Toto

From Paleojudaica

Bible Studies / The things that you're liable to read in the Bible

stephan huller

Charlesworth also accepts SP primacy. How can the Pentateuch be imagined to be a Judaic document when a) there is no explicit reference to Jerusalem b) the area surrounding Gerizim is the sacred heart of the text c) all the patriarchs are buried there d) SP readings are found at Qumran and e) Samaritan scripts too

avi

Hi Toto, and all,

This link is interesting, but, perhaps, not for the reason intended.

Here is some of the text:

So, here is the problem, in a nutshell:

We don't possess an accurate copy of the Greek Septuagint.

Our oldest extant copy is found in Codex Sinaiticus, and it is filled with interpolations.

So, please, take with a grain of salt, this notion, of Yair Hoffman, that our earliest example of the Greek Septuagint dates from the third to the first century BCE.

NONSENSE.

avi

stephan huller

I agree that our LXX is not Philo's LXX. But what is it then?

avi

We are obliged to rely upon the DSS.

I am eager for those scrolls to go online, especially, so that we can once and for all repudiate Codex Sinaiticus' version of LXX as a forgery, fraud and a fake.

avi

stephan huller

I don't understand what the DSS has to do with the original Greek wording of the LXX

spin

If I understand what you're saying it's the stupidity of Frank Moore Cross skulking behind it, the three traditions, Masoretic, Samaritan and LXX. Well, there are Hebrew texts which give indications of a Vorlage to the forms found in the LXX, also examples of texts that are more Masoretic in flavor and clearly stuff that relates to the Samaritan. All there at Qumran. Only thing is they often appear in what one might call "mixed" traditions, ie Qumran doesn't support the three traditions in Cross's head, but a rather heterogeneous flux of biblical texts. Eugene Ulrich has attempted to deal with the making of the biblical text from indications of the various flavors at Qumran. His The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (or via: amazon.co.uk), Eerdmans/Brill, 1999, contains ideas that may be useful in understanding the biblical text traditions. He indicates that the "Scriptures were pluriform .. until at least 70 ce" (p.31), ie there was no text tradition that had priority before 70 ce.

avi

Hope this helps:

Do these most ancient of all extant copies of Septuagint manifest differences from the highly interpolated LXX found in Codex Sinaiticus?

avi

Toto

I am not an expert, but my understanding is that there was no copy of the Septuagint found at Qumran, only some Greek fragments of the minor prophets.

stephan huller

Philo's LXX is not the same as the same text as used by most of the Church Fathers. But notice Clement's citation of Exodus 33.11:

Accordingly it is said, "God talked with Moses as a friend with a friend" (Διελέγετο Μωυσεῖ ὁ θεὸς ὡς φίλος φίλῳ).

This is completely different from what appears in our LXX. Unfortunately we don't have a reference in Philo for this section of Exodus but it is my guess that they are one and the same. Again avi the question is why did the original LXX disappear? Clearly it was connected with heresy both Jewish and Christian. The question, in my mind at least, is whether it was a voluntary abandonment of the text in the third century or imposed from without.

Which should also remember that there was supposed to be another Greek translation developed specifically for Samaritans - the Samaritkon. No idea when, where, how this text emerged other than (a) Origen mentions it and (b) Marqe the great Samaritan 'prophet like Moses' (see marginal note Leningrad MS of the Mimar) knows and uses a Greek text of the Pentateuch. Was Marqe's text the LXX or the Samaritikon? Who knows.