LXX ISAIAH OR ITS VORLAGE: PRIMARY “MISREADINGS” AND SECONDARY MODIFICATIONS*

Donald W. Parry

A number of factors associated with biblical Hebrew manuscripts during the last centuries before the Common Era presented distinct challenges for copyists and translators. These challenges included rare words (esp. hapax legomena), difficult-to-read bookhands, graphically similar characters and words, irregular or inconsistent orthography, incomprehensible scribal notations, irregular or inconsistent orthogra- phy, lack of vocalization, and more. Because of these and other factors, scribes and copyists made various (mechanical, unintentional) errors when making new copies of a text, as did translators when creating translations from the Hebrew. Examples of such errors exist in scrip- tural texts from Qumran, in Masoretic Text(s), in the Greek transla- tion of the Hebrew, and in other translations. This paper will deal with first-level errors in the Septuagint book of Isaiah that resulted in secondary modifications to various instances of parallelismus membrorum. By first-level errors in LXX Isaiah, I mean the inadvertent errors, or the so-called mechanical mishaps, that occurred during the translating process. Various handbooks, based on long-established text critical principles and methodologies, have set forth the categories of mishaps that have occurred during the transmission of texts.1 These include issues that are associated with the following general categories: pluses (e.g., dittography, conflation of readings), minuses (e.g., haplography, homoioteleuton, homoiarcton),

* This article is written in honor of Professor James C. VanderKam, whose scholar- ship has enlightened so many of us and whose friendship deserves praise. 1 The most complete and up-to-date study of biblical Hebrew textual criticism is Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). See also Christian D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897; repr. with prolegomenon by Harry M. Orlinsky, New York: Ktav, 1966); J. Weingreen, Introduction to the Critical Study of the Text of the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Com- pare also the more brief treatments of the subject by Julio Trebolle Barrera, The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible (trans. W. G. E. Watson; Brill: Leiden, 1998), 367–421; and Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament(trans. Erroll F. Rhodes; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 107–22. 152 donald w. parry changes (e.g., misdivision of letters or words, ligatures, graphic similar- ity), and differences in sequence (interchange of letters or metathesis and transposition of words). This paper will not deal with other text- critical categories, such as exegetical pluses or late editorial additions, harmonizations, morphological smoothing, morphological updating, updating the vocabulary, euphemistic or dysphemistic changes, ortho- graphic variants, and phonetic differences. Nor is this paper concerned with translators’ stylistic approaches to the text, idiosyncrasies, and conventions. Examples of alleged, hypothetical, or assumed mechanical errors in LXX Isaiah include the following:

1. Misreadings occurred when there was confusion about what consti- tuted the correct Hebrew triconsonantal root letters (or the Hebrew morpheme), especially when one or more root letters were absent from the inflected forms (i.e., hollow verbs, I-yod, I-nun, III-he, doubly weak verbs, metathesis of sibilants in Hitpael, and so forth). Examples from the LXX as reconstructed into Hebrew include Isa 19:5; 23:1–2[2]; 28:26; 29:1, 14; 30:4, 20; 32:3; 63:14; 63:19[64:1]; 64:6[7]. 2. In a couple of instances, the translator erred through dittography of graphically similar words (Isa 3:10) or of a single character (Isa 8:14). 3. The translator at times erred when a letter was misread because of its likeness to another letter. Examples of graphically similar Hebrew letters include the following: bet/mem or bet/final mem (Isa 11:15; 40:29); bet/pe (Isa 34:4; 40:8[7]; 47:2); dalet/he (Isa 10:18); dalet/resh (Isa 5:17; 8:9; 8:20; 15:4; 16:11; 17:2; 23:10; 25:2, 4–5; 28:9; 33:14; 40:15; 44:14; 45:16 bis; 47:10; 53:10); he/khet (Isa 5:17; 21:15 bis; 22:1; 34:17; 47:2); he/ayin (Isa 41:24); he/resh (Isa 64:1[2]); vav/ resh (Isa 24:1; 28:10, 13); zayin/nun (Isa 30:12); zayin/resh (Isa 25:4; 50:11); yod/resh and khet/tav (Isa 44:24); kaf/pe (Isa 53:10); samek/ final mem (Isa 30:4); and sin/shin (Isa 7:20; 19:10, 13; 28:1, 3; 65:15; 66:9). 4. The translator read the correct Hebrew letters but understood a dif- ferent root meaning than the one intended. Examples include Isa 5:13; 9:15[16]; 28:10; 47:10. 5. The translator read the correct Hebrew letters but misinterpreted the intended vocalization. Examples include Isa 1:27; 5:13, 18; 9:7[8]; 17:11; 24:23 bis; 25:5; 28:24; 32:2; 33:1 bis; 33:2; 41:24; 42:10; 44:11; 48:14; 60:21; 62:7; 63:11; 66:5; 66:10.