Many Christians picture the Septuagint as a single document, produced by one committee of Alexandrian scholars working to a shared plan. The Greek Old Testament tells a different story. Its books came into being over more than two centuries and in several geographic centers, and the translators varied widely in skill, training, and aim. Some followed the Hebrew line by line. Others reshaped what they found. Anyone who treats the whole collection as one voice will misread individual books, while a reader who listens to each translator separately sees how the word of God crossed from Hebrew into the common language of the Mediterranean world. This post places the books along a spectrum of translation method, examines the character of the Greek itself, and tests both with passages from Ecclesiastes, Job, and Proverbs, always measuring the Greek against the inspired Hebrew text and the testimony of Christ and the apostles.
Literary Backgrounds: Greek Language and Ancient Near Eastern Connections
At one end of the spectrum stand translators who pursued strict word-for-word correspondence. Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, and the B-text of Judges belong here. These translators matched every Hebrew element with a Greek counterpart, preserved Hebrew word order, and used the same Greek word for the same Hebrew word whatever the context demanded. The most rigid among them rendered the Hebrew marker of the direct object, אֵת, with the preposition σύν, a habit no native Greek writer would recognize. In the middle of the spectrum sit the Pentateuch, Joshua, and the historical narratives. There the translators chose vocabulary according to context, used Greek particles such as δέ and οὖν with skill, handled infinitives and participles in proper Greek fashion, and smoothed an occasional difficult Hebrew idiom while keeping the meaning and structure intact.
At the far end stand Job, Proverbs, Isaiah, and the Old Greek of Daniel, where the translators handled the Hebrew with considerable freedom. They omitted difficult passages, expanded others for rhetorical effect, and replaced Hebrew sayings with Greek maxims and ethical commonplaces. The Old Greek of Job runs roughly sixteen percent shorter than the Hebrew, and its translator recast poetic parallelisms into heroic verse forms that recall the epic tradition of Homer, a tradition every educated Greek reader carried in his memory. Proverbs borrowed the moral vocabulary of Hellenistic teachers. Behind these books stands the wisdom tradition of the Ancient Near East, which Israel’s sages worked within under divine inspiration and which the Greek translators had to carry into a culture that prized its own philosophers.
Earlier interpreters sometimes called the language of the Septuagint “Holy Ghost Greek,” a special dialect that God reserved for sacred writing. Papyri from Egypt, among them the Oxyrhynchus and Zenon finds, ended that notion. Adolf Deissmann gathered this evidence in Light from the Ancient East, and it shows that the translators wrote the ordinary Koine Greek of Ptolemaic Egypt. The distinctive flavor of the Greek Old Testament comes from the pressure of Hebrew syntax on that everyday speech. God placed his Word in the language people actually spoke, and he meant ordinary people to hear it.
Hebrew patterns show through that vernacular in several ways. Hebrew narrative links clause to clause with the vav, and literal translators rendered nearly every one with καί, producing long chains of “and… and… and” that classical Greek rhetoric would have broken into subordinate clauses. The Hebrew preposition בְּ became ἐν even when it expressed means, so that a man strikes ἐν μαχαίρῃ, “with a sword,” and מִפְּנֵי became ἀπὸ προσώπου, “from the face of,” a phrase that sounded clumsy to Greek ears. When Hebrew doubled a verb for emphasis, as in מוֹת תָּמוּת, the translators answered with a noun and verb pair: θανάτῳ ἀποθανεῖσθε in Genesis 2:17, “you shall surely die,” and ἀκοῇ ἀκούσετε in Isaiah 6:9, “hearing you shall hear.” Each of these choices reproduces the shape of the Hebrew in Greek dress.
Theological and Ethical Analysis
Ecclesiastes shows what strict translation does to a book’s vocabulary. The Hebrew הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים אָמַר קֹהֶלֶת הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל becomes Ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, εἶπεν ὁ Ἐκκλησιαστής, ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων, τὰ πάντα ματαιότης. The translator carried the Hebrew plural of intensity straight into a Greek genitive plural that classical writers almost never used, and he coined Ἐκκλησιαστής from ἐκκλησία to reproduce the Hebrew root קהל, “to assemble.” The result confronts the reader with a sober verdict: every effort under the sun, pursued apart from God, evaporates like breath. The Preacher gathers an assembly and tells it the truth about a life without God, and the Greek preserves that ethic of humility without softening it.
Job 19 shows what a free translator does to theology. Where the Hebrew has Job declare, “I know that my Redeemer lives,” the Greek reads οἶδα γὰρ ὅτι ἀέναός ἐστιν ὁ ἐκλύειν με μέλλων, “for I know that he is everlasting who is about to deliver me.” The legal figure of the גֹּאֵל, the kinsman-redeemer who stands for a family member, dissolves into a participial phrase. The Hebrew line about seeing God from his flesh gives way to παρὰ γὰρ κυρίου ταῦτά μοι συνετελέσθη, “for from the Lord these things have been accomplished for me.” The translator took a notoriously difficult line and turned it into a declaration of providence. That declaration affirms a true doctrine, since God governs Job’s suffering, and it gives the reader tidy theological closure.
Old Testament Analysis and Critique
The Old Testament itself sets the standard for judging these renderings. Moses commands Israel neither to add to the word nor to take from it (Deuteronomy 4:2), and the sage warns in Proverbs 30:6 against adding to God’s words. By that standard the paraphrase in Job 19 leaves a gap. Leviticus 25 and the book of Ruth establish the גֹּאֵל as a living kinsman who pays the price and restores what was lost, and Job’s confession draws on that picture when he declares that his Redeemer lives and will stand upon the earth. A Greek phrase about one “about to deliver” keeps the idea of rescue and loses the family bond that makes the Redeemer so near. The Hebrew expression of Job’s hope to see God in his flesh preserves what the Greek statement about providence cannot: the expectation of a personal meeting with God beyond the destruction of the body.
The Proverbs translator faces the same measure. Where the Hebrew says לֵךְ־אֶל־נְמָלָה עָצֵל, “Go to the ant, you sluggard,” the Greek follows with ἴθι πρὸς τὸν μύρμηκα, ὦ ὀκνηρέ, and then adds an entire passage that sends the sluggard to the bee: πορεύθητι πρὸς τὴν μέλισσαν καὶ μάθε ὡς ἐργάτις ἐστίν. The ant served as a symbol of industry across the Ancient Near East, and Proverbs 6 draws on that familiar image. The bee was a favorite of Greek moral writers such as Aristotle and Xenophon, who used it to illustrate civic order and noble industry. The translator inserted into Scripture a Hellenistic ethical trope that the Hebrew author never wrote. The lesson about diligence stands true, and Christians affirm it, yet the addition rests on a translator’s initiative and lacks the authority of the inspired Hebrew.
No comments:
Post a Comment