Old Testament Studies

The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library

As promised, the first of my Resource Reviews, collected here.

The Digital Scrolls Library

A few months ago, the Tyndale House posted a link on Facebook to an amazing resource that I thought was worth highlighting here as a first review. The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library is the result of the work of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), who have used the latest digital technology to provide high resolution images freely to the public. The site offers hundreds of manuscripts and thousands of fragments found in the Judean Desert between 1947 and the early 1960s.

Not only that, but the site is actually quite beautiful and user-friendly – not often the case for online biblical studies resources! My favorite feature of the site (beside this interesting historical timeline) is the multi-criteria archive search page, where users can sort by archaeological site, language, scroll content, and even more technical filters like material, historic period, and manuscript type. The Greek manuscripts and fragments add up to just over 130 items, a remarkable resource for LXX and OT scholar alike.

This nice video does some of the work for me:

The Significance of Qumran for LXX Studies

Much could be said here, so I will limit myself as much as possible. The discovery of the Qumran documents was a paradigm-shifting event in the world of biblical studies. Prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), the amount of primary manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Old Testament had been largely limited to material from the 11-13th century C.E. and later. Important exceptions to this were of course some evidence in the Cairo Geniza (see the collection here), the Masoretic Leningrad Codex, and the Greek OT content of the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus uncials (both 4th century C.E.). Due to this lack of evidence, OT textual criticism was (far more) difficult. When the DSS were found, however, suddenly scholars had access to primary materials up to a millennium older than what they had on hand, precipitating a new era in OT scholarship.

Most of the DSS date between the 3rd century B.C.E. and the 1st century C.E. The collection includes religious literature far afield from what is today considered the canonical Old Testament, although that too was found. As a sectarian community, the Qumran covenanters had texts detailing their unique religious practices, commentaries, wisdom texts, calendars, and so on. Most are written in Hebrew, but Aramaic, Greek, and even unidentified languages were also used. Amazingly, every book of the bible was discovered (except, curiously, the book of Esther).

The payoff for LXX studies, of course, is the Greek texts among the collection. As little OT evidence as existed in Hebrew, there was even less for the Greek OT, particularly from the pre-Christian era. One of the most significant aspects of the DSS for LXX studies is that the evidence is pre-Hexaplaric, i.e. represents texts not influenced by the 3rd century C.E. text critical work of Origen. Origen’s efforts were massive and admirable, but disastrous for later textual critics.

While no significant divergences in the Greek DSS appeared in comparison to the major uncials, some scholars believe the latter may reflect updating or revision of some kind, usually attributed to Christian scribes. In short, the DSS shed unprecedented light upon the history of the Greek translation of the OT, and provided a sea of primary evidence on which scholars of Hebrew OT studies would set sail as well. May the voyage continue!

An excellent overview of further points of interest for LXX studies can be found in Jobes & Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Baker, 2000), chapter 8. (Buy here). Also see E. Tov, “The Contribution of the Qumran Scrolls to the Understanding of the Septuagint,” 285-300 in The Greek and Hebrew Bible (Brill, 1999).

LXX Resource Reviews

Part of my purpose for this blog is not only to centralize my own work and interests, but to create a sort of LXX resource site. No doubt this will take some time to do well, and so (hopefully) I will get some assistance along the way. But it seems to be a desideratum in the Septuagint blogosphere. Hence: Resource Reviews.

To help bridge the gap, then, I am on the one hand continuing to build my LXX Resources page with resources as I come by them. I will hopefully one day get around to adding some actual prose to the page, with introductory information to the field. As I mention on the Intro page already, even when LXX studies is not concerned with complex and highly technical issues in linguistic and textual matters (which is rarely), it can still be a lot of insider baseball. As a result, things can get quite confusing.

Sometimes LXX studies make you feel like this.

It is a small field that is only just starting to grow and add new faces, so newcomers often end up parsing seemingly endless disciplinary ellipses that are otherwise unmysterious to those who have been speaking LXX for decades.

However, a page full of lists of resources is no good if you have no idea what to do with the resources. So in addition to the Intro page, I will also be periodically posting reviews of the resources. In good romantic fashion, I hope to help those interested in the field see the apparently foreboding and impassable Septuagint Mountains rather as a landscape whose beauty can be appreciated (not feared), and even provide enjoyment.

That brings us to my blog category “Resource Reviews,” which I will tag posts with wherever appropriate. I also have a sub-page under Intro to LXX that will centralize all the information (here). Perhaps I’ll simply start trolling through the materials already listed on the Intro page, and build from there. However it happens, hopefully this will contribute to the field in some small way, even if only to help newcomers navigate unfamiliar territory.

Don’t look down.

Review of Ngunga on Greek Isaiah

A while back I mentioned that I was reading and reviewing Abi T. Ngunga’s recently published dissertation, Messianism in the Old Greek of Isaiah (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). Well, I was, and I did, and the review is now available in full here, soon to be published in the Westminster Theological Journal (issue tbd).

However, I thought it might be helpful to provide an even briefer overview of my review, and add some extraneous comments that did not make it into the review itself.

All in all, I for one find Ngunga’s enterprise worthwhile. Essentially, his thesis asks “Does the LXX translation of Isaiah reflect a greater sense of messianic expectation than its Hebrew source text?” As I discuss in my review, however, answering this question means you have to determine whether LXX-Isaiah was translated by just one person, otherwise any messianic “flavor” in a given text could be unique to just that text, rather than characteristic of the book as a whole. You also have to make a case that any time the Greek text differs in meaning from the Hebrew, it is not due to factors like the translation process itself, scribal error, damages to the source text that made reading (and thus translating) it difficult, or changes made over its reception history. Rather, you must prove that Greek changes are best attributed to the translator at the level of the text’s production, intentional or not.

These can be difficult issues to navigate, of course. But to make matters more complex, this kind of inquiry as a whole presumes that LXX translators would have had some kind of messianic theology. And it presumes that their theology would differ from (would have developed beyond?) the Hebrew text’s own messianism enough to prompt intentional or unintentional alterations in the Greek text’s meaning. It is here that Ngunga faces his most comprehensive challenge and, I expect, will receive the most critique in broader scholarship.

The reason is that much, even most, of the scholarly consensus does not hold that any developed messianism would have existed in pre-Qumran, Alexandrian Jewish communities. As I mention in my review, Ngunga does a good job of challenging this notion from the root, both historically and academically. The latter by tracing the origins of the scholarly assumption that Diaspora Judaism was non-messianic.

But, again, I find the enterprise worthwhile. From the reading I have done in this topic, it seems to me that question begging is not uncommon. Often, scholars will say something like “there is no literary evidence for messianic theology in the Diaspora community (except for the LXX), therefore we should not expect to find any.” So I say more comprehensive studies of LXX books like Ngunga’s are needed, and could be very useful to determine just whether or not the majority opinion holds up.