Monday, January 30, 2023

Jer. tr. Gk., 2 vols., v. 2 (ed.)

William Ross and Paleojudaica alert us to Miika Tucker, The Septuagint of Jeremiah: A Study in Translation Technique and Recensions. I don't own this book... but the work was done as a dissertation in Helsinki which means we can all read its first draught.

Where this really helps is in telling us what the book is/will-be about, on account the blurbs I'm reading are incomprehensible.

What's going on is this: before the text of Jeremiah got polluted, by the Masoretes, or by the lowercase "jews" if you're Tucker, someone translated an earlier version into Greek. This translation is best described as "semi-uniform". Chapters 1-28 were translated one way, the Old Greek way. The rest of it, 29-52 in Greek, was partially translated this way but subsequently got a revision. This revision has almost but not quite the features of the kaige translation of Reigns starting in what we call "2 Samuel", chapter 10 or 11 or so. Like the Psalms of Solomon...?

To me this looks like Greek Jeremiah got split into two volumes. We've seen similar cut-ups in ancient Isaiah, three volumes in Egypt [UPDATE 4/13 and two in Qumran and Syria]. And we've just mentioned Reigns which is 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings for us Latins. For Greek Jeremias that first volume may or may not ever have got revised, before Theodotion and Aquila. And the second volume's original, after the revision, got discarded.

Tucker argued that said revision of this second Jeremias volume was done before the kaige in Reigns. Whoever fixed it aimed closer to the Hebrew in most cases; although, sometimes he slipped into more-koine Greek, perhaps getting bored with the affair on occasion. As to why the revision was done: it is after chapter 25 that the MT starts veering from the original. So, an anti-Masora faction may have felt that the volume overlapping 26f., especially, needed something closer to the original, for exegetic debates. The copyists agreed: the original would do for chs. 1-28, whilst chs. 29-52 could take the Second Edition.

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