Every day now. I promise.

This is going to be a sneaky bit of sleight of hand, where I intend to segue seamlessly from what I have been explaining (namely the particulars of Dominique Barthelemy's theory of Revised Greek texts being harmonised to a different Hebrew tradition) to a broader discussion of how the books of the Old Testament where used and understood, and most importantly a glimpse at the process of canonisation.


So, all the stuff I've explained already (the fact we have a Hebrew and Greek OT; the period of greek translation and all the problems that went along with that; the evidence of an effort to harmonise these different traditions at the turn of the era) lets call that point A.

And lets call where we want to be at the end of this post point B.

By tracing the path from A to B, I will hopefully have conveyed the titanic shift in direction I've made in my dissertation in the last month. And to extend the titanic analogy, something that every seems to be doing at the moment, I can only hope that come April the 24th I won't have horribly gored the side of this doomed experiment in large-scale essay-building.

A. Things we know

• We have two traditions of Old Testament texts Greek (LXX) and Hebrew (MT)
• These two traditions are extremely similar, but differ on several points: book order (Micah after Jonah?), Additions to books (Jeremiah, Daniel), Entirely new books (Judith, tobit)
• While these differences co-existed happily for the most part, some efforts can be observed to make the Greek more like a Hebrew text (whether or not the Revised Greek text was revised to the Masoretic/proto-marosetic is a separate, contentious issue)

My original trajectory (lets call that point C) was to examine the Greek quotations in the New Testament Gospels to see if there was evidence of this revision to harmonise two traditions. However, the sample size was simply not big enough and the evidence too complicated for this particular line of argument to bear fruit. 

But fear not, the same research that I have put into the OT quotations can be used, with a slight change of focus. 

Having squeezed all the linguistic and theological goodness out of my quotation lemons I had hoped to find lots of Greek that agreed with the Hebrew. And there is some evidence of that. But these harmonised Greek passages only made up some of the fine juice I had made, and I was being very wasteful. Not only could I find evidence of harmonised Greek-to-Hebrew, there was also: 

• Some quotations that were extremely faithful to the LXX and suggest an understanding of inspiration that values textual fidelity
• Some quotations that were bat shit crazy and showed that a text can be re-cast, re-interpreted or even completely rewritten and still be understood as inspired and authoritative
• Some long quotations that demonstrated a middle point of both fidelity to the text tradition but also an understanding of interpretation and creativity as part of the inspiration process
• And some quotations that appeared in more than one Gospel and said something about the relationship between the Gospels

And with all these other interesting bits floating around I figured I could talk about all of them. 

I was just going to look at how individual words and phrases demonstrate that the pluriform nature of the scripture was coming to an end through harmonising traditions into one super-tradition. 

I'm instead looking at entire quotations and trying to understand what an authoritative text was (why is this inspired by God and not just a nice poem or speech?), and how it was used (When should I quote directly and when is it acceptable to change the words I know). 

Instead of asking "how is this quotation showing revision to the Hebrew?", I will be asking "Does this quotation show fidelity or creativity to the text tradition?"

Point B will hopefully be an understanding of how sacred texts were used at the turn of the Era. Imagine a semi-circular dial (I would have drawn it but its late and I'm tired). At one end is a detailed, meticulous understanding of scripture that demands a literal copying of the text. At the other end is a free-flowing, creative and ever-changing understanding of scripture where the text gains authority by being engaged by the scribe and interpreter. In the middle are many degrees of grey. 

And the New Testament Gospel writers inhabit all of these positions at different times, its in that juicy goodness I squeezed out of my 20 minor prophet quotations.

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.

Dueling Models

When we left the Bible last time, I'd introduced the idea that the whole thing was a big mess, and that the Greek translation has had a bit of a hard time. I will continue to demonstrate the messiness, and hopefully make some progress towards being able to explain what my dissertation thesis is.

We have the Old Testament (OT) in Hebrew (Colour-coded orange) and in Greek (Colour-coded blue). 

As I tried to lay out last time, the Greek version translated a Hebrew text. During this translation there were issues, which were touched on earlier. These issues (corrections, misspellings, omissions) are depicted in the arrow with 1. and the lack of orange.

However, while mistakes can be put down to poor Ted the Translator, whole books cannot. I have laid out one suggested model for how to understand the relationship between the Hebrew and Greek, and how to factor in the entirely new content.

This model relies on the idea that the books of the OT were written in one language, over a certain length of time, and then became authoritative. Genesis and Judges and Jeremiah were all written in one definite form, and then everyone decided that there was one list of books that would be used, which couldn't be added to.

So after this pause where this list, or canon, become apparent, and then the Greek-speaking Jews took this list of books and translated them. During this translation, more books, written not in Hebrew but but in Greek, sprang up and the translators of this Greek OT added them in for lol's.

This model makes sense and is elegant in its simplicity. 

However, it is completely and utterly wrong.

There is no evidence at all for this theory, and has only ever been suggested, with varying degrees of difference from how I presented it, by those who need this model for their understanding of the Bible to make sense. 

If you allow mistakes and drafts and revisions and alternate versions and politics and egos to effect the books of the Bible, then how can this be the word of God anymore?!

As long as you're understanding of the Bible isn't too naive this challenge can be intelligently and easily answered, but now is not the time.

Let me suggest another model:

I didn't address before my visual depiction of biblical book composition. I've gone for a mad squiggle because I think it best conveys the idea that each book of the Bible went through a colourful development that cannot be understood in a linear way.

The top half of figure 6 shows the simple split between the time of Hebrew composition and the period of Greek composition. Very much one then the other.

The bottom half shows how this is a fallacy. While some parts of the Hebrew Scripture, such as the Pentateuch (first 5 books of the Bible also known as the Torah), were pretty established and uniform, the Hebrew Scriptures for the most part were in flux. 

When the Greek translation process started, it didn't have a nice simple book to copy everything from. Instead there were many competing versions of books. Some with simple changes, others greater. And in some places they used books that some other areas didn't recognise at all.

If Ted the Translator lived in Alexandria he probably didn't have access to all the diversity throughout the entire Mediterranean, but he would have ben aware of the differences and made value judgements.

Its also worth remembering that there isn't just Ted the Translator, there's also Terry and Tom and Tony and Trisha and Tilly and Tristram, all in different geographical locations, in different times and in different religious and political communities.

To sum up this little knowledge bomb: The Hebrew and Greek OT's were in a state of constant change between 300BCE and 0, and while there were some texts written only in Greek, it would be unfair to think of our dark blue friends as inferior to their orange textual counterparts.

Next time I'll explore how we this alternative model came, and how the 20th Century CHANGED EVERYTHING WE KNEW about the transmission of the OT between 300BCE and 100CE.

And then we will begin to touch on my very specific niche within that topic. 

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.

4 Months on...

Well, my worst fears have come true, and my dreams of a booming, regular blog oozing with content have entirely failed.

All the blog and I can do is try again like all relationships that take another shot at it; ignoring the warning signs and trying to avoid the sad truth that maybe they just don't love each other.

But for now I'm optimistic, in the library, and full of good ideas.

Having given some thought to how I could make this blog a success, apart from the obvious doing-some-work bit, I've concluded that a good blog or good anything in this audio-visual, information, stimulation, immediate gratification matrix called the Internet is to be sharp, and to hook you in without you, the consumer, having to commit to much time or effort before deciding whether or not there going to enjoy the content provided.

There are some simple techniques: blocks of text-BAD, bits of text with lots of space-BETTER. Capital letters-GOOD. Pictures, video, music, slideshows, links ALL GOOD.

And therein lies the problem. I'm doing a long piece of written work about about lots of books, using textual and literary criticism. And then I'm writing about that process.

So, in an effort to 1) help me digest the, at times dense, scholarship and 2) hook you, my adoring and easily bored readership, I will try as much as possible to post a big picture or maybe a video (if I figure out a good way of making them) that summarises what I'm reading or writing at the time.

I'll obviously be supplementing this with text as it will probably need some explanation, but I hope this will better lead to the fulfilment of the aims of this entire venture: to get me to work, and to stimulate and entertain a couple of people with this stuff I find really interesting.

I'll se you n a couple of days, hopefully.

A Start

Hello and thank you for having a look at my blog. I hope for it one day to have a complete record of my dissertation-writing process, and for it to be filled with witty, engaging and learned entries about textual criticism and translation theory. Until then, however, I can only keep you hooked with a couple of explanations.

The title of the blog 'What do you mean by sleeping? Get up!' is, of course, what the sailors say to Jonah when he has fallen asleep in the middle of a storm. I often find myself empathising with my biblical namesake, and particularly so here. I can easily see myself sleeping away the worries of this dissertation, so I thought I would constantly remind myself of my own worse habit with the title.

The picture used as the background to the blog is a slide from the journal that first produced the scrolls central to my dissertation, and is a comparison of two different scribes handwriting found in the scrolls. It was one of the few large pictures of the scrolls I could find online, and is both intellectually and aesthetically pleasing.

Sadly, there is nothing else to draw your attention to, yet! I very much hope for this to change, and for this blog to be regularly updated with at least vaguely interesting content.

Again, thank you.