Let me count the ways. A digital copy of the Göttingen Septuagint (GS) for the pre-pub asking price of $299.95 was a HUGE bargain. At the current price of $699.95, you still can’t go wrong (it would cost you three times as much to purchase the 24 print volumes). Installed on the Libronix platform, the value of the electronic edition relative to the print edition goes up many times. Nearly every lemma is linkable via another Logos resource, the Septuagina: Morphologically Tagged Edition: Rahlfs, to an array of other Libronixed reference works, and online resources like Perseus. Logos is to be commended for offering an electronic edition of GS. Below the jump, a worked example of the possibilities and limits of doing research with the electronic GS as one’s point of departure.
One of the supremely annoying things about the state of studies on the Septuagint is that no one seems to have a handle on how many neologisms the corpus contains. Here is a quote from the introduction, p. XIII, of Muraoka’s A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (2009) [reviews here, here, and here] – a reference work not available in electronic form – my commentary in bold.
The asterisk, *, signifies that the word is not attested earlier than the Septuagint. . . . Words so marked do not have to be neologisms created by Septuagint translators. When a word or usage marked with an asterisk is attested in Polybius, for instance, it is likely that its absence prior to the Septuagint is due to incomplete attestation . . . These neologims [sic; the reference is to headwords in GELS that are not listed in LSJ as occurring earlier than the Septuagint] amount to about 1,900, roughly one-fifth of the total LXX vocabulary. The asterisk is also used in the main body of the entry [i.e., to signal usages or meanings of headwords in GELS that are not noted in LSJ as occurring earlier than the Septuagint].
End quote. The notion that “the LXX” – a slippery term referring to, not a linguistic corpus, but a religious and/or modern scholarly construct – contains 1,900 neologisms, is, of course, absurd. It is also unlikely that a fifth of the “meanings” given to LXX vocabulary are calques of a Hebrew or Aramaic Vorlage, or otherwise dependent on a Semitic substrate. But it is probably the case, given the typologies of literalism LXX translation units instantiate, that a significant percentage of LXX phrases are new coins. One might wish that these matters would be the object of careful research informed by a coherent and up-to-date methodology.
In the meantime, the status quaestionis is cause for indigestion. One can begin to make headway thanks to the Libronixed electronic version of GS. Suppose I’m reading along in my electronic GS Exodus, get to Exod 12:9, and read the following:
οὐκ ἔδεσθε ἀπʼ αὐτῶν ὠμὸν
οὐδὲ ἡψημένον ἐν ὕδατι,
ἀλλʼ ἢ ὀπτὰ πυρί,
κεφαλὴν σὺν τοῖς ποσὶν καὶ τοῖς ἐνδοσθίοις[1]
This is translated in NETS, which the Logos folks however cannot link to since it is available online but only in the form of read-only secure PDFs:
You shall not eat of it raw
or boiled in water,
but rather roasted in fire,
head with the feet and the inner organs.
As translations inevitably do, NETS hides as much as it reveals. A “heuristic” translation might go like this:
You shall not eat {of} them raw,
[i.e., ἀπὸ “from” τὰ κρέα “the meats” referred to in 12:8, it being normal in Greek to speak of meat to be eaten in the plural; “raw” is singular, an unexceptionable case of lack of concord in grammatical number; LXX preserves the partitive construction of its Vorlage; this is fine Hebrew but is it fine Greek? – it is not surprising that απ αυτων ωμον was misread/misheard [reading and hearing were fused in antiquity] as απο των ωμων “from the raw (meats)” in 76′ according to Apparatus I of GS]
nor cooked in water,
[ἡψημένον “cooked” is singular, like ὠμὸν “raw” with which it rhymes; the dichotomy is raw vs. cooked – ἕψω has a general meaning “to cook,” and a specialized meaning “to boil” – but one would not know that if one depended on Greek lexica available in English; I follow Montanari’s superlative GI, which defines ἕψω as follows: far cuocere o bollire “[transitive] cook or [specifically] boil” – the semantic range of ἕψω, I would argue, dovetails nicely with the underlying בשל “(generic) cook or (specifically) boil,” such that LXX Deut 16:7 καὶ ἑψήσεις καὶ ὀπτήσεις καὶ φάγῃ ἐν τῷ τόπῳ, ᾧ ἂν ἐκλέξηται κύριος ὁ θεός σου αὐτόν is not oxymoronic, or meant to imply that the offering was to be boiled and then roasted, but is an accurate translation plus a gloss that harmonizes with ὀπτὰ in the verse under review, thus: “And you shall cook and roast and eat it, in the place which . . .” בשל of Exod 12:9; Deut 16:7; and 2 Chron 35:13 to be discussed below has an Akkadian cognate, bašālu, deployed with a wider range of subjects and arguments; for example, in the sense of “become ready, ripe,” of fruit, and “become ready, cooked,” of meat over charcoal, in the intransitive stem; “make ready, cook,” of food in a pot, and “make ready, refine,” of silver, in the transitive stem (the Syriac cognate is attested with a similar range of subjects and arguments). “Become ripe,” “become cooked,” “cook,” and ”refine” are translations which capture the denotative reference of bašālu in specific occurrences. The verb’s core meaning, or “meaning on its own,” is “become ready” and “make ready”; the subjects and arguments of the verb are restricted in range. Ideally, it would be possible to verify by clicking through to select examples that bašālu; בשל in Hebrew; in Aramaic and Syriac; and ἕψω in Greek have both the generic and specialized meanings the lexica say they have (Tawil (2009:61) discusses relevant Akkadian and Hebrew examples). If Logos cannot provide this, no one can.
A specialized meaning of a lexeme may overpower to the point of obliterating the possibility of that same lexeme being understood without ambiguity in terms of its core meaning. This, I would argue, happened in the case of ἕψω, which explains why LSJ glosses it with “boil” to the exclusion of “cook,” and why LXX 2 Chron 35:13 glosses the underlying ויבשלו “and they cooked” unambiguously and harmonistically, with καὶ ὤπτησαν “and they roasted,” rather than accurately, with καὶ ἥψησαν (from ἕψω) “they cooked.” “Unambiguous” and “accurate” qualify overlapping sets of translation equivalents, not identical sets. Disambiguating translation needs to be seen for what it is – a means of destruction of the particular semantic configurations of a source text for the sake of clarity, not to mention ideological clarity imposed from the outside, in a target text.
Aside from that, it is serious fun to compare interlinguistic equivalents across languages in the ancient world: bašālu; בשל in Hebrew; in Aramaic and Syriac; and ἕψω in Greek: a high quality quadrilingual lexicon is within reach in my view given CAD, AHw; the work of Paul, Horowitz, Tawil, and others; the forthcoming studies of Chaim Cohen and John Huehnergard; the splendid lexica of Michael Sokoloff; LSJ and (better yet) GI]
but roasted in fire instead,
[ὀπτὰ “roasted (meat)” is plural, in agreement with τὰ κρέα “the meats”; the dichotomy ἑφθὰ καὶ ὀπτά “charbroiled and barbecued (meat entrees)” from Euripides, cited in the abridged LSJ “An Intermediate Greek-English lexicon” I have in Logos, would seem to be relevant: the flesh of the yearling sheep or goat was to be fire-roasted, not pot-roasted in liquid; “but … instead” translates ἀλλʼ ἢ]
including the head with the feet and the inner organs
[accusative of specification, but not in the sense of exclusion of that which is unspecified: the probable sense is that those parts of the animal’s body normally set aside before cooking the rest of the (skinned) animal in a fire pit or over an open fire were to be roasted in aggregate apart from the rest of the animal’s meat, and eaten, too – though “eaten” is implied by the context rather than expressly affirmed; ἐνδοσθίοις sounds off if one has classical Greek in one’s bones; shouldn’t it be εντοσθιοις? Many mss so read according to Apparatus I of GS]
Apparatus I of GS helps me overcome the indigestion of seeing ἐνδόσθια, a headword in Perseus (it is listed under the adjective in GELS, though the adjective is unattested in the Septuagint), treated as unattested in Greek before the Septuagint – called a neologism in LEH and asterisked in GELS. The spelling is new, but not the word and the set of meanings and usages associated with it. It would seem that ἐνδόσθια in Hellenistic Greek of certain times and places (note its occurrence in Ben Sira 10:9, Ben Sira’s grandson has “How can earth and ashes be haughty / since in life it [mortal humankind] throws up [GS reads “I threw up,” but this is nonsensical] its guts [with a putative play on words in the Hebrew as Ben Sira’s grandson understood them, יגאה and גויו]?”), replaced standard or High Greek ἐντόσθια. Neither LEH or GELS, unlike LSJ and GI, bother to note that ἐνδόσθια = ἐντόσθια. A word to the wise: do not use LEH or GELS except in tandem with LSJ and GI.
The Libronixed edition of GS is a giant step forward. But I won’t be a truly happy camper until the day arrives in which, thanks to Logos, I can watch my grandchildren play, and at the same time, scroll through all the occurrences of East Semitic bašālu, Northwest Semitic בשל, and Greek ἕψω in the ancient corpora on a laptop.
Bibliography
Various editors, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum (24 volumes to date; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974-2008 = GS); Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, and Roderick McKenzie, A Greek-English Lexicon. With a supplement, 1996 (Oxford: Clarendon, 19409 [= LSJ] + 1996 [ = LSG]; Johan Lust, ErikEynikel, and Katrin Hauspie, with the collaboration of G. Chamberlain, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (2 vols.; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1992, 1996; 20032 = LEH); Franco Montanari, GI. Vocabolario della lingua greca. Con la guida all'uso del vocabolario e lessico di base. Seconda edizione con CD-Rom (Torino: Loescher, 2006 = GI); Takamitsu Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Leuven: Peeters, 2009 = GELS); Alfred Rahlfs and RobertHanhart, Septuaginta: Editio altera (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006 = Rahlfs); Hayim ben Yosef Tawil, An Akadian Lexical Companion for Biblical Hebrew (Jersey City: Ktav, 2009)
[1]Wevers, John William ; Quast, U.: Exodus (Göttingen Septuagint II, 1). Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991, S. 165
John - Thanks for once again blogging on the merits of a digital GS. Your readers should know that we are beginning the morph tagging. I'd expect it to be done by next SBL - at least a "provisional" tagged GS if not the final release. I'm naturally sympathetic to your lexicographical wishes. With the exception of Montanari, we either have or are regularly asking to license everything else. Publishers keep saying no; we keep asking. Someday the lights will go on (publishers realize we are a new revenue stream, not a competitor). I'd love to get the CAD, but Chicago's ears are deaf (except for some grad students there, who know that PDF is not a digital solution). We wish we could serve the public with that -- why should biblical studies have such tools and fields like Assyriology are left with PDF and HTML? But that's all they know, and many don't know that much either -- boldly rushing into the 20th century.
Posted by: Mike Heiser | December 04, 2010 at 01:37 PM
Thanks, Mike, for plowing ahead in this area.
The only rational explanation I can think of for the no's you receive is that publishers are by and large as yet unconvinced that Libronixing something they publish will add revenue, not diminish revenue.
After all, the old Latin adage, pecunia non olet (money doesn't stink), ought to still apply.
Posted by: JohnFH | December 04, 2010 at 05:26 PM
Although not a serious Bible student, I do own an original 2 volume edition of Rahlfs LXX, in mint condition, if anyone is interested.
Posted by: Hansen | December 10, 2010 at 07:30 AM
Libronix will continue to fail as a viable consumer product until it realizes that it should exit to serve its users' needs and not vice-versa with regards to operating system and software. Even with the pre-pub price, the cost of purchasing a new computer with the operating system and software required to run Libronix will easily offset anything I would have saved on that one LXX package alone.
Posted by: slaveofone | December 10, 2010 at 04:00 PM
Hansen,
Without a Septuagint, how are you going to investigate the occurrences in which an NT writer quotes the Septuagint without revision toward the proto-Masoretic text, which was fast becoming the gold standard in Hebrew?
Slaveofone,
I take it you are a Mac person. But I thought Logos software was now Mac compatible.
Posted by: JohnFH | December 11, 2010 at 07:57 AM