The old Greek of Isaiah : an analysis of its pluses and minuses
Vorm-Croughs, M. van der
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Vorm-Croughs, M. van der. (2010, November 10). The old Greek of Isaiah : an analysis of its pluses and minuses. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/16135
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In this study I have attempted to provide a systematic and comprehensive survey of the pluses and minuses in the Greek translation of Isaiah. For this purpose I have collected and
compared as many cases of plus and minus in the translation as possible. After having done this, it appears to me that the large majority of these cases can be assigned to one of the following twelve categories, which indicate their possible origin:
1. Double translation: At least 120 examples can be found in LXX Isaiah of pluses that may be the result of double translation. The second rendering of a Hebrew expression in the LXX
sometimes forms a synonym of the first one, but on many other occasions it reflects a
different reading or interpretation of the Hebrew word or phrase. Although the two renderings are regularly joined in coordination, the second rendering can also be located elsewhere in the same sentence, at the beginning of the subsequent clause, or at the end of the preceding one.
Doublets can have multiple backgrounds. At times they may reflect a conflation of different readings, but mostly they are the creation of the Isaiah translator himself, who adopted them to express the meaning of a Hebrew word in a more precise way, or—particularly when the two renderings reflect two different readings or interpretations of the Hebrew—who made use of double translation as a tool to interpret the Hebrew in alternative ways.
A phenomenon related to double translation is “repetitive rendering,” which means that the Greek fills out the ellipsis of the Hebrew by repeating a word from a neighbouring phrase or clause (by means of an identical expression or a synonym). This could serve the purpose of clarifying the text, and often of “improving” a parallelism. This technique can be detected in at least fifty instances in LXX Isaiah.
2. Condensation: As has already been pointed out in earlier publications, the Isaiah translator shows an inclination to reduce identical or synonymous expressions in the Hebrew. Not only does this concern similar words or phrases, but also parallel sentences. In LXX Isaiah I have counted roughly 300 examples of minuses that can be explained by this technique.
3. Explicitation: Quite often the Isaiah translator has added expressions which are implied by the Hebrew but not stated explicitly. In this way he has attempted to elucidate the Hebrew text or make it more specific. I have listed almost 500 pluses that may have this tendency as their background.
4. Implicitation: The translator has now and then also exposed his text to implicitation (though to a much lesser degree than to explicitation), leaving out words which were already presupposed by the context, or information he may have considered to be familiar to his readers. Occasionally he has omitted specifying details that were not vital for the message and content of the text, e.g. specifications of body parts. Such “redundant” words he may have removed in order to arrive at a more concise text. In this study I have offered circa 200 examples of implicitation in LXX Isaiah.
5. The addition or omission of particles: The Isaiah translator has frequently supplied
particles—especially conjunctions—to his text, with the apparent aim of clarifying or creating
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relationships between the different parts of his discourse. Also some minuses consisting of particles can be found, in particular the Hebrew conjunction יכ.
6. The creation or improvement of rhetorical figures: Although the stylistic aspirations of the Isaiah translator have regularly been undervalued in works on the Greek Isaiah, hundreds of pluses and a few dozens of minuses can be found in the translation which probably have arisen from the translator’s wish to “ameliorate” or to introduce rhetorical figures in his work.
These figures include word repetition, synonymia, parallelism, and chiasm. The other side of the same coin is that in a number of cases the translator rather seems to have deleted figures of style, especially where one encounters in the Hebrew examples of geminatio, and
additionally in some instances of parallelism. Yet, those instances may also illustrate the translator’s effort to stay in line with the prescriptions of Greek style, as he may now and then have omitted figures in order to avoid superfluity in ornamentation, which was considered a sin against good style in classical rhetoric.
7. Anaphoric translation: The adoption of elements from other Scriptural passages, both from within Isaiah and from beyond, accounts for a significant number of the pluses and minuses of the Isaiah translation. Sometimes formulations have been assimilated to similar ones
elsewhere (harmonisation), while at other times ideas or expressions have been adopted from texts which do not show a literal correspondence in wording, but are related to the Isaianic text only as regards their content. Besides these, some instances can also be distinguished where the borrowing seems to be purely lexical, without the occurrence of similar contexts.
While it is evident that the translator in rendering his text has made extensive use of elements from the surrounding text and from passages elsewhere in Isaiah, his borrowing from other Biblical books raises further questions. Obviously, the Isaiah translator was familiar with and employed the Greek Pentateuch, but it is less clear whether he made use of other documents, such as the Psalms, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve Prophets, and—if he did—whether this was only in their Hebrew version or already in a Greek translation. Still, there are some pluses and minuses which might point to the Isaiah translator’s reliance on the LXX version of these books, although this remains a rather speculative matter.
8. Free translation of Hebrew grammatical and idiomatic features: For the sake of a correct use of the Greek language and with the purpose of avoiding Hebraisms, the Isaiah translator has repeatedly rendered typically Hebrew constructions in a free way, leading to “pluses” and
“minuses” in his translation. This pertains, for instance, to the rendition of the asyndetic relative clause, the retrospective pronoun in the relative clause, nominal suffixes, the
infinitive absolute, semiprepositions, and several Hebrew idiomatic expressions and formulae.
Roughly speaking, LXX Isaiah has given a free rendering in somewhat more than half of the occurrences of these constructions. In this sense, the Greek Isaiah could be typified as a
‘moderately free’ translation.
9. Several other possible reasons for the translator to add or omit elements can be mentioned, which play a minor role in the clarification of pluses and minuses in LXX Isaiah. One of them is the translator’s possible failure to understand the Hebrew text in some places. Furthermore, the translator may at times have added or omitted text for ideological or theological motives, although such a motivation has more often led to the reformulation of entire sentences or passages rather than to the mere implementation or omission of one or two words.
10. Rearrangement: Many extra and missing elements in the Greek Isaiah cannot be isolated to be explained on their own, but are integrated within and dependent upon a greater
rearrangement of the Hebrew text by the translator. Such rearranged texts consist of
translation units in which most separate Hebrew words or phrases did receive counterparts in the Greek, but often ones which deviate semantically and/or grammatically from their Hebrew source. Besides, the way in which they are joined together into a sentence also differs from the Vorlage. This has resulted in clauses which have not only a distinct syntax but also a different content from their Hebrew original. Rearrangements may regularly have been made in order to “manipulate” the content of the Hebrew, not because the translator deliberately wanted to stray from his source, but because he wished to reveal a different level of meaning of the text, for instance a meaning which was important for his own time and community. In such rearrangements the identification of added and omitted elements is often quite
complicated, and it is sometimes doubtful whether they can still be called “pluses” and
“minuses” in a proper way.
11. Translation mistakes: Apart from pluses and minuses that may have been created through deliberate interventions of the translator, this study has listed circa forty minuses that are possibly accounted for by translation errors such as parablepsis and haplography.
Nevertheless, a considerable number of these could equally be attributed to the translator’s intentional abbreviation of the text. Besides, some errors of parablepsis and haplography may already have been made by the copyist of the Hebrew manuscript underlying LXX Isaiah.
12. A different Hebrew Vorlage: Pluses and minuses that cannot be attributed to one of the above-mentioned translation patterns have a greater chance of having been caused by a different Hebrew Vorlage. The same applies to quantitative differences in the translation which are supported by one of the Isaiah scrolls from Qumran. Of elements which meet the former criterion only a small number can be found. They turn out to consist principally of minuses, and, what is more, often of relatively large ones (of which there are not so many to be found in LXX Isaiah). This suggests that the translator of Isaiah had a Hebrew text in front of him that—in comparison to the MT—lacked a number of clauses or sentences (or, in other words, that the MT was based on a manuscript that contained some extra sentences as
compared to the Vorlage of LXX Isaiah). As regards the second criterion—that a plus or minus is also attested in an Isaianic Dead Sea Scroll, in particular 1QIsaa—one has to take into account the possibility that the scribe of the Scroll and the translator of Isaiah may have had some scribal techniques in common. These include, for instance, an inclination to abbreviate the text and to adopt elements from elsewhere in Isaiah.
Considered on the whole, it seems that only a minority of pluses and minuses in LXX Isaiah are due to a Vorlage differing from the MT.
This classification sets out to make a contribution to and to complement the discussion of pluses and minuses in LXX Isaiah which Ziegler presented in his Untersuchungen. He was of course more restricted to limits of space in his treatment of pluses and minuses, since his work also comprehends many other facets of the Greek Isaiah. In the first place I have included in my investigation more cases of plus and minus than Ziegler did, meaning that I attempted to treat as many cases as possible, even if it turned out to be impossible to treat all of them (also because it is unclear whether many elements can properly be defined as pluses
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or minuses or not). Besides this, I have offered a greater number of categories. One of the extra groups I have introduced is that of pluses and minuses which may have a rhetorical background, thus touching upon a topic which Ziegler has barely dealt with. I have tried to assign each plus or minus in the Isaiah translation to one of these categories, or sometimes to more than one. In this way I have sought to obtain a more complete and more systematic overview of the tendencies and techniques behind the pluses and minuses of the Greek Isaiah.
However, this classification is only intended to provide a general picture of the patterns displayed by the pluses and minuses of the Isaiah translation, and offers a provisional
suggestion for their explanation. It is inevitable that some elements will have been ascribed to a specific translational pattern unjustly, because in reality they may have been the result of another consideration of the translator, or of a different Hebrew Vorlage. Nevertheless, the frequent occurrence of certain tendencies and the apparent frequency in the application of particular techniques have led me to attribute individual cases to the categories mentioned.
One thing that stands out when one surveys these various classes of pluses and minuses in
LXX Isaiah, is that several tendencies seem to be discrepant from each other. While, on the one hand, the translator is concerned to abbreviate his text and to remove synonymous or identical words from it, on the other hand, one can also find in his text plenty of examples of double translation. Something similar applies to his penchant for explicitation, which is counterbalanced by a (minor) inclination towards making text elements implicit. Does this (seeming) inconsistency of the translator point to an unsystematic approach, or can it be explained otherwise? I think the latter is the case. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to uncover the motives underlying the translator’s manipulation of the text, it has already become clear that he regularly employed certain techniques to serve other purposes.
For instance, he has added explicitating words—or, on the contrary, left out “insignificant”
ones—if this appeared to serve the parallelism of his text, or with the aim of assimilating his text to another passage nearby. Additionally, his use of these techniques has in some cases probably been guided by issues of content, since the application of a particular technique might have given him the means to influence the text and to integrate his own ideas in it. For such a purpose he has, for instance, frequently exploited the device of double translation.
What is the significance of this categorisation of pluses and minuses in the Greek Isaiah? I think this extends to at least three areas. In the first place, it has text-critical value. If words are lacking or extra in the translation as compared to the MT, and if their absence or presence can be clarified by one of the translation techniques frequently applied in LXX Isaiah, which I have listed in this work, then it is implausible that the translation was based on a Vorlage differing from the MT. The fact that the preponderance of pluses and minuses in LXX Isaiah can indeed be explained by one of the techniques given, confirms the hypothesis that the Vorlage of the Greek Isaiah did not differ much from the MT, but that most deviations derive from the translator himself.
In the second place, a study of the pluses and minuses of LXX Isaiah may contribute to the knowledge of the Septuagint in general. It may help to map translation methods used by LXX
translators, and thus help to elucidate ways of rendering the text in other Greek translations.
Besides, it can possibly throw more light on the chronological order in which the Greek Bible translations were accomplished, as some pluses and minuses in LXX Isaiah suggest that this
document was influenced by other Greek translations, such as the LXX of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Prophets, which, for that reason, should perhaps be dated as being anterior to the Greek Isaiah. In this way, a study of LXX Isaiah’s pluses and minuses could help to fix a date for other Greek Bible translations.
In the third place, this categorisation provides more insight into the character of the Greek Isaiah on its own, and into the person behind this translation. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the pluses and minuses of the translation can be classified into one of the several categories of translation techniques discussed, points to the unity and methodology of this work. It demonstrates that its translator, even if rendering his text in a free way, did not realise his translation at random, adding and omitting expressions whenever he wished to, but, on the contrary, was bound by a limited number of tactics and “rules.” His creativity and
inventiveness, as well as his inclination to interpret the text were confined by certain
techniques, which he felt it was permissable to apply. So, to express it differently, although by adding or omitting elements he took the liberty of changing the Biblical text—in just a subtle way or more thoroughly—it should be possible to justify the addition or omission by way of a number of “accepted” translation techniques. In this way he restricted himself in the number of text elements which he added or omitted. Even whenever he created a text that, on the surface, differed vastly from the Hebrew, both in syntax and in content, he limited the number of pluses and minuses, as in such “rearrangements” he still stuck to the Hebrew to a large degree, re-using Hebrew words to transform them into Greek expressions which were related to them in an indirect way. Thus, even in such texts most Hebrew words are represented in the Greek, while most Greek words reflect a Hebrew one.
It has also been shown that the Isaiah translator can be seen to have worked in a quite deliberate way, even if, on first sight, the way in which he has used techniques for adding or omitting text might occassionaly seem somewhat inconsistent. He has made considered choices in rendering each phrase and sentence of his source text, and there can be found a policy behind almost every plus and minus. Aside from this scrupulous approach, he also exhibits a high proficiency in both Hebrew and Greek. Not only does he strive for a correct and proper use of the Greek language (though this is regularly balanced by his wish to render the Hebrew literally), he even shows sensitivity to the literary, poetic side of his text, heeding the prescripts of classical rhetoric. At the same time, his many borrowings from other Biblical passages reveal a thorough acquaintance with (Hebrew) Scripture, and his use of a midrashic technique such as formal association (see section 1.3.2d) indicates that he was also well rooted in Jewish exegesis. In all these aspects the translator proves himself to have been a broadly educated and skilled intellectual, well grounded in both Hebrew and Greek literature.
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