Critical Problems of the Text
We shall look in more detail at the theology the Fathers drew out of these chapters later on, but first various critical problems need to be discussed. Compiling a patristic commentary on any part of the Old Testament raises questions not raised by such a commentary on the New Testament. These questions are largely to do with the actual biblical text and to a lesser extent with the higher criticism of that text (that is, questions of composition and authorship). With the New Testament, the English text that we read nowadays is a translation of the New Testament more or less as the Greek fathers themselves knew it (there are sometimes minor differences where textual criticism detects early accretions to the text, for instance at Mk 9:29, but these are few). But with the Old Testament, there is a major difference. For the Christian Old Testament was the Greek Septuagint (usually abbreviated as LXX. the Latin numeral for seventy), whereas what is translated in our Bibles is the Hebrew text, of which the Septuagint was an early translation.
Differences between the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint. The text of the Hebrew Bible and that of the Septuagint display some major differences. The Septuagint includes books such as Eсclesiasticus (or Sirach, an abbreviation of the full title The Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach) and che Wisdom of Solomon that are not included in the Hebrew Bible. Some books in the Septuagint seem to be later expanded versions of the Hebrew original: for example, Esther and Daniel, which in the Septuagint includes stories about Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, and an expanded account of the Three Young Men in the fiery furnace (including the songs sung by them in praise of God and creation). In other cases, the Septuagint presents the text in a rearranged order (e.g., the book of Jeremiah, which has additions as well). There are also many minor disagreements between the Greek and Hebrew versions.
It is generally held that the Septuagint is a later, embellished version of the original Hebrew text. But this is only partly true. Sometimes, as the Qumran discoveries have revealed, the Septuagint preserves works that might have been included by the rabbis in the Hebrew Bible had me Hebrew original nor been lost by the early centuries of the Christian era (or the common era, though it is not clear to whom it is common, apart from Christians and post-Christians): such is the case with Sirach. Furthermore, the text of the Hebrew Bible that we have, the so-called Masoretic text, is the result of critical endeavors on the part of rabbis in the second half of the first millennium. It is, then, a good deal later than the Hebrew text that would have been available to the Greek translators of the Septuagint. Variants in it may well be witnesses to older and better readings than those found in the Masoretic text. (This, too, has been supported by the biblical texts discovered at Qumran.)14
The Septuagint: The Christian Old Testament. The early Christians were well aware of these discrepancies between the Greek Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible, but almost universally they regarded the Septuagint and translations from it, notably the Old Latin version, as the authoritative text of the Old Testament of their Christian Scriptures. The main reason for this was that the Septuagint was the version of the Old Testament that they were accustomed to using. It was in Greek that Christianity had spread throughout the Mediterranean world, and it was the Septuagint to which Christian preachers and missionaries appealed as the Scripture. The Septuagint is the version quoted and referred to, for the most part, in the New Testament, which is, of course, in the Greek of the first Christian missionaries and Christian communities. The Old Latin version (or versions) was a translation of the Septuagint and remained the principal text of the Scriptures for those who spoke Latin throughout the patristic period.
When Christianity established itself among the Armenians, the Copts and the Georgians, the Septuagint formed the basis for their vernacular Old Testament. Even among the Syrians, who spoke a Semitic language, Syriac, their translation, the Peshitta, though naturally a translation of the closely related Hebrew, is not without the influence of interpretations inspired by the Septuagint.
The earliest dissenting voice from the primacy of the Septuagint seems to have been the Latin scholar Jerome, whose translation, now called the Vulgate, was inspired by his ideal of Hebrew truth (Hebraica veritas), though even here, despite his shrill defense of the priority of the Hebrew, his version frequently follows the text of the Septuagint. 15: At the Reformation, the Renaissance ideal of ad fontes (“to the sources”) led to Protestant vernacular translations of the Old Testament being based on the Hebrew, and thence to the idea that the Hebrew Bible is the Christian Old Testament.
Although the Roman Catholic Church initially resisted this and insisted on the authority of the Latin Vulgate, Roman Catholic scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century has tended to follow the Reformers.
Christians of the Orthodox tradition (whether Greek, Russian. Romanian or other strands) stick to the 14 Some scholars are coming to appreciate the value of the Septuagint as a witness to the original Hebrew. In the case of Genesis 1–11, ser. Ronald S. Hendel. The Text of Genesis 1–11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition (New York Oxford University Press, 1998).
15 See again for Genesis, C.T.R. Hayward, Jerom's Hebrew Questions on Genesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
traditional notion of the Septuagint or translations of it as the Christian Old Testament, and they are shored up in this position by the enormous importance of the liturgical texts that are soaked in allusions to and quotations from the Greek text of the Septuagint. In the West, Orthodox Christians are a minority, but it is worth noting that recently a few scholars have called for a return to the original Christian tradition, according to which the Christian Old Testament is the Septuagint. 16
The legend of the Septuagint. For the Fathers, this tradition was virtually unquestioned. Furthermore, it was enhanced by the widely accepted tradition of the way in which the Septuagint had been translated. According to a legend, first witnessed in the Letter of Aristeas, probably written in the second century B.C., the Septuagint was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, commissioned by the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (287–247 B.C.) for his library in Alexandria. The Jewish high priest Eleazar was approached and selected seventy-two scholars, six from each of the tribes of Israel, who traveled to Alexandria and there finished their translation in seventy-two days. 17 Later versions of the legend exist, for instance that recorded by the Christian bishop of Lyons in the later second century, Irenaeus. According to his version the translators numbered seventy and were required each to produce individual translations of the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures, which were miraculously found to be identical. 18 Such stories of its miraculous translation naturally enhanced the authority of the Septuagint (the title derived from the number of the translators) among Greek-speaking Jews, especially in Alexandria, and then among Christians.
The Septuagint between Christians and Jews. By the second century A.D., however, the use of the Septuagint among Christians was producing a reaction against it in Jewish circles, especially those circles influenced by the growing rabbinic movement, which emphasized the supreme authority of the Hebrew version. This division between Christian Greek and Jewish Hebrew was deepened by Christian interpretations of verses from the Greek Septuagint that had no support from the Hebrew text, the most famous of these being the use of Isaiah 7:14 (Isaiah’s prophecy that “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and his name shall be called Emmanuel”) as a prophecy of the virginal conception of Jesus Christ (already found in the New Testament at Mt 1:23). While the Septuagint parthenos unambiguously means “virgin”, the Hebrew word so translated (almah) means a
“young woman.” Such discrepancies between the Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible, especially where the Greek version could be read as a prophecy of Christ, became one of the principal issues of early Jewish-Christian polemic (see especially Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, a work belonging to the mid-second century).
New translations, the Hexapla. In the course of the second century, various translators – Aquila, and later Symmachus and Theodotion – provided Greek versions closer to the original Hebrew.
These translations, which were presumably intended for Greek-speaking Jews, have not survived, probably because of the supreme value attached by the rabbis to the Hebrew text and the consequent encouragement to learn Hebrew within rabbinic Judaism, save in the fragments that survive of a massive tool for biblical scholarship, the Hexapla, compiled by the great third-century Christian scholar and theologian Origen. The Hexapla, so-called because of its six columns, was a massive synopsis of the versions of the Old Testament with columns containing side by side the Hebrew text, that text transliterated into Greek, and the texts of Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint and Theodotion (though there is some dispute about the exact shape of the Hexapla19).
It is not clear what its purpose was though it would alert Christian apologists to places where the Hebrew text did not support the Septuagint. What happened was that the Hexapla supplemented the text of the Septuagint and provided a broader textual basis for scriptural interpretation: this may have been Origen’s purpose, for it is borne out by his exegetical practice in his commentaries and homilies. But it also enabled Origen and other scholars to correct the Septuagint against the Hebrew (where it was obscure, for instance), to supplement the Septuagint by the Hebrew where the latter was fuller and to alert the Christian scholar to places in the Septuagint where the Hebrew was lacking. Origen apparently used the marks of ancient scholarship, the obelus (+) and the asterisk (*), to indicate passages unique to the Septuagint and those passages that had been added to the Septuagint from the Hebrew version.
This text – the Septuagint augmented by passages from the translations of the Hebrew, sometimes with the obeli and asterisks written in, sometimes with them omitted–came to circulate among Christians, especially from the fourth century onwards, when the expansion of the now tolerated Christian church led to the demand for copies of the Scriptures (e.g., the fifty copies of the Scriptures ordered from Eusebius of Caesarea 16 See M. Muller, The First Bible of the Church. A Piec for the Septuagint. JSOT Supplement 206 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
17 Letter to Aristeas, esp. 301–17.
18 Irenaeus Adversus Hacreses 3.21.2. Augustine has much the same story, City of God 18.42.
19 On the Hexapla, see, most recently, A. Salvesen, ed., Origen's Hexapla and Fragments: Papers Presented at the Rich Seminar on the Hexapla. Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 0721–8753:58 (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998).
by the emperor Constantine for use in churches; see Life of Constantine 4.36–37). Such acceptance of both the Hebrew and Septuagint versions of the Old Testament – with the Hebrew supplementing but not correcting the Greek Septuagint, by now traditional among Christians – became the norm among Christians. Augustine gave eloquent expression to this understanding of scriptural authority: For the same Spirit that was in the prophets when they delivered those messages was present in person in the seventy men also; and he surely has it in his power to say something else, just as if the prophet has said both, because it was the same Spirit that said both... so as to show that the work was not accomplished by a man enslaved to a literal rule of thumb but by the power of God flooding and guiding the intelligence of the translator... If, then, we see, as it behooves us to see, in these Scriptures no words that the Spirit of God did not speak through men, it follows that whatever is in the Hebrew text but not in that of the seventy translators is something that the Spirit of God did not choose to say through the latter, but only through the prophets. On the other hand, where anything that is in the Septuagint is not in the Hebrew text, the same Spirit must have preferred to say it through the former rather than through the prophets, thus showing that these as well as those were prophets. Likewise he spoke, as he pleased, some things through Isaiah, others through Jeremiah, still others through one or another prophet, or the same things but in different form through the latter prophet as well as the former. Moreover, anything that is found in both places is something that one and the same Spirit chose to say through both kinds of instruments, but in such wise that the one kind led the way in prophesying and the other came after with a prophetic translation of their words. For just as a single Spirit of peace inspired the former when they spoke true and concordant words, so the same Spirit manifested himself in the latter when without mutual consultation they nevertheless translated the whole as if with one mouth. (City of God 18.43)
Jerome and the Vulgate. Among the Greeks, this view held sway without any serious opposition. The only real dissent came in the West from Jerome, whose Latin translation, which came to be called the Vulgate (the common Bible), was made in the case of the Old Testament, in principle, from the Hebrew. Nevertheless, even he included the books of the Septuagint that are not found in the Hebrew, and frequently his translations, which were generally revisions of the Old Latin rather than fresh translations, reflect the interpretation of the Septuagint. Jerome’s preference for Hebrew truth was a lonely stance and attracted criticism from, among others, Augustine. 20 It was only gradually that the Vulgate established itself against the Old Latin, and in the case of the Psalter. Jerome’s version from the Hebrew never established itself in liturgical use. The Venerable Bede, writing in England in the early eighth century, is one of the first to make regular use of the Vulgate in his commentaries.
The text in the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. How does this bear on the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, and in particular on this, the first volume, that deals with Genesis 1–11? From what we have seen, it is apparent that the actual text the Fathers used is not something that we can pick up in a current English translation, frit English Bibles use the Hebrew text for the Old Testament. Even if there were a reliable translation of the Septuagint available in English, that would not be exactly the text of the Fathers either, for printed versions of the Septuagint text are based on Alfred Rahlfs’s edition, first published in 1935, which is an attempt to work back from the texts that have survived to the original text of the Alexandrian translators. But, as we have seen, the text most of the Fathers would have used would have been some form of the so-called Hexaplaric text or at the very least have contained readings derived from the Hexapla.
In this volume we have printed the translation of the Revised Standard Version and noted the variations of this text from the Septuagint (in Rahlfs’s critical edition). In the early chapters of Genesis the Septuagint follows the Hebrew closely: there seem to be no Hexaplaric readings, the variations from the Hebrew being mainly matters of interpretation of the Hebrew text or sometimes witnessing to a slightly different form of the text than the Masoretic text. But, as the reader will see, almost all the variant readings of the Septuagint are part of the text that the Fathers had before them and on which they were commenting.
Septuagint variants from the Hebrew in Genesis 1–11. Apart from individual variant readings, there are two striking groups of variancs in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, both of which manifest themselves most sharply in the genealogies that form such a prominent feature of these chapters (though one that most modern readers tend to skip). The first concerns names, the second the periods of years mentioned in the genealogies.
The variations in the names are of two kinds. Most commonly, these variants are due to difficulties of transliteration between languages with different alphabets (e.g., Nimrod becomes Nebrod [Gen l:8]). But it is sometimes a matter of interpretation: the Septuagint may interpret the name rather than transliterating it (e.g., at its first mention, the name Eve is translated Zoe, “life”, rather than transliterated; “Babel” in Gen 11 is translated «confusion»). Or it may do the reverse, taking a word to be a name where modern translators see a 20 See Carolinne White , The Correspondence (394–419) Between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo. Studies in Bible and Early Christianity 23 (Lewiston: Queenston: Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), esp. 35–42. White provides an English translation of the letters.
noun (e.g., in Gen 2–3, where Adam is translated by modern translations as “the man”, while the Septuagint sees the name Adam). Or it may identify a Hebrew place name (the most striking example being the identification of the “Babel” of Gen 10:10 with Babylon) or fail to identify a place name identified by modem scholars (e.g., in Gen 10:6, 13, where the Septuagint fails to identify Mesraim as Egypt). All significant variations in names are indicated by additional notes to the RSV text.
The discrepancy between the periods of years recorded in the genealogies between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text (presumably due to misreading Hebrew numerals) was noticed in ancient times. The variations are curious in that they usually have the effect of some of the patriarchs having children later in life, while the actual length of their lives remains the same (e.g., according to the Hebrew, Adam became Seth’s father when he was 130 and then lived for another 800 years, whereas the Septuagint has him becoming Seth’s father at the age of 230 and living for another 700 years; see Gen 5:3–5). These discrepancies, however, caused a problem. In the case of Methuselah (or Mathousala), the Hebrew calculation has him dying, at the age of 969, in the year of the flood (his son Lamech, born in his 187th year [Gen 5:25], became Noah’s father when he was 182 [Gen 5:28]; Noah was 600 in the year of the flood: 187+182+600=969), whereas the Septuagint calculation has him dying 14 years after the flood (Lamech, born in Methuselah’s 167th year, becomes Noah's father in his 188th year; Noah was 600 in the year of the flood: 167+188+600=955, 14 years short of his death at age 969).
But Methuselah was not it the ark, so how did he survive.
Jerome, in his Hebrew Question on Genesis, solved the problem by reference to the Hebrew, a solution accepted by Augustine, who however noted that such correction of the Septuagint by the Hebrew was warranted only if there was reason to suppose that there had been a simple mistake, for the seventy were to be regarded, as we have seen, not simply as translators but as enjoying the freedom of prophets. 21