The Jeremie Septuagint Lecture
The Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge is pleased to announce the Jeremie Septuagint Lecture 2023-2024 by Emeritus Professor Mark Janse (Ghent University):
"The Three Commandments: Hellenizing and / or Hebraizing the Old Greek and other early and later translations of the Hebrew Bible" (abstract below).
The event will take place on the 8th of May at 5pm in the Runcie Room at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. Everyone welcome, no registration required.
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The Three Commandments: Hellenizing and / or Hebraizing the Old Greek and other early and later translations of the Hebrew Bible
According to the pseudepigraphical Letter of Aristeas, a curse would be pronounced on anyone adding, removing or displacing any word in the Septuagint translation of the Torah, echoing the commandments given by God to Moses in Deuteronomy. The ‘Three Commandments’ have dictated the translation techniques of the various translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, as well as appreciations of the quality of Septuagint Greek from late Antiquity up to the present day. Strict obedience to the three commandments results in a Hebraizing aka word-for-word, literal or source-text/language translation. A Hellenizing aka sense-for-sense, free or target-text/language translation, on the other hand, may result in ignorance of any or all of the ‘Three Commandments’ to a greater or lesser extent.
In the first part of my lecture, I return to the placement of object clitic pronouns (OCPs) in the Septuagint. As is well known, OCPs are postverbal in the vast majority of cases, especially if they correspond with pronominal suffixes in the Hebrew Vorlage. The cases of preverbal placement are nevertheless indicative of the native speaker competence of the translators, as they can only be explained as reflexes of Wackernagel’s Law, an inherited Indo-European but not Semitic feature (Wifstrand 1950; Janse 1998, 2002; Lee 2018; Dhondt 2023). The contexts in which Wackernagel’s Law is triggered are well-known, but the question arises why we find both preverbal and postverbal OCPs in similar, or even identical, contexts. To better understand this variation, I present new evidence including indirect and direct OCP clusters and the placement of OCPs in relation to topicalized and focalized constituents, with due attention to the Hebrew Vorlage, textual variation and the position of the Septuagint within the history of the Greek language.
In the second part of my lecture, I focus on Bible translations which are strictly Hebraizing. The best known early Greek translations are those by Aquila and Theodotion as well as the so-called Kaige recension. I discuss a number of peculiarities of such translations, which often result in unidiomatic or even ungrammatical Greek, with special attention to Aquila. By way of comparison, I present a number of medieval Spanish Bible translations, some of which are Hebraizing, resulting in interesting syntactic extensions reminiscent of Aquila’s translation technique. I conclude with the utterly Hebraizing Bible translation by the well-known unknown A.J.B. (Abbé) de Vay, with the unassuming title Biblia sacra ita exactè translata ut statim videatur quid refert unaquaeque vox textûs, quod nullus antea praestitit interpres (London 1817?), whose efforts to be a fidus interpres failed miserably, yet amusingly.
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- 2012-13, Dr John A Lee (Macquarie University) on The possibility that the translators of the Pentateuch collaborated and used a glossary
