Table Of ContentJohn William Wevers
L X X
N G T
otes on the reek ext
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of xodus
Septuagint and Cognate Studies 30
SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE
SEPTUAGINT AND COGNATE STUDIES SERIES
Edited by
Claude E. Cox
Editorial Advisory Committee
N. Fernandez Marcos, Madrid
M. Mulder, Leiden
I. Soisalon ־ Soininen, Helsinki
E. Tov, Jerusalem
Number 30
NOTES ON THE GREEK TEXT OF EXODUS
John William Wevers
NOTES ON THE GREEK TEXT OF EXODUS
John William Wavers
Scholars Press
Atlanta, Georgia
NOTES ON THE GREEK TEXT OF EXODUS
John William Wevers
©1990
Society of Biblical Literature
Library of Cengre» Cataioglng-ln-Publlcatlon Data
Wevers, John William
Nate« on the Greek text of Exodus / John William Wevers.
p. an ~ (Septuagint and cognate studies series / Society of
Biblical Literature ; na 30)
Includes bibliographical references.
£SBN 1 1 5 3 .7 ^55540־ (alk. paper). - ISBN 1 5 ־55540־454־ (pbk. :
allt. paper)
1. Bible. OT. Exodus. Greek-Versions·־Septuagint. 2. Bible.
O.T. Exodus-Translating. I. Title. IL Series.: Septuagint and
cognate audios aeries.: no. 30.
BS1244,G7W481990 90-32274
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Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
This book is dedicated to ROBERT HANHART, loyal friend, learned
colleague, and dedicated scholar, for a quarter century of close friendship,
for his genuine scholarship, and for an intimately shared colleageal
devotion to the Gdttingen Septuaginta, on the occasion of his formal
retirement as Leiter des Septuaginta-Unternehmens in Gdttingen, July,
1990.
vii
INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT
In the course of preparing the Gdttingen edition of Exodus a
voluminous body of notes on the text and its interpretation of the Hebrew
was accumulated. With the completion of the Exodus volumes (edition as
well as The Text History) the Pentateuch is finished. In casting about for a
further project I felt constrained to reorder the notes I had made, and once
again go through the text and write up in a systematic way some of these
notes. It was suggested to me by one of my students that others might find
some of my analyses helpful, and the volume here presented is the result.
1. The most obvious characteristic of Exod is that it is a translation
document. I have written elsewhere on the difficulties faced by translators
confronted with the problem of rendering Hebrew into Greek,1 but it would
not be amiss to recapitulate some of these.
As a translation document the LXX cannot present a one to one
correspondence to its parent text. Hebrew as a Semitic language has a quite
different coding system from the Indo-European Greek. This is obvious at
all levels of language.
1.1. At the graphemic level Hebrew uses 22 signs to represent
consonantal phonemes, but even this it did imperfectly. Thus it could not
distinguish between Sin and Sin, or between cain and gain or between beth
and Heth. Vowels were not indicated at all except for the sporadic use of
the vowel letters, waw, yodh and final he. Hellenistic Greek used 24 signs of
which only 17 represented consonants, and seven, vowels. Greek differed
considerably from the Hebrew phonemic system. Greek had no laryngeals
and only two sibilants, whereas Hebrew had four laryngeals and five
sibilants. Accordingly when the translator had to transcribe a Hebrew word
such as a proper noun the result was perforce inexact.
1.2. This inexact correspondence becomes even more obvious at the
morphological level. In both systems the two word classes, nouns and verbs,
1. The Use of Versions for Text Criticism: The Septuasint, La Septuaginta
en la Investigacion Contemporanea (V Congreso de la IOSCS), editado por
Natalio Fernindez Marcos (Madrid, 1985.), pp.!5ff.
constitute the major unlimited classes, but their inflections mark quite
different distinctions.
1.2.1. The nominal system. Hebrew has two classes of nouns usually
designated as masculine and feminine. These two classes inflect for 1)
number: singular and plural. Hebrew also retains a dual but its use is
limited in the main to common units of time (hours, days, months, and
years), and parts of the body (eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, etc.). 2) definiteness.
This can be marked by the presence of a prefixed article. Indefiniteness can
only be inferred from its absence. 3) state: bound versus free forms.
1.2.2. Greek on the other hand inflects for three genders: masculine,
feminine and neuter. It also uses both a definite and an indefinite article
inflected for number, gender and case. Greek also inflects for five cases
(nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative). Pronouns also inflect for
three genders, two numbers and five cases.
1.2.3.1. Greek recoding of the Hebrew categories was handled in
various ways. Gender had to be disregarded altogether, since there simply is
no correspondence; in fact even biological gender did not fit. There is no
way in which a two gender system of Hebrew can be represented in the
three gender system of Greek. The two are wholly different, and no
conclusions can be drawn here whatsoever.
1.2.3.2. Number is on the face of it the easiest category to deal with
since both systems have singular and plural. The Greek of LXX no longer
used the dual, and the few duals that Hebrew does use were changed into
the plural; when duality was important the translator would add the word
for "two." Nonetheless LXX did not unthinkingly equate its categories with
those of the parent text. Both languages use collective nouns, but the two
have different collectives. E.g. the Hebrew words for heart, בבל , בל, can
be collective or individual, but are almost always collective in MT. In fact,,
the plural form occurs only seven times (though an eighth problematic one
does exist), whereas the singular occurs 781 times. In other words in
Hebrew people have a heart, but in Greek they have hearts. The translators
commonly adapt to the sense rather than to the form.
But even when Hebrew has a concrete noun LXX does not
necessarily render the number of the Hebrew in a literal way. Thus the
word חתפ only occurs in the singular in Exodus, but Exod disregards this;
sometimes the singular, but sometimes the plural, is used.
1.2.33. Definiteness differs in the systems as well. Both have definite
articles, but Greek also has an indefinite article, which is, however, only
rarely used in LXX. Both systems thus can show lack of definiteness by an
unarticulated noun. Theoretically then Greek should be able to reproduce
the system of the Hebrew, but this is not the case. The use of the article is
highly idiomatic for both languages, and the presence or absence of the
article in Greek by no means automatically indicates this for its parent
Hebrew. Articulation as learners of English as a Second Language soon
discover to their consternation is extremely complicated and differs from
language to language. In fact only when articulation in the target language
seems to be unnatural may this be cited as evidence for a parent Hebrew
text. Patterns of usage may also differ from translator to translator, and
these must be studied carefully for each translator's work.
1.2.3A.State. A bound phrase in Hebrew must be ordered as
possessed - possessor with the first word always unarticulated; furthermore
the phrase has a single phrase accent, the first word being vocalized as
lacking a primary word accent. Thus "God's word" becomes םיהלאה *ובר
in Hebrew. Only the free element, "God," can take the article, whereas the
bound element, "word of," is unarticulated. Greek would normally render
the possessor by a genitive, i.e. τοΟ OeoO. So Hebrew has "word-of the
God," but Greek inflects both nouns for case with the second one in the
genitive, and both nouns articulated, i.e. "the word of the God." When a
translator imitates the parent text by leaving the first word unarticulated the
result is unidiomatic, Hebraic, uncouth Greek.
1.23.5. In fact, Greek must inflect for case over against Hebrew
which has no case inflection at all. At times this means that Greek must
make distinctions which are not present in Hebrew. Suppose the Hebrew
text has the phrase ] חלשה לע. The translator would probably use the
preposition έπΐ for לע, but is then faced with the fact that this preposition
can govern the genitive, dative or accusative, and he must make a choice. If
he chooses the genitive it answers the question of "where" or "whither"; with
X
the dative it strictly denotes location, and with the accusative some motion
is necessarily implied such as in the sense of ״he placed it on the table."
1.3.1. The verbal system of the two codes also differs substantially.
Hebrew has two inflections, a suffixal inflection called the perfect, and a
prefixal one called imperfect. These terms are traditional and are often
misleading. Suffice it to say that the suffixed form in isolation is usually past
tense, whereas in context, i.e. with a coordinating conjunction prefixed, it is
often future; on the other hand, the prefixal inflections operate in the
opposite manner.
In other words if one wanted to say "and he arose and went and did,"
one would use the prefixal inflection throughout, but if one wanted to say
"he will arise and go and do," one would start with the isolate prefixal form
and continue with the suffixal forms since these are now contextual.
Actually the inflectional system is much more complex than the
skeletal outline given here. In fact, Hebrew can, though it seldom does,
express a potential mood in the prefixal inflection as well.
1.3.1.1. The Hebrew verb inflects for singular and plural number, for
three persons (1st, 2nd and 3rd), and inflects for gender in 2nd and 3rd
persons only.
1.3.1.2. A Hebrew verbal root can be inflected in seven stems. These
more or less resp. reflect a simple active, a simple medio-passive, a D (for
duplicative) active, a D reflexive, a D passive, a causative active, and a
causative medio-passive.
1.3.1.2.1. These stems also inflect for an imperative mood in the
singular and plural as well as for masculine versus feminine. They also
inflect for two infinitives and a participle.
1.3.2.1. Greek inflects for seven aspects or tenses. These are present,
imperfect (a past continuous), future, aorist, perfect, pluperfect and future
perfect.
13.2.2. Greek also has three voices: active, middle (or reflexive) and
passive. It can distinguish four moods: indicative, subjunctive, optative and
imperative. It also has an infinitive and a participle.
13.2.3. The Greek verb does not inflect for gender, but it does
distinguish number as singular versus plur?l as well as among three persons:
