the other two in a successive post.

1. Translation “according to the Greek”

This first principle is the most far-reaching, and is the primary foil to the NETS approach in two ways. Firstly, BdA aims for a translation that is “as literary as possible on the basis of syntactical and lexical usages of the Greek language current at the translators’ epoch” (ibid., 183). In other words, the (1) French translation of the (2) Greek translation of the (3) Hebrew text is done with reference to (2) the Greek language. This differs from NETS in that the NETS translation is done with attention primarily to (3) the Hebrew source text, at least in terms of syntax and semantics. Harl states baldly: “At this point we disregard the Hebrew source-text,” which is studied in the second stage of translation (ibid., emphasis mine).

Certainly not what the LXX translators looked like

Similarly, she states that “a text written in any language should be read and analysed only in the context of [its own] language” (ibid., 184). BdA sees the target language of a translation as a sort of window into the world of the translator and how he perceived his Hebrew source text when he translated it.

This approach contrasts distinctly with the Interlinear approach of NETS in a second important way. Whereas NETS perceives the LXX as a dependent text, intended to rely on the Hebrew source text for comprehensibility, BdA perceives the LXX as an independent text, meant from the start to be read as a free-standing text without the Hebrew as an aid to understanding. (Recall the distinction between text production and text reception, whereby the NETS group claims that the LXX only later came to be read as an independent text in the communities that received it.) From the BdA perspective, later revision and recension of “the” LXX was aimed to bring the Greek translation closer to the Hebrew source text, to make the Greek “sound” more like the Hebrew original. If that was in fact the case, they say, then it follows that the original translations were not necessarily concerned with (or perhaps successful in) representing the Hebrew in Greek, as NETS understands it.

Thus BdA assumes that the Greek of the Septuagint “makes sense” within its contemporary literary context despite its oddities, while on the other hand NETS begins with an assumption of “unintelligibility” of the Greek precisely because of its oddities (Boyd-Taylor 2011, 91). Both translation approaches identify the same characteristic of the LXX generally: it is not “typical” Greek (this depends on how one understands “typical” of course). But two of the modern translations – NETS and BdA – go very different directions as a result of that single observation. Favoring one approach over the other has to do with determining what deserves the weight of emphasis: the oddities or the conventionality of the Greek of the LXX within its linguistic context.

Connected with this alternative is the assumption of the relative competence or incompetence of the LXX translators – were their translational decisions driven by a lack of knowledge of Greek, or made deliberately (for whatever reason) from a position of language competence? BdA asumes that “they were competent and conscientious” translators who produced a text “if not easy to read, in any case, almost always of good ‘greekness'” (Harl 2001, 187).

Connection with Lexicography

This book was not available to the LXX translators

The question at hand is quite relevant to the issue of Septuagint lexicography. Should a word in the LXX be defined in terms of the meaning of the Hebrew word it represents, or in terms of its textual and linguistic context in Greek generally? Which meaning should be given preference if these options disagree, even if slightly? My research is concerned with determining the meaning of LXX words within the context of contemporary, non-literary Koine Greek. As such, I do not assume at the outset that a given Greek word is perfectly semantically aligned with the Hebrew word it translates. Instead, I take it that word meaning is determined by (1) that word’s usage in the language generally in extrabiblical Greek documents, by (2) its context in the LXX, and (3) by its use in other places within the LXX.

In other words, I tend to agree with BdA’s approach to the language of the LXX in general. Septuagint Greek is best understood with reference to Greek in general: first understand the Greek, then you can understand the Septuagint, and then you can investigate how it renders the Hebrew (and then you can approach the LXX as a text-critical witness … another topic for another day).

2. Establishing Divergencies

This is the second principle of BdA, which is really more of a second “step.” BdA does not assume that the Hebrew text from which the LXX was translated was identical with the Masoretic text in BHS. Rather, the LXX source text was a “proto-MT,” which “makes any comparison very difficult” (ibid. 190). The textual “plus” or “minus” in the Septuagint in comparison with the MT can be explained in any number of ways not necessarily related to translation technique and virtually impossible to substantiate. As Harl puts it (somewhat mind-bendingly), “A ‘plus’ of the LXX could be a word present in its Vorlage but omitted in the MT; a ‘minus’ in the LXX may be explained as an addition of the masorites” (ibid.).

Of course, it is precisely these differences between the LXX and the MT that have driven textual criticism for centuries, all the way back to Jerome himself. And the work is far from over. While “practically everywhere the Greek version attests the consonants of the MT,” the scriptio continua and unpointed text that was translated could have had several reading traditions, which may explain some of the differences (ibid.). Other times, however, as the Dead Sea Scrolls attest, there were legitimate points of difference in the Hebrew source text compared with what we have in BHS; points where the LXX and a Qumran scroll agree against the MT in a particular reading.

The payoff here for BdA is that they “do not speak a priori of the mistakes of the LXX but rather of exegetical options” (ibid., 191). In sum, the meaning of the MT is often obscure, and for that reason does not serve BdA as an arbiter of semantic divergences of the Greek text.

To be continued

This post being as long as it is, I’ll discuss the final two translation principles/steps of BdA in a second post.

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Boyd-Taylor, Cameron. Reading Between the Lines. Biblical Tools and Studies 8; Leuven: Peeters, 2011.

Harl, Marguerite. “La Bible d’Alexandrie I. The Translation Principles.” Pages 181-97 in X Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. Edited by B. A. Taylor. Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint and Cognate Series 51. Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001.