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Methodological Issues Preliminary to a Lexicon of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion

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Methodological Issues Preliminary to a Lexicon of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion Ephemerides TheologicaeLEXICON Lovanienses OF AQUILA, 81/1 (2005) SYMMACHUS 165-176 / Doi:AND 10.2143/ETL.81.1.616507THEODOTION Methodological Issues Preliminary to a Lexicon of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion Katrin HAUSPIE Centre for Septuagint Studies and Textual Criticism, K.U.Leuven This article will not deal with the questions whether it would be preferable to make a lexicon of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion respectively (i.e. of each reviser separately) or one that integrates the vocabulary of the Three into one and the same lexicon, or whether the lexicon should constitute an independent work or a Supplement to already existing Septuagint lexicons e.g. to Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint. Revised Edition of Lust-Eynikel-Hauspie1. The ques- tions dealt with here are preliminary to any lexicographic work on the hexaplaric material. There are a number of methodological remarks that one simply cannot avoid once the decision to compile a lexicon of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion has been taken. For such a lexicon of the Three to be fruitful, it will have to over- come some serious obstacles from the very start. First, the data to be incorporated in the lexicon will have to be collected from different sources. Second, the sources used include at their best but a few fragments consisting of a couple of sentences and, in most cases, just single words. Third, we will investigate the im- plications of the lack of a context for the Three. Fourth, we will analyse the pur- poses or motives of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion for making their transla- tion of the Hebrew Old Testament, attempting to see in what way this influences the lexicographic work. 1. Collection of Data of a Lexicon of the Three E. Hatch and H.A. Redpath, who at the end of the 19th century compiled a concordance of the Greek words of the Septuagint, list in their Concordance at the end of each lemma the occurrences of the headword in the Three, if available. HATCH & REDPATH dates from 1897; its data concerning the Three are based on the work of Field, who at that time had just published his Hexapla in 18752. Field based his work on that of his predecessors Flaminius Nobilius († 1590), Drusius (1622) and de Montfaucon (1713), who all edited the Hexapla, or better still, the 1. This article was read at the Symposium Septuagint Lexicography and Beyond: Symmachus, Aquila and Theodotion (Leuven, 31st of October 2003), on the occasion of the publication of the revised one volume edition J. LUST – E. EYNIKEL – K. HAUSPIE, Greek- English Lexicon of the Septuagint. Revised Edition, Stuttgart, 2003 (= LEH). 2. E. HATCH – H.A. REDPATH, Concordance to the Septuagint and the Other Greek Ver- sions of the Old Testament (Including the Apocryphal Books), Oxford, 1897; reprint Graz, 1954; second edition, Grand Rapids, MI, 1998 [pp. 217-368: T. MURAOKA, Hebrew/Ara- maic Index to the Septuagint], p. IX. 166 K. HAUSPIE remains thereof. The Hexapla, this enormous work of Origen comparing the Greek versions of the Old Testament known to him with the Hebrew text of his day, has not survived in its entirety. The Hexapla is nowadays preserved only in marginal notes in some manuscripts, in very few fragments of copies of the Hexapla and in quotations of the Fathers. Field also added in his edition of the Hexapla a lot of retranslations from the Syro-Hexaplar. These are Greek transla- tions from Field’s hand based on the Syro-Hexaplar or Syriac translation of the fifth column containing the Septuagint text of the Hexapla3. These retranslations cannot be part of a lexicon of Symmachus, Aquila and Theodotion; although some of these retranslations have been proved justified as later discoveries of fragments of the Hexapla have shown, others were just guesses. Hatch and Redpath rightly do not include Field’s retranslations in their Concordance. In 1906 a new edition of HATCH & REDPATH appeared, together with four appendi- ces, one of them being Appendix 3 Hexaplaric Fragments; Redpath states in his introduction that newly discovered Hexaplaric material has been included here4. These are fragments from the Psalter5, Genesis, Job, Habakuk, and 1, 2 and 4 Kings. Newly discovered material from 1906 onwards has not been collected yet in a systematic way6. Schenker gives a survey of manuscripts with hexaplaric material and their publication, after Field7; also Harl gives a list of the more re- cent material8. There are now plans for a new edition of Field’s Hexapla, with insertion of new hexaplaric data9. Hexaplaric material is also accessible in the second apparatus of the critical edition of Göttingen; it is drawn from the margin of some manuscripts, and from commentaries containing hexaplaric material. As far as the Bible book is avail- 3. This Syriac version of the Hexapla is from Paul of Thella (616-617); it is partly pre- served in a manuscript from the 8th century in Milan, published by A.M. Ceriani in 1874. The text translates Origens Septuagint text (fifth column), and also adopts the critical signs in the text; in the margin Syriac and Greek readings of Jewish revisors are inserted. 4. HATCH – REDPATH, Concordance (n. 2), p. 197. 5. At that time Mercati had not published his hexaplaric fragments of the Psalter yet, but Redpath could make use of a copy of a transcript of the fragments of the Psalter (HATCH – REDPATH, Concordance [n. 2], p. 197). 6. N.R.M. DE LANGE, Some New Fragments of Aquila on Malachi and Job?, in VT 30 (1980) 291-294. G. NORTON, Collecting Data for a New Edition of the Fragments of the Hexapla, in B. TAYLOR (ed.), IXth Congress of the IOSCS Cambridge 1995 (Septuagint and Cognate Studies, 45), Atlanta, GA, 1997, 251-262, pp. 252-253 states: “hexaplaric material published since Field is often ignored because it is unwieldy, and hidden away in obscure series of journals. […] Something is needed that will complement this material, and draw out the information that is already potentially there”. 7. A. SCHENKER, Hexaplarische Psalmenbruchstücke. Die Hexaplarische Psalmenfrag- mente der Handschriften Vaticanus graecus 752 und Canonicianus graecus 62 (Orbis biblicus et orientalis, 8), Freiburg – Göttingen, 1975, pp. 4-6. 8. G. DORIVAL – M. HARL – O. MUNNICH, La Bible grecque des Septante. Du judaïsme hellénistique au christianisme ancien (Initiations au christianisme ancien), Paris, 1988, pp. 143-155. 9. This project is called The Hexapla Project of the Hexapla Institute. More information about this project in: K.H. JOBES – M. SILVA, Invitation to the Septuagint, Grand Rapids, MI, 2000, p. 317. See also A. SALVESEN, Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments. Papers pre- sented at the Rich Seminar on the Hexapla, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 25th-3rd August 1994 (Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum, 58), Tübingen, 1998, and NORTON, Collecting Data (n. 6), pp. 251-262. LEXICON OF AQUILA, SYMMACHUS AND THEODOTION 167 able in this edition, the readings of Symmachus, Aquila and Theodotion can be consulted. But as Norton clearly stated at the IOSCS meeting in Cambridge in 1995 the hexaplaric material in the Göttingen edition is spread over the first and the second apparatus, although the main part of this material is included in the second apparatus, exclusively containing hexaplaric material10. To deal with all hexaplaric material of a Bible book, both the first and the second apparatus should be gone through. Beside these tools, hexaplaric material has also been published in a scattered way in different articles and books. Collecting all these material is a work on its own. In real terms, to collect the data for the Symmachus lexicon of the Psalms11 the following works have been used12: the Greek-Hebrew index of the edition of the fragments of Psalms of Symmachus of Busto Saiz of 197813, and Schenker’s Griechisches Wörterverzeichnis of two manuscripts with Psalm fragments of Symmachus of 197514. For Ezekiel the following tools have been utilised to col- lect the data15: the Concordance of Hatch and Redpath and the second apparatus of the Göttingen edition of Ezekiel16. These two examples illustrate the complex- ity of the collection of the simple data, which will finally be used as headwords in the lexicon. This collection work however precedes and facilitates the real lexico- graphic work. The basis for lexicographic work is an index or a concordance which contains all words of the corpus with the passages in which they occur and/or with the quotation of their context which will at a later stage be incorporated into the lexi- con as headwords. For the Symmachus lexicon of the Psalms Lust was able to benefit from the indexes of Busto Saiz and of Schenker. For the other Bible books the situation is less propitious, as Lust himself states in his introduction of the Symmachus lexicon of the Psalms: for the remaining materials of the Three other than the Psalms of Symmachus, he had to rely on the list provided by Hatch and Redpath17. For Aquila we have the index of Reider-Turner18. This index was compiled by Reider in 1913, but never published; later Nigel Turner updated the data with new materials and published it in 1966. Although this work suffered from sharp criticisms19, it is still the only tool which collects all the data on Aquila. Since 1966 new Aquila material came to light. 10. NORTON, Collecting Data (n. 6), p. 253. 11. http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol05/Lust2000.html. 12. J. LUST, A Lexicon of Symmachus’ Special Vocabulary in His Translation of the Psalms, on http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol05/Lust2000.html [= J. LUST, A Lexicon of Symmachus’ Translation of the Psalms, in ETL 74 (1998) 87-92, p.
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