Next up: Septuagint?
Thursday, October 11th, 2012 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manHaving read my way through the Samaritan Torah for the last year, I find myself facing the question of what I should now read during the forthcoming year. One possibility is just to read a new chumash commentary—there's one in the Beit Midrash at shul I haven't read before. But another possibility which intrigues me is to follow on from what I did last year and see how another ancient variant on the Torah differs from the Masoretic Text.
Short of getting hold of one of the variant versions found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it looks like I'd looking at a translation to do this, then, rather than the original Hebrew. (Of course, differences in these would be split between changes introduced by the translator and those reflective of the manuscript he was working from.) Having considered the Aramaic targumim of Onkelos, Pseudo-Jonathan and the Peshitta (briefly—the last turned out to be Christian), my thoughts turned to the Septuagint. Despite being somewhat frowned upon by Jews nowadays, it was according to the Letter of Aristeas highly regarded upon its original translation, a view repeated by Josephus without dissent.
I'm not able to read Ancient Greek, so I'd need to read it in translation, either into English, or a reconstruction of the Hebrew it was translated from (which would be possible, because some of the differences between it and the Masoretic Text only make sense in the light of translation from Hebrew). What I would ideally need, though, is a text highlighting the differences between the two versions, like the one I've been using for the Samaritan Torah.
Does anyone know of such a thing? Googling for such a thing does not seem to turn up any results (bar irrelevant ones, including a number of either ignorant or antisemitic Christians talking about how the Bible was distorted by the Masoretes in the tenth century, and only the Septuagint preserves the original text*).
* For the benefit of those that don't know, the Masoretes produced the current definitive Hebrew text of the Bible by very close comparison of the (small) differences between the texts available to them. They also codified the oral tradition of how to read it by inventing and introducing diacritics to indicate vowels and cantillation. Texts belonging to the same manuscript tradition as the ones they worked from, however, have been found as far back as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest of which are contemporary with the Septuagint; so what these Christians are saying is, basically, rubbish. The simple truth is that by the time the Septuagint was written, the Hebrew Bible had radiated out into a series of slightly different texts, including the proto-Masoretic Text, the source of the Septuagint, the Samaritan Torah and other texts attested by the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Short of getting hold of one of the variant versions found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it looks like I'd looking at a translation to do this, then, rather than the original Hebrew. (Of course, differences in these would be split between changes introduced by the translator and those reflective of the manuscript he was working from.) Having considered the Aramaic targumim of Onkelos, Pseudo-Jonathan and the Peshitta (briefly—the last turned out to be Christian), my thoughts turned to the Septuagint. Despite being somewhat frowned upon by Jews nowadays, it was according to the Letter of Aristeas highly regarded upon its original translation, a view repeated by Josephus without dissent.
I'm not able to read Ancient Greek, so I'd need to read it in translation, either into English, or a reconstruction of the Hebrew it was translated from (which would be possible, because some of the differences between it and the Masoretic Text only make sense in the light of translation from Hebrew). What I would ideally need, though, is a text highlighting the differences between the two versions, like the one I've been using for the Samaritan Torah.
Does anyone know of such a thing? Googling for such a thing does not seem to turn up any results (bar irrelevant ones, including a number of either ignorant or antisemitic Christians talking about how the Bible was distorted by the Masoretes in the tenth century, and only the Septuagint preserves the original text*).
* For the benefit of those that don't know, the Masoretes produced the current definitive Hebrew text of the Bible by very close comparison of the (small) differences between the texts available to them. They also codified the oral tradition of how to read it by inventing and introducing diacritics to indicate vowels and cantillation. Texts belonging to the same manuscript tradition as the ones they worked from, however, have been found as far back as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest of which are contemporary with the Septuagint; so what these Christians are saying is, basically, rubbish. The simple truth is that by the time the Septuagint was written, the Hebrew Bible had radiated out into a series of slightly different texts, including the proto-Masoretic Text, the source of the Septuagint, the Samaritan Torah and other texts attested by the Dead Sea Scrolls.
