Leonard Greenspoon and Olivier Munnich, eds. VIII Congress of the
International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies: Paris 1992.
Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint and Cognate Studies, no. 41.
Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-7885-0208-5. Pp. xi+401. US $54.95.
1. These twenty-four papers evoke a splendid meeting of the IOSCS in Paris
in July 1992 at the noble College de France. In preparing this review of
the proceedings for TC, I am conscious that the literary form of book
reviews for electronic publication is still developing. One important
benefit of electronic publication could be that collections of essays or
conference papers can now be reviewed at greater length than is customary
in hard copy publications. On the other hand, the lack of restriction of
space could become a mixed blessing. Reflection on this has led to a
division of my review into two parts: first, a "table of contents" of the
book, then a more detailed review of each contribution.
2. The book contains the following articles.
* Marguerite Harl, "L'originalité lexicale de la version grecque du
Deutéronome (LXX) et la 'paraphrase' de Flavius Josčphe (A.J. iv,
176-331)"
* Zipora Talshir, "The Contribution of Diverging Traditions Preserved in
the Septuagint to Literary Criticism of the Bible"
* Raija Sollamo, "The Pleonastic Use of the Pronoun in Connection with
the Relative Pronoun in the LXX of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy"
* Ilmari Soisalon-Soininen, "Übersetzen: Der Sprache Gewalt antun"
* Detlef Fraenkel, "Übersetzungsnorm und literarische Gestaltung spuren
individueller Übersetzungstechnik in Exodus 25ff. + 35ff."
* Gilles Dolival, "Remarques sur l'originalité du livre grec des
Nombres"
* Anneli Aejmelaeus, "The Septuagint of 1 Samuel"
* José Ramón Busto Saiz, "The Antiochene Text in 2 Samuel 22"
* Victoria Spottorno, "Josephus' Text for 1-2 Kings (3-4 Kingdoms)"
* Natalio Femández Marcos, "The Vetus Latina of 1-2 Kings and the
Hebrew"
* Alexander Rofé, "Not Exile but Annihilation for Zedekiah's People: The
Purport of Jeremiah 52 in the Septuagint"
* Leonard Greenspoon, "The IOSCS at 25 Years"
* Albert Pietersma, "The Acrostic Poems of Lamentations in Greek
Translation"
* Peter W. Flint, "The Psalms Scrolls from the Judaean Desert and the
Septuagint Psalter"
* R. G. Jenkins, "Sunnia and Fretela Revisited: Reflections on the
Hexaplaric Psalter"
* J. Lust, "The Greek Version of Balaam's Third and Fourth Oracles: The
a)nqrwpos in Num 24:7 and 17: Messianism and Lexicography"
* Takamitsu Muraoka, "The Infinitive in the Septuagint"
* Seppo Sipilä, "The Renderings of wyhy and whyh
as Formulas in the LXX of Joshua"
* Olivier Munnich, "Les versions grecques de Daniel et leurs substrats
sémitiques"
* S. Peter Cowe, "The Caucasian Versions of the Song of the Three (Dan
3:51-90)"
* Frank H. Polak, "A Classified Index of the Minuses of the Septuagint"
* Johann Cook, "The Septuagint Proverbs as a Jewish-Hellenistic
Document"
* John Jarick, "Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Text of Ecclesiastes"
* Theodore A. Bergren, "Assessing the Two Recensions of 6 Ezra"
3. As might be expected, the fully flowering French school was at the
centre of the meeting, and the book appropriately opens with a paper from
Marguerite Harl, leader and inspiration of the school. She takes up the
interesting question of the relationship between the "paraphrase" of
Flavius Josephus and the LXX text, with particular reference to the book of
Deuteronomy. Josephus shows no sign of using the highly original lexical
terms coined by the LXX translators to deal with the terms specific to
Judaism. The important conclusion drawn from this is that for the
Pentateuch Josephus cannot be shown to have drawn on any particular textual
tradition--Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. Harl also points to interesting links
between the lexical choices of Josephus and terms found in the Theodotionic
texts and those of Aquila and Symmachus.
4. Zipora Talshir has a wonderfully intelligent approach to the question of
the comparison of the LXX with corresponding Hebrew texts. Rightly, she
picks up threads of earlier scholars who insisted that the LXX was not just
a translation by a series of workers whose value for the scholar was
somehow diminished by the Tendenz which exercised an influence. The LXX
translators were themselves editors of the text, and the various approaches
and devices can also give us an insight into the editorial processes by
which the text reached its present forms. Talshir follows the profitable
line of comparing the work of two people editing the book of Kings: the
translator of the Third book of Kingdoms and the Chronicler.
5. Raija Sollamo contributes a paper that continues one she gave at the
Leuven IOSCS meeting in 1989 and that was published in the same series as
the volume under review (SBLSCS 31, 1991). Thus she completes her study of
the pleonastic anaphoric pronoun by presenting here material from
Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. This is typical of the careful work of
the Finnish school, to which the scholarly world will be permanently
indebted. The material at hand provides a useful index for comparison among
the translators of the Pentateuch.
6. The Finnish theme is continued by Ilmari Soisalon-Soininen, who teases
out some of the issues involved in attempting the translation of the book
of Proverbs. Soisalon-Soininen looks at the Old Greek translation of the
book of Proverbs and reflects on issues of modern translation of the same
book.
7. Detlef Fraenkel examines Exodus 25ff. and 35ff. and shows some of the
creative tension between norms of translation and the style of the
individual translator in the Pentateuch. He speaks of "Übersetzungskunst",
the art of translation, in these difficult passages. His deep knowledge of
the texts, and the ease with which he marshalls grammatical and stylistic
phenomena, make this study totally convincing.
8. Gilles Dorival, editor of the book of Numbers in La Bible d'Alexandrie,
gives a very useful paper on some distinctive features of the LXX of the
book of Numbers. It is particularly interesting to read this with Zipora
Talshir's article still fresh in one's mind. The distinctive features of
the LXX Numbers are not only pointed out with respect to the MT, but also
with respect to the translators of the other books of the Pentateuch. Like
Talshir, Dorival avoids easy generalisations and points instead to ways in
which the translators and their work might be characterised with greater
subtlety.
9. Anneli Aejmelaeus stresses the need to pay attention to the Old Greek
translation, in those sections of 1 Samuel where it can be identified, in
considering questions concerning the identity of the textual basis for the
Lucianic Text found in boc2e2. The solutions are still not evident.
Initially, study of the LXX of 1 Samuel seems to raise as many questions as
it solves. Professor Aejmelaeus has done a great service in showing how the
study of the translation character of Samuel-Kings, as well as the actual
equivalents used, is a methodologically sound way of moving toward a
solution of the questions.
10. José Ramón Busto Saiz examines the Antiochene text of 2 Samuel 22. He
compares the text with the parallel passage in Psalm 18, including the
Hexaplaric evidence from the palimpsest O.39 from the Ambrosian Library in
Milan. He also draws on some readings from 4QSama to support the case for
dependence of the Antiochene text for 2 Samuel 22 on the Hebrew.
11. Victoria Spottorno comes back to the question of the text of Josephus
for the last two books of Kings in his Antiquities. This follows her
earlier work on the similar question in relation to 1 and 2 Samuel. Again,
she finds that Josephus' text is dependent on a Greek text that was at the
first stages of the development of the Antiochene text.
12. Natalio Fernández Marcos also deals with the Antiochene text of 1-2
Kings, examining the Vetus Latina. Having added to the arguments for a
contact between the Old Latin and the Hebrew tradition, Fernández Marcos
goes on to consider the interpretation of these contacts. Avoiding a
simplistic solution that posits a Hebrew original for the variant readings,
he considers that some of the readings may have come to the Vetus Latina
through a Greek Vorlage, while others came indirectly through the influence
of the various revisions that were circulating, and in particular those
collected in the Hexapla. Fernández Marcos has examined more texts and
developed his observations in Scribes and Translators: Septuagint and Old
Latin in the Books of Kings (Leiden: Brill, 1994).
13. Alexander Rofé's examination of Jeremiah 52 argues that in this passage
the shorter text of the LXX in references to the exile is a curtailment of
a longer text found in its Vorlage, and that this is one instance where the
longer text is older. Rofé restates his position that the editing of
biblical books progressed by both accretion and detraction.
14. Al Pietersma looks at the question of what happened to the acrostic
feature of Lam 1-4 in Greek translation. The manuscript tradition in
Hebrew, Syriac and the Vulgate seems to draw attention to the acrostic
features. Although a majority of Greek textual witnesses label the
alphabetic strophes with the names of the Hebrew letters in Greek script,
it is not clear whether this feature is original or secondary in the Greek
text. Rahlfs judged them secondary and omitted them both from his text and
from his apparatus, largely because in chapters 2-4 the Greek text shows a
reversal of the letters pe and ayin to the "usual" alphabetic order but not
a reversal of their corresponding strophes. Ziegler follows Rahlfs in
omitting names of the Hebrew letters from both the text and the apparatus
of his critical edition. Pietersma argues for the originality of the
presence of these verse markers in the Greek translation, presenting a
closely argued case that both deals with Rahlfs' arguments and advances new
elements based on the nature of Greek Lamentations.
15. Peter W. Flint considers the 39 Psalms manuscripts from the Judaean
Desert and presents a great deal of useful material relating them to the
Greek Psalter. This material was published by Flint in greater detail after
the conference in The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms,
Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, no. 17 (Leiden: Brill, 1995),
but the reader will find here a very useful and detailed study.
16. A second paper on the Psalter, by R. G. Jenkins, looks again at
Jerome's letter to Sunnia and Fretela. The readings cited by Jerome are
compared with the Milan and Cambridge fragments of the Hexaplaric Psalter.
When they are related to the text of the Syrohexaplaric Psalter, the
question of the relation of SyrHex to the Hexapla comes back into focus.
Although SyrHex is often accepted as Lucianic, Jenkins argues that the
question should be re-opened and that the consensus is unjustified. He
further suggests that the best explanation of the evidence is that the
Syrohexaplaric Psalter is Tetraplaric rather than Hexaplaric.
17. Johan Lust's lexicographical concerns emerge in his study of the
messianic connotations of the Hebrew and Greek texts of Balaam's third and
fourth oracles. He concludes that there is hardly any reason to argue that
the LXX version of Num 24:17 is more messianic than the MT, even though the
appearance of the term anqrwpos is hard to explain.
18. Scholars studying the LXX tend to see it either as a document written
in koine Greek or as a translation of a Hebrew text, matching Greek
grammatical categories to Hebrew ones. Takamitsu Muraoka looks at uses of
the infinitive in arguing for an approach that avoids the polarity of much
conventional LXX scholarship. This paper is doubly interesting in that it
advances an approach that Muraoka intends to use in writing a syntax of the
Greek of the LXX. We look forward keenly to that work, which will surely
fill a great gap in LXX tools.
19. Seppo Sipilä is representative of a school that begins from the
"translation technique" pole. In this article he applies the methods used
by Anneli Aejmelaeus in her study of Parataxis in the Septuagint (AASF
Diss. Hum. Lit. 31 [Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1982]) to the LXX
of Joshua; by doing so he identifies aspects of translation technique in
renderings of wyhy and whyh. The paper also
illustrates the importance of paying attention to the context of
translation of particular formulae or words.
20. In a superbly crafted article, Olivier Munnich examines the relations
between three fragments of Daniel found in the fourth cave at Qumran and
the ancient Greek versions of Daniel. Daniel is something of a conundrum.
Although in general the text attributed to Theodotion seems to correct the
Old Greek by reference to a Semitic model close to the MT, on occasion
where the Old Greek is close to the MT, the text attributed to Theodotion
seems to introduce a difference based on a variant Semitic Vorlage.
Although Munnich is careful to take into account the margin of incertitude
in discussions based on retroversions, it does seem that he has identified
a convergent series of data that suggest that at places Theodotion's
Vorlage differed from the proto-Masoretic Text. In particular Munnich draws
on an impressive range of literary critical skills as well as text critical
data to suggest that the text of Daniel 2:13-24 is a secondary addition
made in Hebrew (on which the text attributed to Theodotion is based) but
later translated into Aramaic as it is found in the MT.
21. We stay with Daniel in the following article, where S. Peter Cowe
studies the relationship of the old Armenian and Georgian versions of Dan
3:51-90. The article ends with a tentative reconstruction of the earliest
stratum of the Armenian version.
22. Frank H. Polak writes about one use of the Hebrew-Greek aligned texts
of CATSS-Jerusalem: the study of the "minuses of the LXX". The dream is to
be able to present "a comprehensive overview of various phenomena, so as to
facilitate investigation of the actual data without exclusive dependence on
general 'canons' of judgement". But of course this raises a whole series of
questions of its own, and Polak's paper shows how certain criteria are used
to judge whether a particular reading constitutes a "minus" or not. In this
context "minus" is a neutral term that does not specify whether or not the
Greek text is thought to have omitted a text from its Vorlage. Neither can
a certain personal judgement be avoided in the presentation of the material
under seven categories (word classes, clause structure, stylistic
phenomena, sentence structure beyond the boundaries of the clause,
translation technique, mechanical problems, relationship with other text
forms). A particular case may be cited under several of these categories.
CATSS has led the way in the application of computer techiniques to
Septuagintal studies, but there still seems to be something of a gap
between the possibility of gathering comprehensive data and the conclusions
to be drawn from that data.
23. Johann Cook takes a very different approach in his paper, when he puts
forward the case for the LXX text of Proverbs to be considered as a
Jewish-Hellenistic document. The contrast between wisdom and foreign folly
in the first nine chapters, which he takes to be a "representative corpus",
is to be understood as a warning against foreign wisdom made by
conservative Jews. The study is particularly notable in interpreting
lexemes and themes against a whole pericope or chapter. In one sense Cook's
final position is not far from that of Gerleman, who emphasised that the
LXX Proverbs was a Hellenistic document, but noted that the acceptance of
Hellenistic culture and ideas was minimal when compared to the
Hellenization seen in Philo. Gerleman supposes continuity, Cook,
intellectual resistance. The fulcrum may be the dating of the text.
24. John Jarick's work on the book of Ecclesiastes in patristic tradition
is important. He has already published Gregory Thaumaturgos' Paraphrase of
Ecclesiastes in the SBLSCS series (no. 29, 1990), as well as A
Comprehensive Bilingual Concordance of the Hebrew and Greek Texts of
Ecclesiastes (SBLSCS 36, 1993). In this paper he identifies ways in which
the Greek and Peshitta traditions seem to harmonise the language and ideas
of Ecclesiastes with the rest of the Hebrew Bible. He takes as his starting
point the publication in 1988 of a manuscript from Damascus containing a
sizeable fragment of a Syriac translation of the commentary on Ecclesiastes
by Theodore of Mopsuestia and the biblical text cited therein. Many of the
(more than one hundred) divergencies between the Syriac text in this
manuscript and the Peshitta are not to be related to the influence of the
Old Greek text, nor indeed to the Syrohexapla. This may indicate that the
translators, commentator and transmitters did not feel bound to exactitude
in dealing with the text of Ecclesiastes. An appendix lists possible
variant readings in Theodore of Mopsuestia's text of Ecclesiastes.
25. The final article, by Theodore A. Bergren, studies the relationship
between the two Latin recensions of 6 Ezra. He concludes that "the
'Spanish' recension is a Latin revision of the 'French' recension, probably
without reference to a Greek text". Quite apart from the theory advanced,
which seems convincing, this article is invaluable for its clear exposition
of the nomenclature and principal manuscripts of the 2 Esdras or 4 Ezra
corpus.
26. Conferences, like geese, come in flocks. Some provide as much material
for the novelist as for the scholar. Really academically satisfying
conferences are rare indeed, and among them must be numbered the triennial
meeting of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate
Studies in conjunction with the International Organization for the Study of
the Old Testament. The Paris meeting was no exception. The handsome volume
in which the papers are presented is the result of extensive labour on the
part of the editors, to whom we must be grateful for their patience in
assembling the book from the many computerized formats in which the papers
were submitted. Although perfection has not yet been reached, we have come
a long way since the early days of "camera ready copy".
27. Leonard Greenspoon, one of the editors of the volume may well have got
to this part of the review in some dismay that there has been no mention of
his paper "The IOSCS at 25 years". This article gives a great deal of
information about the IOSCS in a style which many envy but few would dare
to imitate. It is a very useful introduction to the IOSCS as it completed
its first 25 years. Ad multos annos!
© TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 1996.
Gerard Norton
University of Birmingham