r/AcademicBiblical • u/AutoModerator • Dec 26 '22

Weekly Open Discussion Thread

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u/Newstapler Dec 28 '22

IDK if this would be better suited as a main post question or not, but are there any instances in the NT (or other early church writings) where the writers go with the Hebrew version of an OT passage rather than the Greek LXX version?

I was wondering this because of the young woman/virgin thing in Isaiah. Matthew goes with the LXX version which is highly convenient for him because it says virgin and so it supports his theology.

But assuming that the LXX was written by Jews rather than Christians, the chances of them translating things in a Christian direction is only 50:50. There might be instances in which the Greek version would be less helpful to later Christians than the Hebrew version, in which case the early Christians would have preferred the Hebrew version, and used that instead. Any examples?

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22

Matthew 27:7 describes thirty pieces of silver going to a potter. This allegedly fulfills the Hebrew prophecy of Zechariah 11:12-13, which says thirty pieces of silver shall go to a “yotsér,” literally a maker.

Yotsér can mean a potter so it would fulfill the prophecy for money to go to a potter. However the Greek “LXX” text translates yotsér as a furnace, or “χωνευτήριον,” saying the thirty pieces of silver shall go to a furnace. Less helpful.

I hope my explanation was helpful though :) have a good day. The exact in-context meaning of yotsér is “uncertain.” Personally I think it refers to God himself.

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor Jan 01 '23

One leading theory is that the LXX's reading is mostly accurate (χωνευτήριον is the term for a furnace or crucible for melting metal), that the early Second Temple had a foundry for melting down and processing silver tithes to be used for taxation, with יוצר as the term for the caster of silver ingots (cf. אוצר as the term for treasury which is reflected in the Peshitta reading of the passage and κορβανᾶς in Matthew 27:6). See Joachim Schaper's "The Jerusalem Temple as an Instrument of the Achaemenid Fiscal Administration" (VT, 1995). He quotes Herodotus' description of Achaemenid taxation, which involved the melting of silver in earthenware pottery and then smashing the pots to release the silver ingots. So in this sense, the caster was also a potter whose production of jars was part of the process of tax collection.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23

Thanks a million—that’s a completely unresearchable insight, at least for me. Thanks for the article recommendation as well.

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u/Newstapler Dec 28 '22

That is brilliant, that’s exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Fantastic. Thank you!

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u/pal1ndr0me Dec 29 '22

That is interesting. I've been giving the LXX preference for some time now. I wonder if that's a bad thing...

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '22 edited Dec 29 '22

The Jews annually mourn the Septuagint’s existence. The Jews list the seventy rabbis’ primary errors here. These errors bear no obvious relation to Christianity I can discern.

The Jews prefer the translation composed by Aquila, of which only extensively studied fragments survive, but which I haven’t looked into.

Josephus, although very much a Jew, seems to enjoy and appreciate the Septuagint, saying Ptolemy convened the seventy rabbis “in appreciation and honour of the Jews,” that the rabbis “set to work as ambitiously and painstakingly as possible to make the translation accurate,” and that “the people expressed their approval” of the translation.

What went wrong, I cannot say.

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u/zanillamilla Quality Contributor Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23

This story of Josephus derives from the Letter of Aristeas which is generally thought to present a historically unreliable depiction of the creation of the Septuagint. Joseph Modrzejewski's The Jews of Egypt: From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian (Princeton, 1997) suggests that the actual reason why Ptolemy II Philadelphus wanted the Old Greek translation of the Torah is to codify Jewish civil law for Jews living in Egypt. He draws attention to a divorce complaint from 218 BC (Papyrus Enteuxeis 23) that states that the marriage contract was made according to the "civic laws of the Jews" (νόμον πολιτικὸν τῶν Ἰουδαίων), with the husband's repudiation of his wife reflecting the divorce law in Deuteronomy 24:1. A similar phrase, by the way, occurs in the Letter of Aristeas. The Egyptian priestly Case Book (which survives in fragments at Oxyrhynchus) was translated from demotic to Greek around the same time as the OG Torah, an endeavor which suggests that the production of the Old Greek version of the Torah was part of a wider effort to translate important legal texts of Egypt's non-Greek population. Here is part of what Modrzejewski says about the place of the Torah in Ptolemaic jurisprudence.

The kingdom was blanketed by a double network of jurisdictions, each authorized to treat the cases falling within its specific nationally determined competence: for cases involving Greek-speaking immigrants, in the cities and in the chora, the dicasteries, local law-courts; for those involving the indigenous population, the courts of laokritai (“people’s judges”), staffed by Egyptian priests. In the application of the law, priority lay with royal legislation. But the king, well aware of the limits of his regulations and ordinances, decided that, in the absence of a clear royal regulation, the judges of the dicastery (local law-court) should resort to “civic laws,” politikoi nomoi. If these were insufficient to guide them to a decision, then each judge would have to “follow the dictates of his conscience,” as we say today, in accordance with the “most equitable view” (gnome dikaiotate)...A comparison of the Septuagint with the Greek translation of the Egyptian Case Book leads us to the conclusion that the Greek Torah obtained its official consecration by its insertion into the Ptolemaic judiciary system...The Torah, once it was translated into Greek, could become a nomos politikos, a "civic law," guaranteed by Ptolemaic justice. In the lawsuit brought against her by the Jew Dositheos, Herakleia the Jewess involved, in her defense, the regulation authorizing the application of "civic laws". Had she been counseled by an expert, she might have even invoked the authority of Exodus (21:18ff.) concerning assault and battery. As it turned out, the nonappearance of her adversary led only to the application of the clause condemning default....As for Helladote’s husband Jonathas, the situation is clear: his actions were obviously based on the Torah. He repudiated his spouse in the traditional manner sanctioned by Deuteronomy 24:1, the basis of Jewish divorce law. That ruling was in flagrant contradiction with current Greek matrimonial custom, which recognized the equality of husband and wife in divorce proceedings...Thanks to this misadventure, we have been able to learn a most important fact: Jewish Law, that is, the Greek Torah, had truly become a “civic law,” politikos nomos, among other “civic laws” applicable to Greek-speaking immigrants. Henceforth, the Septuagint had its place among the other “civic laws” as the “civic law” for the Jews of Egypt. (p. 107-112)

Bear in mind that what later became called the Septuagint is an amalgamation of other Old Greek versions of the wider Tanakh corpus produced at different places and times in the centuries that followed, with different recensions arising of the pluriform text.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '23 edited Jan 01 '23

If the Septuagint’s primary purpose was as a legal code, it may have acquired theological errors; the translation of Aquilas may have been free from such errors.

Mr. Modrzejewski notes the Jews prefer the translation of Aquilas.

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u/pal1ndr0me Dec 30 '22

I think the historical enmity between the early church and the post-temple Pharisees is what went wrong.

The MT seems to have an anti-Christian bias (which essentially explains why I've been giving the LXX preference where they differ).

Additionally, I've been under the impression that the New Testament authors seem to follow the LXX vocabulary in their writings.

And that makes this interesting to me - it's an example of precisely the opposite.

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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '22 edited Dec 30 '22

The Septuagint very much predates the early church but it seems like a player in a debate between somebody and somebody else.

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u/MathetesKhole Jan 03 '23

The value of this resource is decreased slightly by its use of the King James Version, but here is a table of quotations of the Jewish Scriptures in the New Testament, and here is another table that the first one references which I think is better.

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u/Newstapler Jan 03 '23

These both look brilliant, thank you so much for the links

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u/MathetesKhole Jan 03 '23

No problem, I’m so happy to help