for text-critical purposes was often denigrated, the discovery of Hebrew
manuscripts from Qumran vindicated the veracity of the LXX. Scrolls
such as 4QDeutq, 4QSama,b, and 4QJerb,ddisplay in Hebrew the type of
texts from which the OG had been faithfully translated.
Those manuscripts have illuminated the first of four levels that must be
taken into account when dealing with the individual Hebrew parent text
from which the original translation was made. Previously, it had mainly
been presumed that the parent text was virtually identical with the form in
the MT, but the abundant variant editions unearthed at Qumran have freed
critics from that myopic vision. One must seriously consider that the Greek
is a witness to a Hebrew text that may simply be no longer available.
The second level is that of the act and product of the translation itself.
Due to the many sources of possible variation from the parent Hebrew, the
Greek often presented a text at odds even with the parent Hebrew it did
use. Those sources included, for example, errors or damaged spots in the
Hebrew manuscript, the uncertainty involved in understanding an often
ambiguous consonantal Hebrew, misreading or misunderstanding of the
Hebrew on the part of the translator, and different division of sentences
due to lack of punctuation. Thus, though the translator was usually at-
tempting to translate the Hebrew source text faithfully, unintended vari-
ants were inevitable. It is often declared that every translation is an inter-
pretation. In a restricted sense that is correct; of course, the translator
must interpret what the meaning of the original is. But the degree of inter-
pretation is at times exaggerated to include theologicalTendenz,or even
“actualizing exegesis,” whereby the translator deliberately changed the an-
cient text to highlight some current event or view. Despite the attractive-
ness and relatively heightened significance of such theological interpreta-
tion — if it were correct — the creative exegesis is usually to be assigned to
the scholar proposing it. In light of the pluriform Hebrew and Greek
manuscripts from Qumran, a Herculean burden of proof falls on one who
would claim that the translator saw and understood one message in the
Hebrew and deliberately produced a different message in the translation. A
distinction must also be made between the meaning that the translator
produced and the diverse possible meanings that later interpreters might
derive from that wording.
Messages different from the Hebrew could and did result from a third
level. Roughly six centuries of copyists’ transmission elapsed between the
original translation and the earliest full copies of the LXX dating from the
fourth centuryc.e.It must be presumed that textual variants, both inad-129The Jewish Scriptures: Texts, Versions, CanonsEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
Tuesday, October 09, 2012 12:03:57 PM