Subject: Re: Very old response
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 03 2002 - 01:16:01 EDT
Jim said:
<< I pretty much agree with your assessment, but
would add that the Hebrew Bible was in western culture prior to the
birth of Christ. The Ptolemies had a translation of the Hebrew Bible
into Greek put into their library in Alexandria some time before
Christ...that would be the minimal start date for the bible in western
lit. >>
That translation -- the Septuagint, as it's called -- has had a lot of
conflicting stories told about it, in antiquity and modernity alike. The
story told in the Letter of Aristeas is that Ptolemy II had seventy-two men
(six from each tribe) translate the Torah into Greek so that he could have a
common-tongue copy of the Hebrew Law for the Alexandrian library. They
translated, of course, for seventy-two days. Later traditions added that
they translated the whole Tanakh rather than just the Torah, and that they
worked separately and found later, as evidence of divine participation, that
their translations were all identical.
We will probably never determine with certainty where the apocryphal in
these stories ends. But it is certainly the case that the Torah was
translated separately from the rest: this is unanimous scholarly opinion,
and I can personally testify to a marked difference in style of language and
literalness of translation separating the Septuagint's Torah from most of
the books of Nevi'im and Kethuvim (which make up the NK in TNK, or Tanakh).
I cannot personally vouch for the archaeological as I can for the
philological, of course, but there is general agreement amongst those who
CAN more personally vouch for the former that the Septuagint's Torah was
composed sometime in the early third-century B.C.E. with the remainder of
the Hebrew Bible coming some years later by different folks. My
understanding is that there is some disagreement over whether the rest came
in the second century B.C.E. or if it didn't come until the Christians took
it over.
The Septuagint is to me particularly interesting -- I mean, more so than a
2,000-year-old book of its size and scope written in Greek would naturally
be -- for a few reasons. First, it was composed more than a thousand years
before the creation of our oldest extent copy of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew;
and our oldest manuscript of the Greek is older than our oldest of the
Hebrew by only a bit shy of a millennium. It is thus witness to a much
older copy of the Hebrew than we can access. It is endlessly enjoyable to
puzzle over the differences between the texts and to ponder what was a
choice of the translator and what reflects a different original. Second,
the Greek (or at least Greek-writing) authors of the New Testament often
quote the Old, and their quotations frequently follow the Greek of the
Septuagint. Other evidence of influence exists, such as the language of the
first chapter of the Gospel of John, which is strikingly reminiscent of that
of the first chapter of the Septuagint's Genesis (this is somewhat apparent
in English translations, but not nearly so strikingly so). So to study the
Septuagint is something like a peek at the Hebrew Bible as it was read by at
least some of the authors of the Christian Bible. And finally, later
translators have frequently followed the lead of the Septuagint, and it is
thus insightful concerning certain traditions. Translating the
tetragrammaton as "Lord," for instance, is a tradition begun by the
Septuagint's rendering of it with the Greek "kurios" (or kyrios).
I've digressed. It's so easy to do with some things.
It is very likely that the Alexandrian library had the Septuagint -- at
least the Torah -- in its collection. In its day it had a collection not to
be scoffed at. But whether the translation was commissioned by Ptolemy II,
as some stories say, is less certain. The existence of the translation is
today usually credited not to royal request, but to the needs of the large
population of Jews in Hellenist Egypt who knew little or no Hebrew. The
Greek-speaking Alexandrian Jews, it seems, would be a likely incentive for a
rabbinical mission of vernacular translation. The Septuagint is certainly a
milestone in several things, the westernization of Hebrew literature being
one of them, but it seems probable that in the pre-Christian world, it
existed primarily for Jewish use, especially considering that it began as a
Greek Torah. I would be inclined because of this to think that its very
profound influence on Western culture was not yet even visible on the
horizon. That would take the arrival of a new religion.
Jim also said:
<< It would also be more accurate to say that the Bible introduced new
questions in addition to the questions Homer started asking already... >>
I agree. I didn't mean to suggest that all Western Literature after Homer
was simply a discussion of his ideas. Much that was new came after him.
The Hebrew Bible was a particularly potent infusion since it was the product
of a long tradition that was isolated from the Western one.
-robbie
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Sep 17 2002 - 16:27:01 EDT