Scribes and Translators: Septaugint and Old Latin in the Books of Kings.

• Author: Pietersma, Albert

This slim volume contains the Grinfield Lectures of 1991 and 1992 delivered by the author at the University of Oxford. Dr. Fernandez Marcos is well known and widely respected in the field of Septuagint studies, not least for his work on the books of Samuel-Kings.

The textual pluralism resulting from the discoveries in the Judean Desert is not, in principle, a new phenomenon in biblical studies. Ancient critics such as Origen and Jerome were well acquainted with textual pluralism and each confronted the problem as well as contributing to it.

It is particularly Origen's and Jerome's belief in the original unity of the biblical text that has been called into serious question. Not only has the path of Jerome's trifaria varietas to the pre-recensional ("pure") Septuagint (LXX) text proven to be far more difficult to tread than Paul de Lagarde could ever have anticipated (though his notion of Urtext has found additional support), but Qumran has confronted us with a multiplicity of variant texts in Hebrew. As Fernandez notes in his first lecture, we now have, in Hebrew, not only textual agreements with the LXX - which have made us cautious in dismissing LXX readings as mere translators' whims - but also entire literary compositions which reflect the Greek tradition rather than the Masoretic Text (MT). Interpreting such variations has, in Fernandez' judgment, given rise to two distinct attitudes among scholars: whether to treat them as exceptions that prove the rule or as the rule, in which case additional variant texts should be assumed and expected. Fernandez suggests that the best approach is "to edit the Septuagint critically, to maintain its integrity as a witness to an Hebraica veritas, at times the only witness to the Hebraica veritas, and to a text different from the textus receptus" (p. 14).

In his second lecture, Fernandez begins by noting that the multiplicity of texts on the Old Greek (OG) side has been confirmed to be, not a primary, but a secondary phenomenon. That is to say, all the heterogeneous materials we now have can still best be explained on the basis of an original unity of the LXX (Lagarde) rather than in terms of a Targum-like plurality of translations later edited into some semblance of uniformity (Kahle). It would be a mistake to think, however, that "original unity" has the same meaning for all segments of the Greek corpus. Fernandez sees an important contrast between the Pentateuch, on the one side, and the remaining...