Oh Bloody Hell.

Oh Bloody Hell. It's been another month since I posted. I did think of doing this, but I just haven't gotten the hang of doing it habitually. It just always seem like such a lot of effort.

Well, it's March now, and time is running out fast. I have a month and a half. Shit.

I'll being doing something pretty much everyday now, so more content should be coming, as I'll probably write on the blog to avoid doing actual work.

As I left it last month I had introduced the idea of two slightly different traditions of the Old Testament growing up, in Hebrew and Greek. These two languages were not great monoliths, like Shelley's legs of stone, but pluriform and organic. An entirely apt state as their use was equally pluriform and organic.

Understanding these stories and histories and tall tales and myths and poems and expressions of how people see the world, relationships and 'God' can only be disparate and contradictory and difficult because  human lives are messy, and recording these things in a written form is even messier. As I've dabbed my toe into the icy river that is textual analysis of the Bible, I've realised how deep it goes, how wide it is, and how quickly the currents can take you. I also can't swim.

I hope in my few posts so far, that I haven't overloaded you with information and completely lost you. I'll be honest, in digesting some of the things I can speak relatively easily about now, I was utterly lost to begin with.

But anyway. To finish this prologue and introduce my dissertation subject:

We have broadly two versions of the scriptures in use. They have mostly the same content, some additions, some omissions, a few sneaky whole books here and there.

These different versions, in their different languages being used by their different communities, did know about each other, and people seemed to get on with it.

There may have ben some tension and loyalty and pride at stake every so often, but everyone understood both as authoritative. That being said, at some point the two versions started to be harmonised. Somebody clearly saw the constant back and forth between these two text traditions and thought 'This is an issue, guys'.

Some scribes could interact with both the Greek and Hebrew texts from 100BC-100AD and made an effort to revise and harmonise the two traditions.

And it is in the middle of this revision process, when we zoom in on the turn of the century, that we can see this process.

However, we have almost no Greek texts of the Old Testament that were written in this period. We have Christian codices from about 300 years later, but by that point things were far more settled. Which brings us to the wallpaper that I introduced in my first ever post: 

The Nahal Hever scroll of the 12 Minor Prophets in Greek. 

From this scroll a scholar, Dominique Barthélemy, first argued for this revisionist idea using text analysis and devices that I don't really understand.



What then, I hear you say, is my novel and ingenious contribution to this field. Well, let me ask you a question, one which you can most certainly answer.

What other texts are written between 100BC-100AD, in Greek and contain parts of the Old Testament which could be analysed to find evidence of a revisionist harmonising of the Greek texts to more closely follow the Hebrew?

Easy.