The Leontopolitan targum of Isaiah

I argued last month, if on slender evidence, that Isaiah, in Greek, was taken from 1QIsa^a itself. For more evidence, Michaël N. van der Meer summarises the Greek Isaiah in the course of "Prophecy and Politics in the Old Greek Version of Ezekiel 28". We'll address Ezekiel later.

The "translator" of Isaiah which Christians have inherited is no translation. It updates the text; for instance changing Aram > Syria, the Philistines > Greeks (Hellenes, not "allophyles"), and Tarshish > Carchedon i.e. Carthage. On the surface such is mere geographic gloss, to aid "the modern audience" as we'd put it. Narratively the effect is to insinuate "Isaiah" (already encompassing chs. 34+, remember) into the role of a predictive prophet.

The Isaiah 8:23b-9:6 oracle had concerned the historical Isaiah's king, the young Josiah. In Greek, not so much. Its focus is no longer the king. In fact he's not any king: he is "the herald of the Divine Council", never a royal title. Such title does, however, match an angel like Gabriel or a prophet - or a priest. Van der Meer relays his homeboy Arie van der Kooij, against other scholars, that Isaiah intends some chief priest of the Hellenistic age. Specifically Onias IV; who had to serve out his priesthood in Leontopolis from the early 140s BC.

Onias is, then, the once and future High Priest in Jerusalem; and the suffering servant. It was in Leontopolis and other Ptolemaic cities that Isaiah was interpreted, for that Jewish community. Ptolemy VI Philometor (and Cleopatra II, please don't forget her) kept these priests around in case the Ptolemies (and Cleopatrae) could ever reclaim the Judaea.

Well... they couldn't, and this is one reason Jews today justly dismiss Onias' pretensions for a load of cods. It seems to have gone little better for this sore loser in his own day; Jews elsewhere entertained rival translations of other books. Eventually the Jews as a people would get so disgusted they embarked upon real translations of the Hebrew, here and elsewhere (although not in time to save the MT from, say, the injections into Jeremiah - nor to save Isaiah itself!). One does, however, hope the Aramaic communities kept shtum on this, because they were (famously) floating their own targums.

Other evidence that Isaiah is late is the practically CS Lewis word "terebinth". The Septuagint proper retains the Attic "terminth". Elsewhere the two lower-Egyptian texts mostly share a language, for instance the oddly male parthenos for the female Hebrew alma "damsel" (if the Greeks ever implied a not-yet-a-woman, LXX didn't restrict it to physical virgins). I posit here that the Isaiah translator, living after this Torah, should have had access to such. If so, it looks like our man simply ignored the text. Isaiah's reactionary priestly translator may have preferred the Levite corpus, some of which also survives in Greek; which in early HasMaBean times was downplaying Torah.