Posts
1. Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (New York: T&T Clark, 2004) 98.
Dines is discussing the Hexapla, which was created by the Christian thinker Origen (second-third centuries C.E.). The Hexapla had six columns of Bible versions. One was the Hebrew version that is like the Masoretic Text. Another is the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Then there are other Greek translations featured, such as the ones by Aquila and Symmachus.
I found the following statement intriguing, or, more accurately, slightly unbelievable:
From what was effectively a pre-electronic database, it would have been possible to see at a glance how the LXX related to other versions, and thus to the original Hebrew (it did not occur to anyone at this time that the Hebrew underlying the LXX was sometimes different).
Okay, come to think of it, I already interacted with this issue in my post yesterday, Updating and Text Criticism in Antiquity, in which I state:
Siegert states that no attempt was made to apply [text criticism] to the Bible before Origen (second-third centuries C.E.), who compared the Hebrew version of the Bible with the Septuagint and other Greek translations. For a long time, Alexandrian Jews such as Philo simply assumed that the Septuagint and the Hebrew version of the Hebrew Bible said the exact same thing, only in different languages.
Philo (first century C.E.) actually says that in Life of Moses 2:34-40. But is Dines suggesting that people before Origen didn’t know that the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint were different, meaning the Hebrew text behind the Septuagint wasn’t always like the MT? In Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, vol. 4, Michael Brown documents that the New Testament authors referred to a variety of versions of the Hebrew Bible: the MT, the LXX, etc. (pp. 3-20). Krister Stendahl discusses the same issue in his School of St. Matthew and Its Use of the Old Testament. So, obviously, there was a notion as early as the first century that the Hebrew and the Greek versions were different. Would that imply that people before Origen realized that the Hebrew text underlying the LXX was different from the MT? Moreover, Dines refers to Irenaeus’ (c. 130-208 C.E.) statement that the LXX is superior to the new Jewish translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.
Did the NT authors believe that both the MT and the LXX were divinely-inspired? Did Irenaeus believe that there was one Hebrew text, and the LXX was the best translation of that, whereas the other translations were biased and inaccurate? Dines says something like this on p. 77. And, under my post “What’s Canonical for Us?”, Looney said that Augustine rejected the Hebrew versions of his day because he saw them as the result of poor copying, which was why there were so many variants. Augustine came after Origen, so he was aware of the variants, according to Dines’ scenario. But I’m wondering if Irenaeus years earlier rejected certain variants for the same reason that Augustine did.
2. Folker Siegert, “Early Jewish Interpretation in a Hellenistic Style,” Hebrew Bible, Old Testament: The History of Interpretation I/1: Antiquity, ed. Magne Saebo (1996) 142-143.
The synagogue service, be it by chance or not, fitted very well with Pythagorean and Stoic concepts of ‘pure’ and ‘unbloody’ worship which had developed out of philosophical criticism of religion and sacrifice. It was non-violent, bloodless, and [logikon] in every sense of the term: a cult based on verbal utterance, with reasonable meaning. It consisted of learning and prayer. The Pythagoreans, who categorically refused to kill animals, and the Stoics, who were conscious of the divine logos within them, were longing for a community to communicate with the divine. But since traditional cults were open to interpretation but not to innovation, they had to resort to more private forms of prayer and contemplation.
The part about the Pythagoreans not killing animals stood out to me. I wonder what their rationale was. Also, is this quote suggesting that the Stoics believed animals had a divine logos within them? That reminds me of something John Valade said in his post, “Leadership” in the Image of God. In discussing God’s command to humans to have dominion over the animals (Genesis 1:26), John states:
The idea of “dominion” over animals suggests that they probably also have all the necessary attributes to respond to this “dominion” appropriately. Unlike the teaching of the founder of our former denomination, this suggests that amimals are in fact intelligent.
Who knows? Genesis 3:1 says the serpent was the most subtle animal of all the land creatures that God had made. People may say, “Well, that’s because Satan was inhabiting him,” but the text says that the serpent was subtle, not Satan. Moreover, Numbers 22:28ff. says God opened the mouth of Balaam’s donkey. People say God was speaking through Balaam’s ass, but is that what the text really says? Or is it saying that God enabled the donkey to express himself in a manner that was understandable to Balaam? And the donkey was expressing his feelings as a donkey: about Balaam hitting him even though he’d been a good and faithful donkey for a long time. Could animals be intelligent?
At the same time, God commanded animal sacrifices. And, when Paul applied I Corinthians 9:9 (”You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain”) to Christians, he dismissively asks, “Is it for oxen that God is concerned?” (NRSV). So there are voices in the Bible that don’t treat animals as all-that-intelligent, as far as I can see. If animals were intelligent, would God allow human beings to kill them?
