HerodionRomulus

I've missed that one. Where is it.

Speaking of swooning and delicacies, once I was visiting a fundamentalist church in the Bible belt.
As is the practice in waaaaay too many churches, they were reading the announcements even though they were printed in the bulletin.

One such announcement was a list of signs of Holiday Depression (it was Xmas time)
They read the list of warning signs verbatim until arriving at the one which said "decreasing interest in sex."
The reader rendered it as "loss of libido."

:banghead: Prudery lives!

rlogan

Tread lightly on me here guys -

My understanding was the septuagint came into being maybe 300 years BC roughly. It translated the Hebrew, which the jews quit using as it became a dead language basically.

But after the 1st century the Jews rejected the septuagint and did their own translations of the ancient Hebrew.

we don't have an actual septuagint, but rather a book here&there from different periods. I don't think we have any of the old hebrew.

So I'm a little fuzzy here: origin does some kind of reconciliation of some different translations. I don't Know if the Jewish translated Hebrew texts go off on their own to become the
the Masoritic texts or whether they play some part in origen's little enterprise too.

So Spin when you're saying the "translators" have Hebrew available - do you mean they're looking at the Masoritic texts, and these had a line "separate" from the Christian septuagint and Origen compilations? Or is there a Hebrew variant apart from the Masoritic?

So dead sea scrolls turn out to ba a good check on the septuagint and the Masoritic.

Who wins there?

Happy 2004.

spin

No. There is a story in a work called the Letter of Aristaeus which tells of the Hebrew law being translated into Greek at the time of Ptolemy Phildelphus. Scholars usually consider the letter to be apocryphal, as it makes a few historical mistakes indicating it wasn't written at the time it intimates. The Aristaeus account is quite "fictional in the types of information it introduces to the story, including the 72 (hence septuagint, well, it should be 70) who did the translation coming up with exactly the same text. So the date attributed to the Greek translation circa 250 BCE cannot be used as meaningful.

No, the Jewish works were written in Hebrew and then translated according to need into Greek. So, you're correct with this:

Well, the funny thing is that among the scrolls are various Hebrew biblical texts and they reflect various text traditions, one of which is a Hebrew underlying the LXX tradition, ie the variations found in this Hebrew variety of texts can be seen in many of the oddities in the LXX, with the Hebrew naturally preceding the LXX.

One strand of Hebrew text tradition is something which led directly to the Massoretic tradition. In fact all the texts from Masada (circa 70 CE) and Murabba'at (circa 135 CE) reflect the tradition. There were no other traditions found at that site.

I'm referring to modern translators of such things as the NIV who have the Massoretic text available to them and choose not to use it, despite the fact that the major tradition found among the scrolls supports it in almost every way.

Yup.

(Remember that there are very many Hebrew biblical fragments.)

I scratch my head, wondering what are you asking...


spin

rlogan

Got a rank amateur here, spin. Let me revise it in view of what you've said.

It seems there's more than one Hebrew tradition going already by the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The septuagint gets translated and leads ultimately to the christian traditions. I want to make sure about this part: the Masoretic follows certain original Hebrew traditions and is not influenced by the Septuagint strand.

Because the scrolls reflect more than one tradition, they can "validate" both strands. What I was wondering is if generally speaking one can say the Masoretic or Septuagint strands is more "faithful" to whatever originals they were trying to follow.



Here is an example where this would be important to the "Jesus Question":

In Psalms 22: 16-21 you have this controversy over whether the text should read "like a lion at my feet" or "pierced my hands and feet".

I understand the MT supports the lion and the Christian supports the piercing.

Given that the last verse refers to both dogs and a lion, it makes sense to me that the early verse should be both dogs and lion too. I favor the MT on that basis.

This would be more evidence to me that a Christian writer was cramming material from Psalms 22 Septuagint into the gospel account, not realizing it was a mistake in translation.

I think the virgin birth business is a similar affair.

It leads me to wondering then how much more of this sort of thing was happening, and therefore how much of the content in the current Bibles is Septuagint-induced bad translation.

Should Chritians be wearing lion pendants and "lionizing" a little slut? A religion with a little more zest!!

Anyway, I see the import of using both sets of materials and hashing out the differences. If one tradition tends to be significantly more "corrupt" than the other by virtue of the dead Sea scrolls "test" then it provides some marginal assistance in making the call.

I apologize for my ignorance here. It's why I come play with the big dogs.

the_cave

Ha nice.

Actually...I bet that's exactly it! The authors of the scriptures did have senses of humor, after all...

Doctor X

rlogan:

spin will answer your questions far better than I can. On another thread, I link to some basic books on the LXX and MT 'n stuff. No need to apologize.

the_cave:

Indeed. People who look at the infamous "bears eat kids and little lambs eat ivy," incident where the kids taunt Ezra to be met and rent by bears for it offensiveness. Non-theists tease the theists and apologetic theists try to turn the kids into a band of Crips . . . with the bears only like . . . you know . . . playing with them.

The humor of the passage comes from what preceeds it. The MEN of the town treat Ezra well, so he gives them a spring. Then comes the kids. It is sort of a "gallows" or "black hyperbolic" humor--treat old prophets well!

--J.D.

spin

Correct.

They are simply two diverging text traditions. I've read that what is found in some of the pesharim is that while one tradition is cited, another is apparently commented on, ie the comments reflect another tradition than the one cited, so it would seem that they were given "equal footing".

First, I don't know if the passage is found in the scrolls, but it would be good to know, for it would provide an early attestation and give us a starting point.

The text in Hebrew is unclear because it doesn't make syntactic sense. The verse may read:

For dogs surround me, a council of evildoers encompass me, like a lion my hands and my feet

The Hebrew text featured a marginal note which suggested a verb with a similar appearance to the word in the text and this means "dig, dig through, make a hole". There are a number of places in which an error has been preserved by later scribes for fear of intervening the wrong way on the text, but providing an alternative which seemed to make sense in the margin.

As you now see the Hebrew is not clear. In such a situation the best that can be done is to refer to translations, but as you are aware the translations have theological reasons for having a particular reading, though this is only said in hindsight. They may be reflecting the underlying text more closely than the obviously disturbed Hebrew version.

Well, to me it is different. It is based on a Hebrew word, meaning simply "young woman", being translated into a Greek word which could also mean "virgin" and the writer took it to mean this latter reading without understanding the significance of the context of the original verse.

I can't think of too many such examples.

Ummm, does this need comment?

I don't see any "significantly" in the matter.

Yap. Yap. Yap.


spin

Haran

I have not checked it yet, but I believe the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (Wise, Abegg, et al.) reads "pierced" in 5/6 HevPs with the LXX and Syriac Peshitta.

The following website has some very good information:
http://www.hadavar.net/Psalm22.html

As does this one:
http://www.heartofisrael.org/chazak/articles/ps22.htm

CJD

Indeed, I agree, except for the very last clause. Spin, you always seem to assume the worst when it comes to the ancient writers, editors and translators of the Tanak. I would take the translated Greek as completely understanding the original context: Isaiah's wife, at the time of the omen, very well could have been virgin [if he had not "gone into" her yet] (chpt. 7). After that they shared the bed (8:3); after that, Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz was born.

Regards,

CJD

spin

I think the language is particularly plain in the sentence:

H-`LMH HRH WYLDT BN

The young woman [is] pregnant and shall bear a son...

If she is pregnant you cannot call her a virgin, and notice HRH means "pregnant, with child". Look at Isaiah 26:17,

As (one) with child[ie HRH] draws near to begetting...

And the Greek version of 7:14 is rather similar to the Hebrew:

<grk>parQenos</> [is] pregnant and shall bear a son...

It's difficult to take parQenos, which means both "young woman" and "virgin", to mean "virgin" when she is with child.

The importance here is to explain how an ancient reader could get the idea that many xians want this verse to have.


spin