Septuagint

“ See below, No. 10. Among the poetical books that of Proverbs is the best. As a whole the Septuagint version cannot for a moment enter into competition with the Hebrew original. Yet, as the most ancient of versions and one which also represents a text much older than the Masoretic, its use is indispensable to every scholar who would study the Old Testament in the original language.
6. Independently of its critical value, the Septuagint must be regarded with deep interest from its close connection with the New Testament. ”

“ But after making every allowance for these cases a large class of passages remains, in which the Septuagint presents important variations from the Massoretic text. The test by which the value of these variations can be determined is the method of retranslation. A faithful translation from Hebrew into an idiom so different as the Greek especially such a translation as the Septuagint, the work of men who had no great command of Greek style cannot fail to retain the stamp of the original language. ”

“ So that, if the reader desires nothing else than to adhere to the history of events, he may be aroused from his sleep by the Septuagint interpreters, as well as the prophets, to search into the depth of the prophecy, as if they had said, In the forty days seek Him in whom thou mayest also find the three days,—the one thou wilt find in His ascension, the other in His resurrection. Because that which could be most suitably signified by both numbers, of which one is used by Jonah the prophet, the other by the prophecy of the Septuagint version, the one and self-same Spirit hath spoken. ”

“ To be more exact, our book represents some form of the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch midway between the forms presupposed by the Septuagint and the Syriac; for it agrees more frequently with the Septuagint, or with combinations into which the Septuagint enters, than with any other single authority, or with any combination excluding the Septuagint. Next to the Septuagint it agrees most often with the Syriac or with combinations into which the Syriac enters. ”

“ He accordingly arranged the texts to be compared in six [16] parallel columns in the following order:— (1) the Hebrew text; (2) the Hebrew transliterated into Greek letters; (3) Aquila; (4) Symmachus; (5) the Septuagint; and (6) Theodotion. In the Septuagint column he drew attention to those passages for which there was no Hebrew equivalent by prefixing an obelus; but where the Septuagint had nothing corresponding to the Hebrew text he supplied the omissions, chiefly but not entirely from the translation of Theodotion, placing an asterisk at the beginning of the interpolation ”

“ An early reader, probably of Pharisaic leanings, felt the poverty of the epilogue, [67] and sought to remedy it by the following addition in the Septuagint: ‘And Job died, old and full of days; and it is written that he will rise again with those whom the Lord raiseth.’ [68] The remainder of the Septuagint appendix testifies only to the love of the later Jews for amplifying Biblical notices (see Chap. VII.) Our own poet painter has also amplified the details of the epilogue, but in how different a way! (Gilchrist’s Life of Blake, i. 332-3) . ”

“ The children of Israel were three hundred thousand, and the men of Judah thirty thousand - This was a vast army, but the Septuagint make it even more: "All the men of Israel were ἑξακοσιας χιλιαδας, Six Hundred thousand; and the men of Judah ἑβδομηκοντα χιλιαδας, Seventy thousand." Josephus goes yet higher with the number of the Israelites: "He found the number of those whom he had gathered together to be ἑβδομηκοντα μυριαδας Seven Hundred thousand." Those of the tribe of Judah he makes seventy thousand, with the Septuagint. ”

“ When we say that the readings of the Septuagint afford a fair measure of the limits of variation in the early history of the text, it is by no means implied that the Greek version, taken as a whole, is as valuable as the Hebrew text. A translation can never supply the place of a manuscript. ”

“ The Christians, though with difficulty, did escape, every man; but not one of the Jews escaped, whether found in Jerusalem or elsewhere.
It is rather strange, but it is a fact, that this verse is the Septuagint translation of [208] : Behold, the righteous shall be recompensed in the earth; much more the wicked and the sinner. For this the Septuagint and St. Peter have, If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? Such a latitude of construction can scarcely be accounted for. ”

“ In fine, he would urge that the explanation of the LXX. is much more natural. God comes with thousands of saints, and the angels, the principal angels, those who are named Emanations were at his right hand. These proofs would have been invincible in the first ages of Christianity, where the version of the Septuagint was considered to be inspired, and had much greater authority given to it than to the Hebrew. ”

“ We find these Hellenists in Acts vi., living on the best terms with the religious authorities of the capital. Hellenists and Hebrews, the Septuagint and the original text, met in Jerusalem without schism or controversy. Yet many of the Palestinian scholars were familiar with Greek, and Paul cannot have been the only man born in the Hellenistic dispersion, and accustomed from infancy to the Greek version, who afterwards studied under Palestinian doctors, and became equally familiar with the Hebrew text. The divergences of the Septuagint must have been patent to all Jerusalem. ”

“ When the edition contained only the translations of the Septuagint, Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus, it was called Tetrapla, and the name of Octapla was sometimes given to the eight versions, that is, to the collections containing the translations of Jericho and Nicopolis. Ruffinus, speaking of this elaborate work, affirms that Origen undertook it because of the continual controversies between the Jews and Christians: the Jews citing the Hebrew, and the Christians the Septuagint, in their disputes, this father was willing to let the Christians understand how the Jews read the Bible ”

“ This is the reading of the Septuagint, as follows: ἂν εἰς ἄνθρωπόν τις ἁμάρτῃ, προσεύξονται περὶ αὐτοῦ. The Hebrew, however, is different, and reads, “If one man sin against another, God shall judge him; but if a man sin against the Lord, who shall entreat for him?” ”

“ The Septuagint reads, from the avenger of blood. The word translated here as "avenger" is a somewhat broader word in Hebrew (goel) , meaning something like, "a person who carries out duties associated with their status as a relative." In this case, though, the reference is to avenging bloodshed, and perhaps, following the Septuagint, it originally read goel ha-adam, "the goel of blood", to specifically indicate the function of revenge.↑ (35:20) throws [something] . The Hebrew does not say what the killer is supposed to have thrown. ”

“ There is a contradiction here—and that not merely verbal—between the evangelist and the prophet; for in this place at any rate both Septuagint and Hebrew agree. The evangelist says that he is not little among the princes of Judah, while the passage from which he queries says exactly the opposite of this, “Thou art small indeed and little; but yet out of thee, small and little as thou art, there shall come forth for me a leader in Israel,” a sentiment in harmony with that of the apostle, “God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” ”

“ For which reason I also, according to my capacity, following the footsteps of the apostles, who themselves have quoted prophetic testimonies from both, that is, from the Hebrew and the Septuagint, have thought that both should be used as authoritative, since both are one, and divine. But let us now follow out as we can what remains. ”

“ Note, further, that the words 'despise' and 'be weary' both imply rather rejection with loathing, and thus express unsubmissive impatience which gets no good from discipline. The beautiful rendering of the Septuagint, which has been made familiar by its adoption in Hebrews, makes the two words express two opposite faults. They 'despise' who steel their wills against the rod, and make as if they did not feel the pain; they 'faint' who collapse beneath the blows, which they feel so much that they lose sight of their purpose. ”

“ But it did not stand alone like the Septuagint. Many volumes of ecclesiastical literature are extant through which we could trace the gradual importation into the Latin language of the new meanings. For example, at the end of the second century—no doubt with the object of distinguishing the Christian Mystery of incarnation, death, and rebirth from its many rivals—Tertullian fixed the Latin ‘sacramentum’ as the proper translation of ‘musterion’ instead of ‘mysterium’, which would probably have disappeared altogether had not Jerome restored it to partial use. ”

“ The rest of the Jews used the Hebrew Scriptures; but at last they agreed that the Hellenists might use the Greek copies. Afterwards, however, finding that the Christians always used the Septuagint, when endeavouring to convince the Jews that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, their dislike to that version of the Holy Scriptures increased to such a degree, that they came to look upon all persons who used it as Schismatics; that is, as persons who sinfully separated themselves from their brethren, who held the true faith as delivered to them by Moses. ”

“ A devout believer in the omnipotence of the Deity would doubtless wonder how chariots of iron could form serious obstacles to the attainment of any object by Judah, when the Lord was fighting for Judah. The Septuagint renders the verse somewhat differently. ”

“ On turning to the Hebrew Bible, we find that the word is left untranslated, and simply given in its Hebrew form, thereby signifying that the translators could form no opinion whatever of the proper rendering of the word. The Septuagint translates the Tinshemeth as the Porphyrio or Ibis, and the Vulgate follows the same rendering. Later naturalists have agreed that the Septuagint and Vulgate have the far more probable reading ”

“ The Septuagint also must have had the same text, for it translates, "nor will (= can) a man walk and direct his own walking." The Masoretic punctuation is certainly incorrect; and the best that can be made of it is Hitzig's version, which, however, disregards the accents, although their authority is the same as that of the vowel points: I know Iahvah that not to man belongeth his way, not to a perishing (lit. "going," "departing") man—and [Pg 212] to direct his steps. Any reader of Hebrew may see at once that this is a very unusual form of expression. ”

“ If, therefore, the Jews could bar all appeals to the well-known Greek, and remove the controversy to the inner courts of their own temple, the decision, it might be expected, would not improbably turn out to be in their own favor. Just before Origen's own time more than one Jew or Judaizing heretic had attempted to produce Greek versions which should supersede the Septuagint. Some ninety years before the period of which we write, Aquila, a Jewish proselyte of Sinope, had issued what professed to be a literal translation from the Hebrew. ”

“ Without going very deeply into the matter, we may say that Hebrew scholars generally allow that the ideas of Satan—a power opposed to that of God, and of angels or spirits, were introduced between the captivity and the period when the scriptures were translated into Greek, and that the notion of a future life and the resurrection of the dead, was developed after the time of the Septuagint, about b.c. ”

“ Difficulties—or what seemed such—are removed by the most bold methods, and by free handling of the text; it need scarcely be said, often very unsatisfactorily. More especially, a strenuous effort is made to banish all anthropomorphisms, as inconsistent with their ideas of the Deity. [46]
Later the same authority points out the fact that the Septuagint version of the Hebrew scriptures became really the people's Bible to that large Jewish world through which Christianity was afterwards to address itself to mankind. ”

“ The Septuagint translate the Hebrew just as the evangelist does here, τι εμοι και ὑμιν; it is the same idiom in both places, as there can be no doubt that the demoniac spoke in Hebrew, or in the Chaldeo-Syriac dialect of that language, which was then common in Judea. See on [70] (note) .
Art thou come to destroy us? - We may suppose this spirit to have felt and spoken thus: "Is this the time of which it hath been predicted, that in it the Messiah should destroy all that power which we have usurped and exercised over the bodies and souls of men? Alas! it is so. ”

“ Luke, he had no doubt learned the use of the Septuagint, in which his knowledge of the Greek tongue soon rendered him an adept. His copy of that version, however, does not always agree with the Received Text, as the reader will perceive. ”

“ Until recently it was generally taken for granted by Biblical scholars that there were no codices extant in the world but these five, which contained data of a nature to enable us to reconstruct the text of the Septuagint. And the assistance given by these manuscripts was dubious at best, for they included the misleading additions incorporated in the text by Origen, merely marking them with asterisks, which were not only insufficient in number, but oftentimes wrongly distributed. ”