Handsome Saul

When waiting for the shop to swap out some defective car-parts Friday, I got to skim that TC journal with my free oversweetened coffee-machine product. They're on the Scholarly Publishing Collective now. A lot of it concerned the transmissions of the Masoretic and the Greek; this morn we handle 2 Reigns.

Our part of 2 Reigns concerns the death of Saul. In Greek this is in Thackeray's first eight-or-nine ββ chapters, which Barthélemy considered (relatively) unadulterated by later editors. The rest of the volume will be "kaige" sometimes ascribed to Lucian. Zachary Margulies here accepts a 2021 Oxford "handbook" consensus that the Codex Vaticanus ("B") preserves all 2 Reigns pretty well. That old Greek somewhat-famously translates the 4Q51 / Sam^a scraps, against the Masoretic Hebrew which... ain't great, for the Reigns quartet. Unfortunately that Qumran scrap does not preserve Margulies' subject, which is the lament for Saul. As to the Vetus Latina, we get no aid from the Palimpsestus Vindobonensis nor the Quedlinburg.

It turns out that the old Greek for ββ did suffer a bit of emendation outside of B's tradition. That emendation is the Lucianic tradition of Antioch ("L"). This affected the lament.

The Vaticanus (and Alexandrinus... and Sahidic) called the subject ὡραῖος, which means "beautiful". And, yeah: the footnotes point to Old Latin scraps with pulchri as an ephebic beauty. (Paging Al Sharpton.) In this context, which is Saul and not, say, Jonathan: that Greek doesn't work. The Lucianic made him εὐπρεπεῖς, which in kaige 23:1 is "handsome" or "dashing". Margulis concludes the Lucianic is improving a sus translation. The base Hebrew for Jonathan's good looks should be the same: נעים, to follow beloved Saul נאהב.

Of some interest here, perhaps, I see that the corrections toward the Hebrew do not encompass deletions against the Aleppo/Putingrad codices. The Hebrew proto-MT (as "II Samuhel") was already corrupted when Jerome got to it.