One Book at a Time: Dates, Translators, and Profiles

A man who translates Ecclesiastes almost word for word and a man who recasts Job with considerable freedom are not the same textual witness merely because both write Greek.

Yet a compact critical apparatus can make them look like one. A single symbol—usually G—may stand beside a Hebrew reading. The reader sees “the Septuagint” and imagines one ancient authority speaking with one voice.

The books do not permit that shortcut.

The proposition of this article is:

Because Greek biblical books arose through different translators, periods, places, and methods, no single origin date or translation profile may be imposed upon the entire Septuagintal anthology. Every textual judgment must begin with the particular book or translation unit.

This rule is not a concession made to avoid a difficult text. It is the elementary condition for using a translation as evidence.

A Translation Difference Has More Than One Possible Cause

Suppose a Greek book differs from the received Hebrew.

The difference may reflect another Hebrew exemplar. It may also arise because the translator:

• chose a contextual equivalent rather than a formal one;
• read the same Hebrew consonants with different vowels;
• misunderstood an uncommon word;
• resolved an ambiguous pronoun;
• simplified difficult syntax;
• harmonized the verse with a parallel passage;
• paraphrased an idiom;
• removed repetition;
• expanded an implication;
• interpreted the passage theologically;
• wrote better Greek than a wooden rendering would permit.

A later Greek scribe or reviser may then have introduced another difference.

The mere fact of difference cannot identify its cause. The investigator first asks how this translator ordinarily works. Does he regularly render a Hebrew term with the same Greek equivalent? Does he preserve word order? Does he abbreviate repetitions? Does he make implicit subjects explicit? Does he harmonize? Does he tend toward idiomatic Greek or toward Hebrew-shaped Greek?

Only after those habits are known can an unusual rendering become serious evidence for an unusual source text.

Peter Gentry states the prerequisite plainly: the Septuagint is not a Hebrew manuscript within the Hebrew transmission. It is a version. Its evidential value can be assessed only by comparing source and target languages and by learning the translator’s method.¹

That principle becomes useless if “the translator” means every Greek biblical translator at once.

The Anthology Contains Very Different Translators

The editors of NETS place the translated books along a broad continuum. At one end stands the translator of Ecclesiastes, whose rendering is exceptionally literal. Near the other stands Greek Job, whose freedom is so marked that the translator can be described as functioning partly as an author. Proverbs, Isaiah, and portions of Esther likewise resist a single universal model.²

These comparisons do not pronounce one book spiritually worthy and another worthless. They describe methods.

A highly literal translation can preserve formal features of its parent text, but it can also produce opaque Greek and reproduce misunderstandings mechanically. A freer translation can express the sense intelligently, but it is usually a less stable instrument for reconstructing exact Hebrew wording.

Neither label decides a passage before examination.

Even the Pentateuch cannot simply be assigned one hand. The Oxford Handbook’s study of Aristeas notes that linguistic analysis points to different translators or translation units within the Greek Pentateuch, against the letter’s picture of one Jerusalem committee.³ Shared vocabulary and common setting can indicate relation without establishing one translator or identical technique.

Outside the Pentateuch the diversity increases:

• Greek Isaiah often renders freely and interpretively.
• Greek Job is substantially shorter than the received Hebrew in its early form and later acquired supplements from other Greek traditions.
• Greek Proverbs frequently recasts, rearranges, and interprets.
• Greek Ecclesiastes is strikingly close to Hebrew form.
• Samuel–Kings contains sections associated with different translation or revision profiles.
• Jeremiah presents major questions of order, extent, and literary development.

These descriptions are starting points, not universal verdicts. Every book must be tested internally.

“Literal” and “Free” Are Not Enough

The usual labels can themselves become shortcuts.

Calling a book “literal” may conceal the level at which it is literal. A translator may preserve Hebrew word order while varying lexical equivalents. He may represent particles mechanically but reshape clauses. He may be literal in narrative and freer in poetry.

Calling a book “free” may conceal disciplined patterns. A translator can paraphrase regularly, employ recognizable exegetical traditions, or alter rhetoric while preserving the underlying event. Freedom is not randomness.

A proper profile therefore asks several kinds of questions.

Lexical profile

• Does one Hebrew word normally receive one Greek equivalent?
• Are rare words guessed from context?
• Are technical religious terms rendered consistently?
• Do later books borrow vocabulary from the Greek Pentateuch?

Grammatical profile

• Is Hebrew word order retained?
• Are Hebrew infinitives, participles, and conjunctions imitated?
• Are pronouns or subjects supplied for Greek clarity?
• Are difficult constructions normalized?

Exegetical profile

• Does the translator explain metaphors?
• Are anthropomorphic expressions softened?
• Are ambiguous forms resolved?
• Are parallel passages harmonized?

Quantitative profile

• Does the Greek tend to be shorter or longer?
• Are repetitions compressed?
• Are names, numbers, and genealogies handled consistently?
• Do large blocks appear in another order?

Transmissional profile

• Is the surviving Greek text uniform?
• Are later revisions toward Hebrew visible?
• Do major codices preserve different textual forms?
• Has ecclesiastical supplementation entered the transmitted book?

These questions turn the vague word Septuagint into an accountable witness.

Dating Must Also Proceed Book by Book

The date assigned to one Greek fragment is not the date of every Greek biblical translation.

P.Ryl. Greek 458 supplies a conventional palaeographical assignment for a copy of Deuteronomy. It does not date the original translation of Isaiah. A quotation from Greek Sirach may establish that some wording existed by the date of the quotation. It does not date Judges. An apparent historical allusion in Greek Isaiah may contribute to a proposed range for Isaiah. It does not date Job.

At least five different forms of dating evidence must be separated:

The date of composition, date of translation, date of a surviving copy, and date of a revision are separate questions.

A later article will establish the full dating protocol. The present point is narrower: there is no single “date of the Septuagint” because there is no single translation event for all the books called by that name.

The Book-Profile Card

Before this series treats a Greek reading as evidence against the received Hebrew, the following profile should be completed.

This card is not busywork. It exposes the missing premise in many emendations.

When a critical apparatus proposes a Hebrew reading on the testimony of “the Greek,” the reader should be able to ask: Which translator? What does he normally do? Which Greek text? How was the proposed Old Greek reconstructed? How many Hebrew retroversions fit it?

Without those answers, the apparatus gives a conclusion without showing the bridge.

A Useful Admission from the Discipline

The IOSCS commentary prospectus builds its entire design around individual books. Each volume must address date, provenance, unity, literary and translational profile, relation to parent texts, critical editions, and textual history.⁴

That structure is an institutional admission that one corpus-wide description will not do.

The same prospectus calls the parent text an arbiter of meaning. A commentator may read the Greek as Greek, but because it is translated literature, the Hebrew or Aramaic parent supplies linguistic information necessary to understand it.

The series does not adopt every conclusion of the IOSCS project. Its doctrine of the Hebrew text comes from Scripture and confession, not from a commentary prospectus. Yet the project’s method confirms the linguistic order already established:

1. Identify the translated book.
2. Establish its Greek text.
3. Learn its translation profile.
4. Consult its parent text.
5. Only then judge a difference.

That is ministerial investigation. The method becomes magisterial when an uncertain reconstruction through a free translator is allowed to depose the authentic Hebrew.

The Strongest Objection

A critic may object that book-by-book controls make versional evidence almost unusable. If every difference requires a translator profile, a history of the Greek text, and a retroversion analysis, ordinary textual criticism will grind to a halt.

The difficulty is imposed by the evidence, not by confessional bibliology.

If a witness is a translation, its wording necessarily passed through another language and another mind. If the corpus contains divergent methods, those methods necessarily affect the evidence. Speed cannot remove the intervening steps.

Nor must every passage begin from nothing. Decades of book-specific work supply grammars, lexicons, critical editions, and translator studies. A responsible scholar can use that work. He must not erase its qualifications when presenting the result to a pastor or layman.

The more ambitious the conclusion, the heavier the burden.

Using Greek to illustrate an ancient interpretation may require modest confidence. Using it to propose a possible alternate Hebrew reading requires more. Using the proposal to alter the Hebrew text of the Church requires the highest warrant—and confronts the prior confessional boundary.

Diversity Is Evidence, Not Chaos

Ruckman and Williams observe the diversity of Greek biblical books and treat it as a reason to dismiss the whole subject. Some critical uses move in the opposite direction and treat the same diversity as though it were one uniformly ancient witness.

Both responses evade the books themselves.

The lawful course is harder and better. Greek Ecclesiastes must testify as Greek Ecclesiastes. Greek Job must testify as Greek Job. A kaige section must not be passed off as the untouched work of the first translator. A reading in Vaticanus must not silently become the reading of every Greek manuscript.

The anthology is not one witness.

It is a room of witnesses, each with a language, history, and measure of reliability that must be learned.

The fountain remains one. The downstream channels are many.

The next article will follow those channels from Jewish translation and revision into Christian codex culture. That history explains how early renderings, later corrections, changing collections, and ecclesiastical additions could meet inside one great manuscript.

Notes and Further Reading

See also Emanuel Tov, The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research, 3rd ed. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015); Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015); and the introductions to the individual books in NETS and the Göttingen Septuaginta.

Previous in the series: “What Greek Scripture Existed Before Christ?”

Next in the series: “From Jewish Translations to Christian Pandects.”