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A New Index to Hatch and Redpath1 A NEW INDEX TO HATCH AND REDPATH1 Throughout the ages people were interested in the relationship between a given word in the LXX and its Hebrew or Aramaic equivalent, and this for a whole range of reasons. New Testament scholars, particularly those working on the Synoptic Gospels, were desperately in need of such infor- mation2. Those who regarded the LXX primarily as a rich mine of possi- ble variants for the text-critical study of the Hebrew Bible had to be able to retrovert the Greek of the LXX to Hebrew, and such a task naturally presupposed the presence of the sort of information we are talking about here. One of the uses to which Hatch and Redpath's concordance (hence- forward: HR) has been put over the past hundred years is precisely this3. Obviously HR themselves regarded this information of vital importance, hence the list of numbered Hebrew/Aramaic words at the beginning of each entry and an index of Hebrew/Aramaic words as part of the Supple- ment volume. More than thirty years ago the present writer also got interested in this very question. Whereas the value and the admirable degree of accuracy of the concordance of HR is in no doubt whatsoever, it soon became appar- ent that there are ways to enhance its usefulness further and there is some scope for improvement. One obvious way of making a better tool of it was to convert the refer- ences to page and column in the above-mentioned index of Hebrew/Ara- maic words in the Supplement to actual Greek words they represent. The inconvenience of the current format has been keenly felt by many users of it, particularly where a given Hebrew or Aramaic word is of high fre- quency and/or corresponds to many Greek words. For instance, the verb dba qal is said to have been translated by thirty (!) different Greek words. 1. T. MURAOKA, A Hebrew/Aramaic Index to the Septuagint: Keyed to the Hatch and Redpath Concordance, to be published in early 1998 by Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, MI. Abbreviations used: BZAW = Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wis- senschaft; HR = E. HATCH – H.A. REDPATH, 1897-1906, Oxford, Clarendon Press [Repr. Graz, Austria, Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1954]; ICC = The International Critical Commentary; SCS = Septuagint and Cognate Studies. 2. The late Robert Lindsey, who published a Hebrew (not Modern) translation of the second Gospel, is one such, and my copy of Hatch and Redpath purchased from him bears tell-tale marks of how intensively he used it. 3. One would find a most useful essay on this very subject in E. TOV, The Text-critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research (Jerusalem Biblical Studies, 3), Jerusalem, 1981, pp. 142-158, which is a reworked version of his The Use of Concordances in the Reconstruction of the Vorlage of the LXX, in CBQ 40 (1978) 29-36. One of the central concerns of Tov is, furthermore, precisely the question of retroversion of genuine or pseudo-variants in Greek to their Hebrew form. 258 T. MURAOKA There are worse cases. My wife kindly agreed to undertake this time-con- suming mechanical work, completing in 1971 a neatly handwritten man- uscript running to 503 quarto sheets. In the meantime a young Brazillian by the name of Elmar Camilo dos Santos was working on a similar proj- ect, without my knowledge, and his work appeared in Jerusalem, pre- sumably in 19734. Dos Santos added another valuable feature, with an incredible degree of tenacity and hard work: frequency count. One learns that baï is translated with patßr 1035 (!) times, and that rma Qal is trans- lated with eîpe⁄n – êre⁄n 3334 (!) times, and 7 times in Nifal. For critical scholarship, however, was more significant the policy adopted and followed by Hatch and Redpath (and their team of cowork- ers). The policy is stated in the Preface in no ambiguous terms, and must be quoted here in extenso5: As far as possible, and without making the assumption that the Greek is a word-for-word translation of the Hebrew [emphasis added: TM], the Con- cordance gives the Hebrew equivalent of every Greek word in each passage in which it occurs. … There are many passages in which the Massoretic text differs from that which is implied in the Septuagint version, and there are others in which that version is rather a paraphrase than an exact translation. There are consequently many passages in which opinions may properly dif- fer as to the identification of the Greek and the Hebrew: it must be under- stood in regard to such cases that the aim of the present work, from which philological discussions are necessarily excluded, is rather to give a tenable view than to pronounce a final judgement. Suggestions were made to the present Editor [Redpath] from more quarters than one, that, where the vari- ant reading followed by the Septuagint version was obvious, such readings should also be noted in the list of Hebrew equivalents at the head of each article; but it has been found impossible to do this without altering the scope of the whole work. On the other hand, Hebrew words may occasionally be found in this concordance, of which the connexion with the Geek is not very obvious: such cases may well be pardoned on the ground that it is better to err by inserting too many references than by rejecting some which after all upon further investigation may be found to have considerable importance with regard to the matter in hand. Many would say that this is a reasonable and defensible position attesting to a typically British mixture of sound scholarship and common sense. Nonetheless, we believe that there are weighty arguments for attempting to improve the quality of this essential outil de métier. 4. An Expanded Hebrew Index for the Hatch-Redpath Concordance to the Septuagint, published by Dugith Publishers, Baptist House, Jerusalem. The publisher of our index, despite repeated efforts, was not able to establish contact with neither Dugith Publishers nor Dos Santos. Hence they turned to the present author for permission to publish his manuscript. 5. HR, vol. I, p. VI. A NEW INDEX TO HATCH AND REDPATH 259 REASONS FOR REVISION 1. Since the publication of HR in 1897 the Septuagint studies have never stood still, and especially in the wake of the discovery of Qumran and associated documents we have witnessed a strong upsurge and revival in the Septuagint studies6. Results of these studies need to be taken into account. 2. Some of the results just mentioned relate to the textual basis of our studies, namely discovery of new Greek and Hebrew texts. Even the Hebrew text of Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus, the Genizah fragments of which had been made available to HR and been taken into account in the form of a valuable special appendix in the Supplement volume, has become known to a greater extent due to the discovery of further Genizah fragments and fragments from the Judaean Desert, notably the Massada fragments: for details, see below. 3. On the side of the Greek text of the LXX the past century has witnessed a significant number of publications and studies. The Larger Cambridge Bible (1906-40), Swete's three-volume edition of the LXX (1930-34), Margolius' edition of the LXX Joshua (1931), the publication of which was completed by Tov (1992), Rahlfs' Handausgabe (1935), and the Göttingen edition (1939-) represent some of the landmarks in this respect. 4. HR state that “the absence of a number after a quotation implies that the passage does not exist in Hebrew” (HR: p. vi). This statement surely cannot be made to apply to the apocryphal book of 1 Esdras except its mid-section, which is assumed to have been composed originally in Greek. As a consequence no quotation from this book carries a number. This deficiency has been rectified in Muraoka's Index to I Esdras7. As a consequence, no small number of Hebrew and Aramaic equivalents which are not listed anywhere by HR have been retrieved. 5. HR themselves appended to vol. 2 of their concordance a few pages of addenda and corrigenda. Some more, but by no means many, which 6. Apart from the formation of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cog- nate Studies in 1968 (see L. GREENSPOON, The IOSCS at 25 Years, in ID. – O. MUNNICH [eds.], VII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Paris 1992 [SCS, 41], Atlanta, GA, pp. 171-181), there is no more eloquent witness to this phenomenon than the fact that S.P. BROCK – C.T. FRITSCH – S. JELLICOE, A Classified Bib- liography of the Septuagint, Leiden, 1973 (with 217 pages covering the modern times) has had to be supplemented by C. DOGNIEZ, Bibliography of the Septuagint. Bibliographie de la Septante 1970-1993 (VTSuppl, 59), Leiden, 1995 (with 329! pages covering a mere 20 odd years: 1970-1993). 7. T. MURAOKA, A Greek-Hebrew / Aramaic Index to I Esdras (SCS, 16), Chico, CA, 1984. A recent study on the putative original language of this section is D. TALSHIR and Z. TALSHIR, On the Question of the Source of the Story on the Three pages: The Apoc- ryphal Ezra 3-4), in M. FISHBANE – E. TOV (eds.), Sha‘arei Talmon [FS Talmon], Winona Lake, IN, 1992, pp. 63*-75*. 260 T. MURAOKA have a bearing on the identification of the Greek and Hebrew, have been spotted in their index of Hebrew words and elsewhere. 6. With due respect to the policy formulated by HR we believe that the problems mentioned by them regarding the identification of equivalents must be squarely faced.
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