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While @Simply-a-Christian has provided a fine answer to this question, there are a couple more wrinkles that can be added for the sake of completeness.
1. The "PIPI" Representation
We know of a tradition of supplying the Tetragram (Y-H-W-H), HaShem, the name of God, in special characters from the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the clearest places to see this is ...
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See also the follow-up Q&A to this one on the Greek antecedents of the absolute use of ἐγὼ εἰμί in the New Testament which advances and nuances the discussion below.
The Question
This is an excellent question, and one that in different forms has been pondered by interpreters of John's gospel for centuries. My own way of capturing what is at stake here ...
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There are plenty of web sites that will give you comparatives, however, my broad take on the subject is that the LXX is not generally speaking considered more authoritative than any Hebrew text. The translators were not especially careful (though certainly not sloppy.) The amount of textual variants in the Hebrew text are MUCH smaller than in the Greek, for ...
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This is a good question -- or rather, set of questions. I begin by reiterating a comment from the Q&A linked by OP: to engage with this set of issues fully, one really needs to consult Catrin H. Williams, I Am He: The Interpretation of ʾAnî Hûʾ in Jewish and Early Christian Literature (WUNT II/113; Mohr Siebeck, 2000). There is plenty of other relevant ...
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The LXX and MT texts of Jeremiah are substantially different. The LXX is substantially shorter (around an eighth shorter) and the order of some of the text is different. This is much more substantial than most divergences between the LXX and MT.
In general, there are two main ways in which the MT and LXX can differ: the Hebrew text that the LXX ...
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It's odd to me that this isn't literal. The early portion of Genesis (1-11) is usually very literal. In my studies, Numbers is more literal than Gen 1-11 (so literal that I called it "Greek vocabulary on top of Hebrew syntax").
Uses in the Greek
The Greek word appears in the NT three times, all in Hebrews. (All scripture references are from the ...
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LXX with superscripted N refers to Codex Venetus; the use of the minus sign probably indicates that this witness does not have the reading referred to (for more, see Addendum, below). It is cited as such by e.g. Jeremy Hughes in his Secrets of the Times (Sheffield, 1990). Information about this codex is difficult to come by, but there is a description of the ...
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Dinah, Jacob’s only daughter, born by Leah, was a virgin. She went out to see the daughters of the land. In Gen. 34:2–3, the narrator then uses a series of vav-consecutives to describe a sequence of events.
And Shechem, the son of Hamor:
v. 2:
וַיַּרְא אֹתָהּ (“and he saw her”)
וַיִּקַּח אֹתָהּ (“and he took her”)
וַיִּשְׁכַּב אֹתָהּ (“and he lay with her,...
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The Idea in Brief
Before the appearance of the Masoretic Text in the Tenth Century, at least three early witnesses attest to the forty day period in Jonah: the Dead Sea Scrolls at both Wadi Murabba'at and at the so-called "Cave of Horrors" in Nahal Hever, which both date to the First Century; and, thirdly, the Targum Jonathan, which dates to the Second to ...
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Like other ancient books, we only have copies (of copies of copies) of the Septuagint. So, at a basic level, no, there is no official Septuagint. Scholars attempt to reconstruct a text based on an examination of the variants in the texts that we have.
A further complication with the Septuagint, however, is that, although we think of it as a single work, ...
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In Judaism the final decision of which writings (Ketuvim, the third part of the Tanakh) were canonical did not happen until at least the end of the 1st century CE. This was after Christianity and Judaism had largely split, and so the two groups made different decisions about which writings were accepted as canonical.
In particular, nascent Rabbinic Judaism ...
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Yes, there is at least one Hebrew rendition of the LXX that is aimed at reconstructing its vorlage (i.e. the text from which it was translated, in this case unpointed Biblical Hebrew). The Parallel Aligned Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek text was created as part of the CATSS (Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Study) project under the direction of Emmanuel Tov ...
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As alluded to in the question, the primary (mostly) complete witnesses to the text of the Septuagint are codices bound up with the Christian New Testament. Pride of place goes to Vaticanus in which we have a nearly complete Greek OT. Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus also provide valuable witness. These codices have been dated to the 4th Century CE.
Unfortunately,...
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For OP's question:
Is the chi (χ) used to indicate the kind of a vowel in the original Hebrew (namley the aleph א), a transliteration as it is from Hebrew in already Hebraic Greek?
The short answer is "No" -- (1) in the first instance, because chi is representing (possibly, more in a moment) a consonantal sound, not a "vowel". Aleph and Ayin are ...
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In the Hebrew text, there is a play on words, as “man” is אִישׁ (ish), and “woman” is אִשָּׁה (isha). Jerome explains why he chose to use virago rather than the common word to refer to a woman, mulier.1
(Vers. 23.) Hoc nunc os ex ossibus meis, et caro de carne mea: hæc vocabitur mulier, quoniam ex viro sumpta est. (Now this is bone of my bones and flesh of ...
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Acts 7:14 is part of a speech which Luke records. The speech is given by Stephen, a Greek Jew who no doubt would have read the Septuagint. The Septuagint (along with the Dead Sea Scrolls) varies from the Masoretic Text in both Genesis 46:27 and Exodus 1:5 and reads instead "75 people." It's likely Stephen was quoting this tradition.
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The answer to whether עַלְמָה means "young maiden" or "virgin" may lie in the answer to a second question. The meaning of the word אוֹת has a tremendous impact on how we read Isaiah 7:14. The word אוֹת as it is used in Tanach can generally be translated as "sign" or "omen." But as signs in the bible often come from G-d, אוֹת can also convey the meaning "...
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The Sign of Immanuel in Isaiah 7:14 is the single most debated text in scripture. Dozens—literally dozens—of PhD dissertations have been written on it. There are three main questions inherent in the text but the center of the storm revolves around a single word: elem or alma.
The story begins with Ahaz, King of Judah, and the coalition formed between the ...
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What is a Recension?
A recension is an edit on an existing work. For the Bible, this is usually distinct from a retranslation. If you were to take the KJV (1611) and simply remove the archaic language without working from the Hebrew and Greek, this would be a recension. A recension may also refer to a family of manuscripts. For example, the NT Alexandrian ...
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The Dead Sea Scrolls are the only ancient Hebrew Bible manuscripts that we have. Everything else in Hebrew is from the 11th century or later. Thus it's natural that the Dead Sea Scrolls loom large in studying the textual history of the Hebrew Bible. However, the Dead Sea Scroll texts don't always agree with each other, and their age is no guarantee of ...
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I think "which is more reliable" is too imprecise a question. There are situations where the Dead Sea scrolls agree with the MT against LXX and vice-versa, and in some cases there's just no way to know which version is older. One more precise question is how often are the Qumran manuscripts close to MT and how often are they close to LXX. Wikipedia says ...
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Fraser Orr's answer is excellent and I only hope to supplement his excellent answer with a few thoughts regarding "reliability."
When asking a question like this, it's important to state your purpose. Why are you asking this question? The logic is such that they have reliable uses and applications within their own domains and we need to know the domain in ...
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The reason I most often use the LXX is to find the concept the NT authors were using. Yes, they wrote in Greek, but they were thinking Jewish thoughts. Many times, you can take the Greek words in the NT, find them in the LXX, and see what Hebrew words they translated.
For example, the word ecclesia is used in the NT in Matthew 16:18 and 18:17. Some argue ...
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It is commonly believed that Job's original 10 children are in Heaven.
The texts do say that Job received a "twice as much", and that he had "more":
Job 42:10 And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for
his friends: also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before.
Job 42:12 So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than ...
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The Idea in Brief
The Hebrew verb to pierce (כָּרָה = H3738) in Psalm 40:6 is the same triliteral root for the Hebrew verb to prepare (כָּרָה = H3739). For example, this second verb (כָּרָה = H3739) appears translated in 2 Ki 6:23 as "prepared." In other words, both verbs have the exact same triliteral root, but have different meanings. The LXX translators ...
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The question:
What tools are the necessary tools to determine what NT Greek words correspond to the Hebrew words that were translated into the LXX?
My first answer would be a working knowledge of classical Hebrew and koine Greek. I suspect this is not what OP has in mind, but it is the "right" answer.
So, trying again:
What tools are the necessary ...
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Although my initial reaction to this question was (not unlike the response in another answer here) that obviously this day-of-the-week superscription (DWS) reflects the Jewish liturgical background of the translator, this conclusion depends on several assumptions:
The phrase "τῆς μιᾶς σαββάτων" is original to the Old Greek translation of the Psalms ("LXX")....
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The Greek translation of Jewish scripture (the Septuagint) occurred between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. The canon of the Tanakh was finalized hundreds of years later. The Christian canon was debated from the 4th to the 16th centuries. We have a tendency of thinking of the Bible as written in stone, so to speak, but the canon has been the object of ...
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