The Nature of Lucian's Revision of the Text Of

THE NATURE OF LUCIAN’S REVISION OF THE TEXT OF GREEK JOB Claude E. Cox It is an honour to offer this study to our friend Raija Sollamo. We have been together at several IOSCS meetings, where Canadian schol- ars always feel a special affinity towards our Finnish colleagues who specialize in the Septuagint: Ilmari Soisalon-Soininen, Anneli, Raija, Seppo, and Anssi. We feel this affinity because Finland and Canada are both northern countries—we know what winter really is like!—and we are relatively small in terms of population. Though Canada is a very large country, our population is not large compared to our southern neighbours, the United States and Mexico, much like Finland in rela- tion to Europe to the south and Russia to the east. Finally, Canadians and Finns share a love of hockey and when we meet at international competitions it is with a mutual love of the game; further, some of our favourite NHL players are Finnish in origin: Teemu Selänne, Jari Kurri, Miikka Kiprusoff, Saku Koivu, and Esa Tikkanen, to name a few. The purpose of this study is at least two-fold: first, to demonstrate that the text that Lucian worked on for the book of Iob was a Hexaplaric text; second, to show that the Lucianic revision of Iob is in keeping with Lucian’s work that we know from elsewhere. So the task to be undertaken is simple, even if the subject of Lucian and his revision of the Greek Bible is highly complex. Lucian and Lucianic Iob The single most informative introduction to the work of Lucian is that of Natalio Fernández Marcos.1 It begins with a few remarks about Lucian and relates that he was probably born in Samosata, Syria, about 250 c.e., studied in Edessa and Caesarea, eventually founded 1 The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible (tr. Wilfred G. E. Watson; Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2001), 223–38. Also, brief and judicious: B. Botte and P.-M. Bogaert, “Septante et Versions grecque,” DBSup 12.68:573–75. 424 claude e. cox an exegetical school in Antioch, and was martyred in Nicomedia in 311/12. Readers are referred to Natalio’s work for a treatment of his- torical sources that discuss Lucian as well as for a survey of research on Lucian’s revision. Natalio offers a summary of the characteristics of Lucian’s revision, based upon a study of those books where his work has been most studied, i.e., the Prophets, 1–3 Maccabees and 1 Ezra. Since this summary forms the basis for the analysis that follows in this study, it may be best to reproduce his remarks. In general, it can be stated that it [Lucian’s revision] tends to fill the gaps in the lxx in respect of the Hebrew text on the basis of additions taken from “the three”, particularly from Symmachus. This procedure, combined with a certain freedom in handling the text, often gives rise to a series of doublets that are not in the lxx. It also inserts a series of interpolations (proper names instead of the corresponding pronoun, possessive pronouns, articles, conjunctions, making implicit subjects or objects explicit, etc.) which tend to clarify the sense or minimise incorrect grammar. It often resorts to changing a synonym, in most cases without it being possible to discover the reason for the change. At other times one notices a tendency to replace Hellenistic forms with Attic forms due to the influence of the grammarians of the time. There are also many grammatical and stylistic changes: of prepositions, of simple to compound verbs, of person, number, etc.2 The result, he says, is a full text, with no omissions. To what Natalio has written above, he adds Hanhart’s observations derived from work on 1 Ezra.3 Of these, we may note that Lucian supports most of Origen’s Hexaplaric work on the text and that, among stylistic phenomena, the Lucianic text contains transpositions that change the more classical hyperbaton.4 For the book of Iob, The Septuagint in Context provides these brief remarks: “In Job . it [i.e., the Lucianic text] occurs clearly in the Codex Alexandrinus, the Codex Venetus (V, from Job 30:8), in the minuscules 575–637 as well as in the commentaries on the book of Job by Julian 2 Septuagint in Context, 230. 3 R. Hanhart, Text und Textgeschichte des 1. Esrabuches (MSU XII; Göttingen: Vanden- hoeck & Ruprecht, 1974). 4 Septuagint in Context, 230–31. On hyperbaton, see A. M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens, Discontinuous Syntax: Hyperbaton in Greek (New York/Oxford: Oxford, 2000). This complex presentation of hyperbaton in classical Greek easily invites its application to Old Greek texts such as Iob. .

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