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Preface Introduction ChaptersChapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 AppendicesAppendix I Appendix II Appendix III Appendix IV Appendix V Appendix VI Appendix VII Appendix VIII Appendix IX Appendix X Appendix XI Appendix XII Appendix XIII Appendix XIV Appendix XV Appendix XVI Appendix XVII Appendix XVIII Appendix XIX Appendix XX Appendix XXI IndexesReferences Names Biblical References General Bibliography |
THE WITNESS OF OTHER
VERSIONS. The number of English translations of the New Testament increas- es year by year. We have Moffat's, Weymouth's, Williams', Phillips', and many
others. The number of translations of the Old Testament is probably almost
as great, and if we include the more ancient versions, they may
even exceed those of the New Testament. Moreover, the Bible in
whole or in part has been translated into many hundreds of other
languages, and the Jewish people themselves have produced quite a few
versions in their own vernacular. It
is these versions as well as
those in various languages other than English-Aramaic, Greek,
Latin, and Hebrew (New Testament) - with which this chapter is
chiefly concerned. The best known among the earliest
of such other-than-English versions is that commonly
referred to as the Septuagint. This Greek translation of the
Old Testament was made, supposedly, by some seventy Jewish
scholars in the third century B.C. The origin of the word
"Septuagint" is to be found in the Epistle of Aristeas who recorded that King Ptolemy
Philadelphas (285 - 246 B.C.) at the instigation of Demetrius
of Phaleron, had determined to have a Greek pg
1 of 19 rendering of the Holy
Scriptures for his library at Alexandria.
He accordingly asked the High
Priest Eleajar at Jerusalem to send a commission of the most
erudite Jewish scholars for the undertaking. With alacrity, Eleajar
dispatched 72 elders (six from each tribe) to make this version. It is considered unlikely that the whole of the Old Testament was translated into Greek at
one "sitting", but it is believed that at least the Pentateuch was
completed during Ptolemy Philadelphas' time and that the remainder was
completed later in Alexandria, probably within 150 years. Three subsequent Greek versions appeared. One, a literal translation of the Hebrew
by Aquila is dated around 128 A.D. A second, by Theodotian is
dated about 180 A.D., and a third of unknown date was produced by
Symmachus. These three were put into parallel form by Origen along with
the original Septuagint and accompanied by a transliteration of
the Hebrew text into Greek character s, to form his great critical work, The
Hexapla, only small fragments of which now remain. It is with the original Septuagint that we are chiefly concerned here and primarily with its
rendering of Genesis Chapter 1. There are numerous copies of this
available and these do not differ significantly with respect to the
information they supply relevant to the present issue. Remembering that
this text originated in Egypt in an atmos- phere of broad educational
interests where the best of the tradition and folklore and
philosophy of the ancient world was being recorded and preserved and where a
certain cosmology had already crystall- ized in a form which saw the
first stage of creation as a Chaos rather than a Cosmos, what the
Jewish scholars have and have not seen fit to recognize of the
precise structure of the Hebrew original will be better under stood. It is to be assumed that the translators
them- selves were scholars in
the Hebrew of the Old Testament: but they were also concerned to
produce a rendering which would impress their Greek readers with
the "soundness" of the Mosaic Cosmology, by which would be meant its
essential concordance with the views of the day though entirely
free of any polytheistic element, as well as the antiquity of their own
history as a people to match that claimed by the Egyptians for
themselves. These two facts are
important: first, because the version
makes one odd exception in this first chapter in the handling of
the Hebrew verb not easily accounted for, an exception which allowed them to present a cosmology that, like
other pagan cosmologies, appeared to make creation begin with a Chaos much as the Egyptian and Greek cosmog-
onies
did. Secondly, as is well known, the
Septuagint extends the Hebrew chronology
considerably, presumably in an attempt to give a comparable antiquity to
their own history, like that of the Egyptians. Here, then, is a picture as it relates to their translation of this verb. Throughout the whole of
Chapter 1, the Hebrew verb 27 times. In verse 2 once, in verse 3 twice, in verse 5 twice, in verse 6 twice, in verse 7
once, in verse 8 twice, in verse 9 once, in verse 11 once, in verse 13
twice, in verse 14 twice, in verse 15 twice, in verse 19 twice,
in verse 23 twice, in verse 24 once, in verse 29 once, in verse 30
once, and in verse 31 twice. In 22
of these instances the
Septuagint has employed some form of the Greek verb of of these 5 cases the
verb towards the future. Thus in verse 6 where the Hebrew has,
"And let it be a divider between,
etc....", the Greek has used the future of The sense in all four
instances is "to serve as" or "to serve for", and not simply "to
become" and although the meaning is similar, it is not precisely the same.
We have here not a change in fact, only in function, a
circumstance which is recognized by Lexicographers. In verse 14 the Hebrew has
adverse of critics of the
present thesis would be allowed to mean "become" since
the verb Septuagint has
forms as verse 6. The same
is precisely true of verse 15 where, as inverse 14, the
have been rendered
"Let them become as lights....", the Septuagint again uses the form of
command - either a straightforward
future sense or a form of command (once again the
simple future of the verb
"to be", meaning either "let it be...." or "it shall
be...." Now this, then, accounts
for all the occurrences of the verb save one, and this
exception occurs in verse 2. Here, for reasons which are worth
considering, they made an exception. But just to show how really
exceptional this case is, it may be well to note in summary
that, excluding these occurrences of the Hebrew verb which are strictly future
or in the imperative mood, ie., verses 6, 14, 15, and 29 (all of which
have been rendered in the Authorized Version as "Let it be
for", "Let them be for", "It shall be for...."), the Septuagint scholars
uniformly rendered verb as meaning
"become" and not as a simple copula. Thus there is only one case out of 23
occurrences of the verb have made an exception and
treated it as a copula, translating it in verse 2 as
of Gen.1.2 as
stance strongly
influencing Jerome as he produced the Latin Vulgate which in turn served as a
basic guide in many cases to all the other Western versions from the
Authorized to the present day. As a consequence, the Universe
appears to have begun as a Chaos. Now the word Chaos
had a rather special meaning in Greek thought. It did not necessarily
signify what we mean by a situation which has become so badly disrupted
that it is a ruin. The Greek concept tended rather to mean only
the infinity of space: not an engineered dis-order but an early
stage of development before order had been imposed on the
Universe. The opposite of Chaos is
Cosmos. The first stage in the
development of the Cosmos was therefore being presented as a stage
of total emptiness - and this total empti- ness was termed
Chaos. In Appendix II it will be
seen that Ovid defined it as, "Rudis
indigestaque moles", ie., "A shapeless mass unwrought and
unordered". Webster defines
Chaos as, "The void and form less infinite;
the confused, unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation
of distinct or orderly forms". But this interpretation of the word
was a later one, held only by Roman authors and not by the Greeks, and
when the Septuagint was being written, the word Chaos almost
certainly still bore its more ancient meaning, ie., the infinity of empty
space. In time it came to be viewed
as not so much empty space
but as unorganized matter. Thus it is not really too
surprising that the Jews who formed the translation Committee
of the Septuagint and who knew too well that the Version they
produced was to take its place beside the lit- erature of Greece in the
great library at Alexandria, should seek, but without actually
distorting the Hebrew text, to make it possible to look upon it as a reflection of
the same basic cosmogony as was commonly accepted at that time. Yet
they did NOT, be it noted, actually use the word Chaos as a translation
of the Hebrew tohu where it might have seemed the obvious
thing to do if this is how they saw the earth's condition in verse 2. I
think their use of term s other than the Greek word Chaos is a
significant indicator of their view of Gen. 1.2. That the words in Gen. 1.2, however, have a very different meaning from the Greek Chaos or
the modern "nebulus", is shown later (in Appendix XVI) and it seems likely to me that the Jews in Alexandriawere quite aware of this. So they left the meaning “open” by a
transliteration which was
true in part but not the whole truth and could be interpreted by
the reader with some freedom to adjust the meaning to his own
particular preconceptions. The earth was a "chaos", whether initially or as a consequence of some intervening event it is not
specifically made clear in the Greek version, even though they did as shown
above, use between verse land verse
2. It may be argued that a Jewish reader would not necessarily see
such a significance in the use of many commentators have
done since, including Jerome. Yet Onkelos evidently did, for
he viewed the situation as a Chaos, not in the Greek sense but in the
more modern sense, a destroyed rather than a
waiting-to-be-ordered world. In
conclusion, therefore, in Genesis chapter 1,
wherever a becoming, the Septuagint
has in all but one case (22 out of 23) used the Greek important to note that the
verb
ing from their normal
practice in verse 2. Now according to my count
the Septuagint rendered some 146 times in Genesis
alone: in Genesis and Exodus together, 201 times; in the Pentateuch,
some 298 times; and in the whole of the Old Testament, close to
1500 times. Since the Old Testament uses the verb
half its occurrences the Septuagint considered the correct
sense to be "become". A very large number of the cases
where refer to the future as a
changed circumstance where, as we have seen, it is necessary
to introduce it since it is no longer merely copulative: quite properly
this demanded in Greek the simple future of the verb "to
be". On a fair number of
occasions the Septuagint has taken the Hebrew
original and paraphrased it, rendering the verb "to be" followed
by some other verbal form as a single verb which comprehends the composite
of the Hebrew original. I do not know exactly how often these
two situations (future tenses and paraphrastic renderings) occur, but it
must account probably for a fair percentage of the balance of
appearances of the Hebrew verb 'those instances in which
the Hebrew verb appears as an imperative, and those in which it has
the meaning of "existing" (ie., living), we shall not be far wrong if
we conclude that in the great majority of cases the Septuagint did
not look upon the meaning of the Hebrew verb as mere "being"
in the copulative sense but as "becoming" or "coming
In summary, I think it is
safe to say that by the Septuagint as
meaning "is" or "was", and that their rendering of it in Gen. 1.2 as
the accepted cosmogony
held in Alexandria and by the Greeks gen- erally . For such a
conflict would have appeared, had they translated Gen. 1.2 as "But the
earth had become unorganized....", since this clearly implies that it
had not been so in the beginning. We have already made
reference to the Targum of Onkelos, but in order to make this Chapter
more or less complete in itself, a brief review of what this Targum
represents may be in order. The word Targum,
(from Ragamu, "to speak", in certain Semitic languages) is a term for
the Aramaic versions or paraphrases of the Old Testament which became
necessary when, after or perhaps during the Babylonian
exile, Hebrew began to die out as the common language of the people and
was supplanted by Aramaic. The first evidence of a Targum as an
already existing body of accepted Aramaic paraphrase has been found by
some authorities in Neh. 8.8. Accord- ing to tradition, Ezra and
his coadjutors were the original founders". There grew up a certain
accepted rendering into Aramaic of parts of the Old Testament which
assumed something of the status that the Authorized Version did in
the seventeenth century in England. The Mishnah or official
Commentary of the Jews on the Old Testament soon contained a number of
injunctions respecting the "Targum", but for many centuries it was
preserved orally and not written down. All that is now extant of these traditional "renderings" are three distinct
"Targums" on the Pentateuch, a Targum on the Prophets, Targum son the Hagiographa
(Psalms, Job, Proverbs), and the five Magilloth (Song of
Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Esther, and Ecc- lesiastes), another Targum
on Esther, one on Chronicles, one on Daniel, and one on the
Apocrypha. The most important of the three Pentateuch Targums is named after Onkelos, probably a
corruption of Aquila, a proselyte and one of Gamaliel's pupils. Aquila's Greek version became so popular that the Aramaic version
current at the time was credited to him. It appears that this
Targum originated among the scholars of Rabbi Akiba between 150 - 200
A.D. in Palestine. It was later sent
to Babylonia where it was
modified and edited and vowelled in the Baby- lonian manner about 300 A.
D. Hence arose the Babylonian Targum. The oral tradition
behind it may therefore be traced to about 150 A.D. , but it could in
fact be considerably earlier. Hence
at or about this time we have an
Aramaic version of Gen. 1.2 which reads
the earth was destroyed", where the Aramaic verb has the meaning "to cut",
"to lay waste", or "to destroy", a rendering reflected in the traditional Midrash
interpretation quoted from Ginsberg (see page 14 above). The next version to be
examined is the Vulgate. Jerome, or more accurately, Sophronius
Eusebius Hieronymous, its author, was born in the city of Stridon
on the borders of Dalmatia and Pannonia, some time between 331 and
340 A.D. At about the age of 20, he was sent to a Rom an school
where he studied the classical authors under Aclius Donatus. He later attended the University at Trier
and Aquileia, where he studied
theology. After a tour of the East which ended in 373 and after a
severe illness, he adopted the ascetic life and spent four years in the
desert near Antioch where he studied Hebrew. He was ordained in
379 and three years later visited Rome on official ecclesiastical
business from Antioch. In Rome he began his work on the translation
of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into Latin. This great work was
completed before he died in 420 A.D. and since that time
remained in use throughout the Roman Church. Of chief concern here is his rendering of
the verb in the first chapter of
Genesis. In his translation he
consistently has factum (or facta)
est (ie., "became") wherever the Septuagint has
"The earth, however, was....",
thus faithfully reflecting the Greek version. Whether he really
was governed in this by what he found in the Septuagint or was
independently convinced that he was correctly translating in each
instance, we shall, of course, never know. But this much at least can be
said: once he had passed beyond verse 2, he had no hesitation
thereafter in equating the meaning of the Hebrew verb
in 13 occurrences in the
first chapter of Genesis alone. His depart- ure from this general principle
in verse 2 thus seems odd and looks suspiciously like a
Septuagint influence. Now, if we allow that the
term "Version" really means nothing more than "Translation
into a different language", we have another non-English
"Version" that may be allowed to bear its independent witness - and this is the
New Testament wherever it quotes the |
which is
otherwise
occurs
ie.,
"become".
,
, "it
shall be...." This seems quite proper.
(which even by the most
which falls into the same class of verbal
.
In verse 29 there is
by the Greek
so showing that they viewed it in this context
,
thereby presenting the reader with the opening words
: ie., "But the earth was...." a circum-
instead of 
for the particle
is clearly indicative of a
change or
.
is not to be equated with
.
is seldom considered
was probably in order to avoid conflict with
,
and in verse 2 he has "Terra autem erat....", ie.,
