Through the Medium of Tetris...

So before I could actually introduce the intricacies of my dissertation topic, I thought I'd do some scene-setting.

So here is my tetris-based explanation of the main issue you encounter when studying the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible in Greek (which, in a very broad sense, is exactly what I'm doing).

So when you go and buy that Old Testament (O.T) that you've saving up for, you'll probably get it in your native tongue, and not have to worry about any of the issues about to be brought up. The people that translated that simple tome you how hold, however, they, hopefully, did worry. 

They worried and argued and debated and fell out and excommunicated and killed each other, because that simple tome is not very simple. There are a great many not-very-simple things about the OT, but the first of those, depicted below is the fact that it comes in both Hebrew and Greek.

Looking at it how, I realise that I've laid this out very ambiguously. Damn. Just so you don't misinterpret my easily misinterpretable picture:

 THE GREEK VERSION (LXX) USED (and is translated from) THE HEBREW VERSION (with possible exceptions). 

The oldest parts of Bible were written in Hebrew (probably) somewhere between 1000BCE and 800BCE. The Greek OT, the 'Septuagint' or LXX, was translated between 300-100BCE.

We don't have the originals of any of these, as they are very old. In fact, the OT in that simple tome you just bought will base itself mainly on those books listed underneath my ambiguous boxes. Most English translations follow the Hebrew, for reasons I'll get into, and the Hebrew they use will come the Aleppo or Leningrad, both written around 1000CE. These are called 'Masoretic Texts' or M.T.

The oldest Greek OT's we still have are from around 300CE (the big three listed there).

However, if you were to depict the Hebrew and its Greek translation in a vaguely tetris-esque format, they might look like this:

The Greek we have today doesn't match up with the Hebrew we have today. They're very very similar in most places, but there are differences (see 1.) and some completely new bits (see 2.).

How, if the LXX is meant to be a translation of the same stuff, do we get not only differences, but entirely new books.

We have this dark blue addition to our greek tetris piece, and in it we new books (See figure 3.). However, as i mentioned we several different versions of the greek text alone and even among themselves they don't agree. Some texts have more, some less, some slight deviations, other bits riffed on a lot. What the hell were these crazy greek-speaking jews doing? This is the bible, with its established contents page and some definite things that God wants us to know! 

With the LXX translation happening between 300-100BCE, a common solution is to say that they started making stuff up after the period of Old Testament compositions had ended. All this stuff written in the last couple of centuries before CE don't really count. They were only written in Greek anyway. No Hebrew, No entry.

Or so they say. I'll address that at some point. So with these unique greek books discounted we still have all these mistakes to sort out.

We have Ted the translator, who wasn't one guy, but loads over a long period, and he's looking at our orange tetris piece/Hebrew Bible. As you can read, there are a load of suggestions for what happened in the translation process. All of these reasons are put forward at different places, and they are well backed up with examples and show the similarities and the potential confusion and have good evidence and generally do what scholarly work on the Bible should do.

So where does this leave our poor Greek Old Testament?

A bit buggered really. Between about 100-400CE the Jewish people firmly got behind the Hebrew, and the standardised M.T. that we have in Leningrad and Aleppo was born. 

St. Jerome in the 400's also went back to the Hebrew, despite the fact that Christians had been using the LXX version, although he did use the greek for those awkward dark blue bits where he couldn't find anything else. Jerome's translation, The Vulgate, was the bees knees for about 1000 years after that.

Then the reformation happened, and even those dark blue bits that had hung on, despite Jerome, they got culled by Luther and co.

So today every Bible (except Catholic; Greek, Slavonic and Georgian Orthodox; Armenian; Syriac; Coptic and Ethiopic ones) excludes the dark blue bits, and follows the Hebrew M.T. text over in the LXX in most places.

All this despite the fact that almost all the New Testament writers and most of the fledgling Christian movement, along with thousands of diaspora Jews, all loved and used the greek version. 

I hope this was enlightened one small aspect of the huge mess that is the Bible.