Greek Articles in the Septuagint: From Yahweh to Kyrios to Ho Kyrios?

FIVE THOUSAND YAHWEH Greek translations have now been categorised, covering Genesis all the way through to Song of Songs - the question at hand: how did the translators of the Hebrew Bible translate the divine Name of Yahweh into Greek? We know that the answer to that question is the same answer as the title of Adonai: KYRIOS (Lord). But the article is missing in Greek, giving it a name-like quality, like Pharoah. But to what degree? Scholars and historians agree that it is likely that the initial main translation project was not of the whole Hebrew Bible, but rather of the first five books, sometimes referred to as the Torah. If a decision about using anarthrous KYRIOS was made for Yahweh and Adonai at this stage, then measuring article behaviour across the rest of the Septuagint can provide us with interesting data about the translation history of the project, and maybe even some fresh perspective on the redactional dates of the originals. Finally, we may wish to question afresh the adequacy of the "the LORD" solution in many English translations of the Old Testament.

I'm going to present the information graphically in two forms: one with the book of Job included and one without. The reason for that is that because Job is such an extreme outlier in the way it includes the article with Kyrios and Kyriou that it reduces the visual impact of the variations across the other books. So here, first then, is my current data set (excluding Ezekiel, which will be integrated when I provide the full data set with the prophetic books):

So we can observe that the pattern of excluding the article for Kyrios and Kyriou established in the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy) seems to continue relatively without change until we get to Job, at which point the rule book is completely thrown out of the window! Job has 26 relevant occurrences of Yahweh translations, and 22 of them include the article. This makes for a huge spike, but note how the orange line tracing the rates of articles does not immediately sink back to its typical levels - both Psalms and Proverbs seem significantly higher than before, just below the 20% mark.

What else do we know about Job that could account for such a wildly different approach to the Kyrios translation? NETS, the critical and publically available Greek translation into English thus far does not integrate this astonishing statistic nor help us in attempting to understand it. It does help characterise it, however, with the following observations:

• "OG Iob is one of a kind in the Septuagint corpus: ... the least literal, both in its attitude to abbreviating the parent text and in the way the translator worked with that portion of the text." (NETS, p. 667)
• It consciously abbreviates the parent text at an increasing rate as you go through the book, with the overall text being significantly shorter than the Hebrew.
• Except, I note, in 1:21, the translator does not opt for the usual "and it came to pass" Hebraism translation (καὶ ἐγένετο) of וַֽיְהִי and states simply "And when" (καὶ ὡς) - however, I could only find three occurrences of that translation in Job for the 8 occurrences of וַֽיְהִי .
• The translator inserts a lot of particles: 'as Kitto says, "Greek is well stocked with little words, conjunctions that hunt in couples or in packs, whose sole function is to make the structure clear. They act, as it were, as signposts". This seems to be the translator's intent in Iob, i.e., to give the rather loosely linked Hebrew text a connectedness. So the translation is heavily salted with particles: "and," "but," "now," "because," "for," "really," "on the on hand ... on the other," "however," "therefore," "rather," "again," "or" and others." (emphasis mine, NETS p. 668, Kitto citation taken from D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973 (1951; revised ed., 1957))
• The translator may have been borrowing techniques from other translated books in the Septuagint: NETS cites research comparing 4.21a to Isaiah 40.24b, 34:13 to Psalm 24:1 and 34:15 to Gen 3:19.

This last point is interesting since it removes one of the explanations for the use of articles with Kyrios - a very early translation preceding or beyond the influence of other translations. It is difficult to ground much on this, however, because if you actually bring up the Greek for the comparisons cited, there really is nothing strikingly similar.

Whatever the relationship, we can note the following progression through the three language groups:

Hebrew Name Yahweh throughout the OT ("anarthrous") 
     --> Greek Name/Title KYRIOS ("anarthrous") 
           --> Greek Title HO KYRIOS in Job ("arthrous") 
                --> modern European language title throughout the OT THE LORD/L'ETERNEL/o SENHOR/il SIGNOR/El Señor/der HERR, etc. (also "arthrous"). 

Could Job, then, be our "missing link"?

Job, despite its extreme position, is not our only outlier. We have discussed Psalms at various points over the course of my postings on this topic, and in my next post, we'll zoom in a bit further by removing Job from the picture and see where the other contours lie. Sneak preview:

Of course, I will also be cataloguing the remaining prophetic material to complete the survey. However, we can expect few surprises there, the prophets I think are very on board with the anarthrous rule. So expect the brown line to come back down and stay very low.

Let's Hear It For...... Chronicles!

THERE AREN'T MANY folks who get excited about the Old Testament books of 1 and 2 Chronicles, so why am I a definite exception to that rule today? You might remember a critical response piece I wrote not so long ago to a 2013 essay published by Koog Hong on "Divine Euphemism". His ideas comparing the parallel passages between 2 Samuel 7 and 1 Chronicles 17 (David's response to God to the message transmitted by Nathan) were novel but didn't make sense to me. If, during Israelite history, there was a gradual rise of euphemism and wariness around the divine Name of Yahweh and an assimilation of Adonai, how could Hong's discovery favour that tendency? 1 Chronicles seems to prefer the title "Yahweh Elohim" over "Adonai Yahweh". Shouldn't we rather expect a later composed Israelite text to opt for an Adonain substitution, say Adonai Elohim or something?

Well, my survey on the translational habits of the Greek-speaking Jews has been marching on in the meantime, now with over 4000 Yahweh occurrences categorised (and many checks and errors ironed out in the process). Last time I published on the research, I had reported, as expected, a consistently low rate of Greek articles for the translated divine Name of Yahweh in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also sometimes referred to as the "Torah", the Law given by God to Moses (for rather random reasons, I had also calculated the values for Ezekiel and Psalms too). This translated name was and is "KYRIOS" or "LORD", which is also how the Greek translators operating around the middle of the third century BC went about translating the Hebrew title "Adonai". The peculiar thing about this translation is that the notion of it being a name is imputed via this absence of the article. Well, it has been speculated, without anyone systematically checking as far as we know, that this methodology was continued beyond the initial translation of the Torah to the rest of the Hebrew Bible (not all of which was necessarily in a finished state at that time anyway, by the way!)

Now we can add the following books with confidence to the study, with two big surprises on the way: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Esther, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon:



Looking at that you might think, well why isn't John shooting off about Job? Well you'd be right, I probably should be shooting off about Job too, as I hadn't yet heard any rumours or reason to suspect Job to be such an odd-ball. Put in layman terms, then, for Job, let us just say that the peculiar rule of dropping the article before kyrios and kyriou was dropped. It's easy to imagine actually. You know how in our English Bibles we always see in the Old Testament this rather odd "the LORD" all caps? Well, as it turns out, for the book of Job, that is very much how it looks in the Greek, despite its conspicuous absence in much of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), that "the" is coupled to "LORD" almost as consistently as we make it in English (and in French that seemingly insignificant little "l'" preceding "Eternel", and so on). But I don't want to dwell on what that means for Job for now (was it translated before the Torah? How could it be translated in such a different way to everything else?...)

The important point to note is that for both volumes of Chronicles, other translation style points and hallmarks aside, the translators could just as well have been the same translators as those translating the Torah, with rates of "arthricity" at around just 1 to 2 %. Queue the odd chronological implications of Koog Hong's essay. Could this piece of evidence actually be indicative of an earlier translation, maybe an even earlier compositional date for Chronicles?! If we are able to trace some form of decomposition of the rule over time, then this would place the Chronicles translation as extremely early.

Expect two more posts before we reach the major milestone of wrapping up the Hebrew to Greek Yahweh translation project survey: completion of the historical books (very nearly there, give me less than a week), and the prophetical texts of Isaiah through to Malachi (June). We will then be in a position to plot the translational practice across the entire Hebrew Bible into Greek. Exciting!

How My Relationship to Christian Scripture is Changing

The title of this blog if the last three and a half years has been a good summary of its purpose: faith and scripture.

It is the connection between these two that make each of them so interesting and sustainable as a conduit for the faith community to frame their action and thought.

However, over this period I have traversed a number of physical and psychological changes that have taken me out of the mainstream church action and into a different kind of theological reflection. I only think it is fair to be honest with blog readers on an important shift I can sense occurring within me and despite my efforts to the contrary: these biblical texts that I find so fascinating I no longer approach from the faith perspective primarily. When I read them, I am asking historical questions first and foremost. It just seems to be how my brain has reprogrammed itself to process these texts for various reasons. Let's guess at why:

As I already mentioned, the first of these is probably human suffering. My issue is not the classic one of the existence of suffering, I think that would be far too tedious and unreliable a fallback strategy. But rather it is the way in which Christian scripture itself is interpreted on the painful area of suffering that is creating distance between me and God. It is supposed to be short-lived, God is supposed to alleviate it or be felt closer somehow through it and have a greater purpose at work through it, like maybe my sanctification or something. So I have gotten tired of placing my confidence in inspiring texts like Isaiah 58:8

Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

Or James 1:2-3

My brothers and sisters, consider it nothing but joy when you fall into all sorts of trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.

Or Romans 5:3-4

... we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

"No," life experience is saying to me, "not necessarily."

Secondly, I think I got tired a while back as I exposed time after time how impartial apologetic exegesis of texts put a strain on a more reasonable and defensible Christianity. Over time this insatiable drive for truth and intolerance of undisclosed bias I think had a negative impact on my faith experience.

Thirdly, in addition to the experiential deficit, I don't know how to trust the Scriptures as an accessible window to the heart of God, on controversial areas of ethics (contradictions between contexts) and conflicting details between multiple accounts of the same historical event (internal contradictions). Here my defense mechanism is the same as ever: stop worrying too much about what I think about this, and try to unpack how this event was understood and integrated into the early faith community experience of God. On this point I will soon be asking blog readers in particular to honestly engage with this thought process as you, with me, try to understand the New Testament villain of Judas Iscariot according to its contrasting accounts.

A fourth factor takes us back a couple of years - I guess I am going in reverse order - a realisation that I was in a small minority of persons who rejected (and continue to reject) a modalistic view of Christ in which the centre was basically Christ, with the Holy Spirit and the Father really just emanations of Him. By rejecting a first century triune God, I found this new model that seemed to have dumped itself on my lap (the "Triune Hub" Jewish mutation) placed me in an even tinier minority, one so small that I was no longer in close relationship with anyone else who shared this perspective or these concerns.

So how do I go on? I continue to be highly motivated to dig around the texts (and their translations) historically, seek to bless the faith community with the greatest degree of honesty I am capable of offering, and continue to experience a degree of hope and gratitude in the church tradition that I am glad to be a part of. It is interesting to  me that although personal faith has taken a real knock, I still pray, sometimes even spontaneously worship. If someone wanted to pray with me, I'd love that, especially if it brings the deep level connection prayer can give and not intercessory. Praying for healing is trickier and my disillusionments and alienation are readily awakened. I may take the time to reflect on the blog soon about this sensitive issue.

Back soon!
John

When the Old Greek may indicate the oldest and lost Hebrew original: an example from Joshua

One of the perennial quests of scholars of the Bible is to establish what the original texts said. That sounds pretty easy, you just translate the old scroll, right? Wrong. All the old hand-written parchments and codexes we have found are at best copies, but much more likely copies of copies - and they all differ, usually in tiny ways.

I'm looking at how the Hebrew translates into Greek for key words: Adonai and Yahweh. One of the driving reasons behind this work is to better understand the "Bible" that the Greek-speaking first-century churches had to hand and cited, especially with reference to their new Lord, the risen and exalted Christ Jesus. So even if there are points where we feel that we need to look at our best Hebrew texts to establish our Old Testaments, our simultaneous desire to better understand the New Testament pushes us to contextualise first century understanding of God's Word. This Word is read avidly, in Greek, to establish and understand the perceived fulfilment of Christ's (first) Coming.

But there is another fundamental question that I remembered today as I was finishing up the Yahweh translations in Joshua - who is to say that the critical text of the LXX Greek translation does not, at points, refer to the oldest Hebrew tradition, to which we no longer have access? This point has been raised already by Septuagint scholars and provides further impetus to the NETS translation project.

But let me give you the example in Joshua I just came across that triggered this memory, from Joshua 8:27:

NASB: Israel took only the cattle and the spoil of that city as plunder for themselves, according to the word of the LORD which He had commanded Joshua.

NETS: Except for the livestock and the spoils that were in the city, all things that the sons of Israel took as spoil, according to the ordinance of the Lord, as the Lord had instructed Iesous.

Greek has no problem with using pronouns, so we should be asking ourselves the question here: why would a Greek translator opt to supplement the Hebrew in front of him with an additional "Lord"? We have already seen in our in-depth analysis of Adonai translation that there was a preference among the translators to remove redundant repetition where possible, so why do the opposite here? We can be more specific than this. In that Adonai study, which kept a close eye on redundancy avoidance, I showed that the translator of Joshua himself has expressed that preference for avoidance in Joshua 3:13 and 7:7, condensing "Adonai Yahweh" into a single κυρίου or κύριε.

It is more than possible that prior to a proven millennia-spanning vigilance for Jewish scripture copying, an earlier more natural practice was in force, as evidenced by Christian scribes. In my approximate understanding, this means copying as best as possible but minor tweaks/clarifications and a failure to independently proof for natural errors (a good summary of these is available here). In this instance of Joshua 8:27, what do you think? Did the Greek translator add a redundant "the Lord", or did he translate an earlier Hebrew exemplar that contained the repetition? If the latter, why didn't he remove the redundancy like in 3:13 and 7:7?

I wonder if the lost Old Hebrew did indeed contain the repetition and that in this instance the translator did simply stick to that repetition. The worry of consistency with 3:13 and 7:7 could be resolved by the fact that those redundancies are immediately adjacent, not so here in 8:27, and that the practice of Adonai-Yahweh redundancy avoidance may not be true of "Yahweh-Yahweh" avoidance, if indeed that even exists.

Pentateuch Translations of Yahweh

HERE IS HOW the translators of the Septuagint went about their initial task of translating the divine name, Yahweh (and the shortened version, "Yah") into the Greek word, KYRIOS, which of course means "Lord" in English.

In the table below, we can see how often the translators applied the article when they did this. Because I have already done some work elsewhere in Ezekiel and in the Psalms, I have also populated the table with the data I obtained there also. Please see below for some comments, but do also note this post, because as I continue to work on the rest of the Hebrew Bible translation, this table should continue to automatically update.

As stated previously, we are looking here specifically at the cases known as "nominative" and "genitive". The reason for this is that the other three main Greek cases affect whether or not an article is required. This tighter selection provides a tighter and more meaningful methodology than has been previously reported by Septuagint scholars. It shows us that the "anarthrous" rule implemented by the Pentateuch translators was even closer to systematic for the Septuagint than has thus far been reported: the one we like to call "The LORD" was initially and perhaps almost as bizarrely as in English, translated just "LORD" in 99.3% of the 1340 instances where the translators used nominative or genitive forms (kyrios and kyriou). By so conspicuously removing the "the", the name quality of Yahweh seems to have been carefully integrated, perhaps in a similar vein to other important name-titles like "Pharoah".

At the time of writing this post, I have developed a process that has significantly accelerated how I can generate this data, with now nearly 3000 of the Yahweh occurrences in the Hebrew Bible processed. This may seem like nearly half-way, but actually, things should move much quicker now (Psalms has been accessible on this blog as early as October 2016!).

What will take longer to provide is the control data - from a control group of proper names and a control title group of "king".

When the Yahweh translations are complete we will also be able to show diagrammatically any shifts or outliers in the translation practice outside of the Pentateuch.

Remember, a fairly extensive and relevant analysis has recently been completed on how Adonai was translated throughout the canon, integrating the response of lead NETS translator, Dr. Albert Pietersma, here.

From Yahweh to Judas Iscariot

NO, YOU ARE quite right, there is probably nothing directly connecting these two, but you know me, always trying to think of catchy titles... By it, I am simply wanting to whet some appetites for those who find Divine Names and Titles a little tedious and enjoy zooming in some more juicy Bible character details. Indeed, examining important characters in their context and according to the believing community's memory, I see as important in developing my theological understanding. That is why my mini-series on John the Baptist was so illuminating to me, especially when I began to see his largely unrecognised contribution to the successful spread of Christianity and even to Trinity development.

Judas is, of course, practically synonymous with the word "traitor" and is an intriguing character even without speaking of his demise. However, when we read that despite his apparent evilness and demon-possessed-ness he still must have felt wretched enough to commit suicide, the story just seems to be begging investigation. The upcoming series is prompted also by a Youtube debate I recently watched between New Testament scholars Bart Ehrman and Craig Evans. It's a few years old now, but their agreement that "horizontal reading" of the gospels is an important practice in establishing the reliability and meaning of the accounts' history (or histories) and I am sure will help me with some unresolved questions for me on Judas Iscariot, son of Simon Iscariot (John 6:71). I have briefly discussed Judas' death on this blog here back in December 2015.

For those who are interested in my research into Adonai and Yahweh translation into the Greek, the good news is I'm far from over with that too and am almost ready to post some results on Yahweh translation for the whole Pentateuch (yep, that's another 2000 Yahweh occurrences categorised and put into Greek cases for you, free of charge!) For you folks, you'll know what I mean but maybe you'll be surprised to hear if I say it's even more anarthrous than we expected.

Back soon!

How does the Adonai cookie crumble into Greek Yoghurt?

TODAY, WE’RE AIMING HIGH, attempting to answer the question of how the Hebrew title “Adonai” was translated into Greek. It’s a bit tricky and nuanced, but I believe doable, now with the help of my conversation with Albert Pietersma. As a micro-recap, we have seen recently that, generally speaking:

• Yahweh has hugely-greater frequency than Adonai, which is particularly rare in the Pentateuch.
• Adonai leans a lot on Yahweh when it occurs, the two usually appearing together in a “combo” format.
• There are Jewish traditions, manuscript retranscription hesitations and errors that point to semantic proximity and even overlap of the two terms, Adonai and Yahweh.

For further reference please see the bottom of today's post for where to look.

So as I reach into the theological fridge for my Greek yoghurt to share the news about how the Adonai translation went, I wanted to also let you know that my email to Albert Pietersma received a short but meaningful response. I basically wrote to him an edited form of my 2016 post: Why This Research Matters, in which I highlight two important differences between Yahweh and Adonai translations into Greek within the book of Psalms: Yahweh still receives special treatment grammatically with fewer articles than expected, in line with the tradition of the Pentateuch. Furthermore, on one sample lexical unit, ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον, I seemed to have a clear point, with only Adonai receiving the middle word in the Greek there, “τὸν”, or “the Lord”. At the time of writing the email I didn’t know it yet, but a third differentiating factor arises for Psalms. But surely, even with these two differentiating factors alone, Pietersma was going to have to recognise that this Mr. Nobody here had stumbled over a wrong-headed assumption and perhaps now reconsider how his NETS translation handled “the Lord”? I'd still like them to do that by the way.  Here's what Pietersma said and how combined with the results I am going to share with you today, there is good cause for me to rethink my overall picture of Adonai translation:

AP: I wonder if our respective foci aren’t at odds.  My point here is simply that the Hebrew divine names Yahweh, Yah, and Adonai are all rendered by Greek kyrios. Differently put, though the translator might have opted for transcriptions like Yao, Ya, or Adonai, by opting for kyrios he foregoes differentiation at the word level. Period! Full stop! Needless to say, differentiation at the grammatical remains an option, but that is a different issue. Yes?

First of all: fantastic to be able to get direct insights from specialists like Pietersma! Second, yes the Greek translators could quite easily have avoided any differentiation issues by transcribing the words differently. If they'd really wanted to incorporate a Kyrios translation for one of them, they could have left the other untouched by transliterating it into the new alphabet. Actually, I should probably mention that transliteration does very occasionally happen for both:

• ·       For Yahweh, toward the end of Psalms, you may notice this standalone line often repeated at the end of these smaller Psalms: Praise the LORD! In the Hebrew you have two words for this, הַֽלְלוּ־יָֽהּ - “Hallal” and “Yah” (as in Yahweh), which in Greek combine to form the single: αλληλουια, literally, Allelujah! 
• ·       For Adonai, on one of the Old Greek manuscripts passed down to us in Judges 16:28, it reads Αδωναιε κύριε for the NASB of: “Then Samson called to the LORD and said, “O Lord GOD...”. Here this translator in this manuscript does something I have seen hardly anywhere else[i], transliterating the Hebrew Adonai into Greek Αδωναιε.

However, exceptions prove the rule sometimes, and that is the case here - thank you Dr. Pietersma for reminding me of this glaring option.

So, the translators chose, collectively and more or less unanimously, to use the same Greek word κύριε to translate both of these different Hebrew names for the Israelite Deity, Adonai and Yahweh.

Yet Pietersma seems to acknowledge the possibility of grammatical differentiation. Yet, how significant should the grammatical issue that I raise be and how on Earth would you represent that in an English translation like NETS?

Well, when producing a massive translation project such as any Bible you might have at home, consult in a seminary or look up online, you are benefitting from the fruit of ridiculous numbers of hours of collaboration to maintain consistency of practice across the whole thing. So if striving to produce a single-volume translation where grammatical differences occur consistently throughout the texts, then you might want to consider a strict translation scrapping the English article for LORD (Yahweh) and maintaining it for the Lord (Adonai). To most readers, I think this could seem confusing or like a curious typo. But hang on a second, is there a consistency of practice across the whole thing? Isn’t one of the point of NETS to draw out the particularities of each book? To answer these questions we need to see what actually happens to the articles in the Greek translation of Adonai in nominative and genitive cases across the Septuagint:

Adonai into nominative and genitive Kyrios

	LXX nominative + genitive arthrous (HUMAN LORD FIGURE)	LXX nominative + genitive anarthrous (HUMAN LORD FIGURE)	Adown - human lord - "arthricity"	LXX nominative + genitive arthrous (GOD)	LXX nominative + genitive anarthrous (GOD)	Adonai - GOD - "arthricity"
In total	107	6	94.7%	15	327	4.4%
Genesis	25	1	96.2%	0	0	n/a
Exodus	1	0	100.0%	1	2	33.3%
Numbers	2	0	100.0%	0	0	n/a
Deuteronomy	1	0	100.0%	0	1	0.0%
Joshua	0	0	n/a	0	2	0.0%
Judges	2	0	100.0%	0	0	n/a
Ruth - Job	72	4	94.7%	0	6	0.0%
Psalms & Proverbs	1	1	50.0%	11	12	47.8%
Isaiah	2	0	100.0%	1	42	2.3%
Jeremiah	0	0	n/a	0	6	0.0%
Lamentations	0	0	n/a	1	11	8.3%
Ezekiel	0	0	n/a	1	212	0.5%
Daniel-Malachi	1	0	100.0%	0	33	0.0%

 

Result: Like we expect of Yahweh, Adonai (and Adown) applied to God receives the same treatment as Yahweh, not many articles at all, with the exception of Psalms. When a human referent is presented, the presence of articles is radically higher. Rather than representing a Bible-wide tendency of article-adding to Adonai translation, Psalms is actually the outlier by far! Amazing how quickly our expectations can skew our analysis.

It might seem puzzling to see books missing in the table above or even fewer counts than mentioned in my recent posts discussing relatively low occurrence rates of Adonai. The reason for this is to do with how Greek articles can be seen to function even with proper names in certain cases. It has been clear to me for almost two years now since I started thinking about the Greek “anarthrous” translation of Yahweh that this anarthrous rule is only really particularly discernible in the nominative and genitive Greek cases. Of the remaining three, accusative, dative and vocative, “Lord” in the accusative (κύριον) and dative (κυρίῳ) needs lots of articles, while in the vocative (κύριε) it virtually never requires an article. So I hope that helps explain why we are looking at even fewer instances of Adonai and why in the table above many books are not represented or have been grouped together - they may literally have zero occurrences of a translation of Adonai into the nominative (κύριος) or genitive (κυρίου) cases. 

But where we do have data, apart from the Psalms, we can deduce that Adonai seems to have been “swept along” with Yahweh's anarthrous rule, with very low rates of what I am calling “arthricity”, i.e. articles relative to what we might expect on average for a normal title. 

The Pentateuch Legacy

Before we move to examples of genitive or nominative translation beyond the Pentateuch, let's illustrate this similarity of Adonai and Yahweh translation by going back to some of the vocative texts. These would have been among the very first to be translated into Greek in the third-century BCE Septuagint project targeting the first five books, including significant passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy:

Exodus 15:17 (NASB): 

“You will bring them and plant them in the mountain of Your inheritance,

The place, O LORD [Yahweh => κύριε], which You have made for Your dwelling,

The sanctuary, O Lord [Adonai => κύριε], which Your hands have established.

Deuteronomy 3:24 (NASB)

‘O Lord GOD [Adonai Yahweh => κύριε κύριε], You have begun to show Your servant Your greatness and Your strong hand; for what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do such works and mighty acts as Yours?

• In Exodus 15:17 we have simple parallelism with undifferentiated κύριε.
• In both Deuteronomy 3:24 and 9:26 we have an Adonai-Yahweh “combo“ reflected in a simple repetition of “κύριε κύριε”.

We know that Yahweh is a super-common term in the Pentateuch (see Adonai vs Yahweh - Two Charts for the One Lord and BlueLetterBible search here), especially once Moses receives the revelation of Yahweh’s name in early Exodus. We can also assume that any term selected had to be meaningful but also practical in order to help Jews avoid recreating issues of tiptoeing around the Name all over again in the new host language. So Exodus and Deuteronomy simply substitute in this solution and aren't fussed by the repetition. Let's look now though at two combos from Genesis, which do seem to reflect an early concern about repetition:

Genesis 15:2 (NASB)

Abram said, “O Lord GOD [Hebrew: Adonai Yahweh => Greek: δέσποτα => NETS: “O Master”], what will You give me, since I am childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?”

Genesis 15:8 (NASB)

“He said, “O Lord GOD [Hebrew: Adonai Yahweh => Greek: δέσποτα κύριε => NETS: “O Master, Lord”], how may I know that I will possess it?”

What is the nature of this apparent concern? As I said, we know that there is nothing super-sacred about saying “Lord” or “Master” in and of itself, as they are used throughout the Greek Bible and as these are terms also used for human rulers. But what is going on with Gen 15:2 throwing in this new word “δέσποτα” to translate both Yahweh and Adonai simultaneously and why is it different in 15:8? Actually, the Genesis translator in both instances achieves something that the translator of Deuteronomy was apparently not so concerned about: avoiding redundant repetition. What doesn't matter - if you are the Genesis translator - is quite how you go about that avoidance work. Heck, Adonai occurs so rarely (at this stage), it's not like you need to scratch your head for ages to come up with some complex rule, so it just doesn't matter if there is inconsistency between 15:2 and 15:8.

A final point from the Pentateuch: because Adonai can be used to say “my Lord”, conveyed in Greek “the Lord of me”, the article must be maintained here (see Exodus 34:9 “ὁ κύριός μου”). The translator team are simply not fussed that the non-possessable Yahweh will become indistinguishable from the possessable Adonai in their fused translation.

Thus we can summarise that the first translator team left a legacy for subsequent translators with the following approximate set of implicit instructions:

• Treat Adonai as you would Yahweh
• Try to avoid repeating κύριε when you can, but there are none of the theological stakes of the Hebrew originals
• Adonai possessives will need to follow usual Greek rules with the article

Nearly all the subsequent translators “got the memo”.

Subsequent Hebrew History strengthens the emerging Adonai-Yahweh synonymy

Initially, Joshua translator seems to be aware of the Genesis translation alternative of despota (Jos 5:14) and affirms the simple parallelism in 3:11 and 3:13 with genitive application: “the ark of the Lord [Adonai]” and “the ark of the LORD [Yahweh], the Lord [Adonai] of the whole Earth”. Previously, only two anarthrous genitives had preceded this, both of which were combos (Ex. 23:17 and 34:23). Like Exodus, he continues to avoid this redundancy, via condensing into a single κυρίου or κύριε (3:13 and 7:7).

Judges translator only has 4 Adonai to work with and continues the work of redundancy avoidance in 16:28 with the exceptional Αδωναιε κύριε (see above) and seems to experiment in 6:22 with a possessive to separate the two κύριέ: κύριέ μου κύριε, which will be picked up in later historical books. So Adonai is still rare at this stage and all four occur in the typical vocative – O Lord – sense.

Ruth: no Adonai to work with.

Samuel has a super-concentrated passage in 2 Sam 7:18-29 (which will certainly have interested source critics), providing all of a sudden six Adonai-Yahweh combos. This translator picks up on Judges translator’s κύριέ μου κύριε and slams it down for all six occurrences of the Adonai-Yahweh combos in 2 Sam 7. Perhaps we could speculate that Judges and Samuel translators’ (assuming they are not one and the same translator) double-emphasis of Yahweh's lordship is maintained and the inelegance of the strict repetition of κύριέ κύριε is avoided. 

Kings appears to be from a different translating mind again although with the same legacy behind him. This translator doesn't mind the inelegance of repetition (1 Ki 8:53), and reasserts that Yahweh's stuff can be stated in exactly the same terms as Adonai's stuff, anarthrously. Our two examples here are “the ark of the covenant of Adonai” (1 Ki 3:15) and the anarthrous lexical unit “ἐνώπιον κυρίου” here applied to Adonai as with Yahweh: “in the sight of Adonai”. 1 Ki 22:6 and 2 Ki 7:6 introduce our first conspicuous nominative anarthrous for Adonai: κύριος (no “ὁ”). 

Ezra 10:3 and its translation are not relevant to my survey as the Greek translator clearly understands a human referent and deviates from the Hebrew in any case. 

Nehemiah is on redundancy alert in 10:29, appearing to accept some sacrifice of the initial proper name character of Yahweh (“observe all the commandments of Yahweh, our Lord” => “observe all the commandments of our Lord”). 

Job's a bit weird - but it's interesting in the divine aspect of Adonai. In 28:28 we read the rather famous line: “Behold, the fear of the Lord (Adonai), that is wisdom”. In Greek this becomes something more like “God-worship, that is wisdom”.

Isaiah

Moving ahead into the prophets, the redundancy issue of what I am calling “Adonai-Yahweh combos” intensifies for the translators, and will reach its climax in Ezekiel. The Isaiah translator in 1:24 and 3:1 keeps to an already Greek-transliterated divine name “Sabaoth” (e.g. 1 Samuel 1:3, NETS: “Lord God Sabaoth”) after avoiding a repetition via δεσπότης instead of the usual condensed κύριος to translate Adonai alongside Yahweh. We have already seen this, of course, precedented back in Genesis. NETS shifts path slightly here, going for the rather peculiar “the Sovereign, the Lord Sabaoth, says”.

3:15 simply avoids translating Adonai-Yahweh completely - this avoidance tactic is evidenced elsewhere too. Generally, repetition avoidance is systematic in Isaiah. 3:17 applies an explicit divine swap similar to the Job instance while 3:18 introduces us to the first of many (35) anarthrous simple nominative translations for Adonai into κύριος, with only one articulated instance “ὁ κύριος” in 49:14. As opposed to my initial expectations (which were partly influenced by scholars like Wever's comments), Isaiah, if anything, is stronger on the anarthrous rule even than the Pentateuch itself!  Genitive translations of Adonai are also consistently anarthrous, even when a Yahweh combo is not at stake (see 28:2, ὁ θυμὸς κυρίου, the wrath of [the] Lord).

Jeremiah and Lamentations

Jeremiah translator appears to be different to Isaiah and doesn't transliterate “Sabaoth” and isn't quite as systematic in combo redundancy avoidance (44:26 reads the double-anarthrous of “κύριος κύριος”), but is utterly faithful to article avoidance throughout the six nominative forms of κύριος (there are no genitives).

Lamentations is worth a separate mention in that its Adonai occurrences are all super-relevant to this survey, occurring separately from Yahweh (no combos) and nearly exclusively in the cases we are integrating (nominative and genitive). Result? Only 1 occurrence out of 12 relevant occurrences includes the article (1:15a): 8%. I particularly appreciate the existence of the Lamentations translation witness because it allows us to see Adonai treatment more independently from direct Yahweh translation influences of the many combos in the other Hebrew books in the Hebrew canon surrounding it, and this figure of 8.3% happens to remain very consistent with what we have learned to expect from Pentateuch-Yahweh-translation rates. 

Ezekiel: thus says Adonai-Yahweh aka κύριος

Ezekiel is the big mama of any study on Adonai because of a single saying, repeated so often it's like a mantra. The full version in Hebrew it reads unwaveringly: אָמַר אֲדֹנָי יְהֹוִֽה, “thus says [the] Lord”. The Greek varies slightly between λέγει κύριος and λέγει κύριος κύριος. I suspect my count not to be perfect, but the following statistical overview should give a good idea:

• Of the 224 Adonai in Ezekiel, 213 occurrences are nominative or genitive and 212 are anarthrous 
• There are 215 Adonai-Yahweh combos and the translator avoids repetition 166 times (77%) via condensation into a single κύριος
• λέγει κύριος also translates “says Yahweh” when no Adonai is present (e.g. 4:13)

Daniel and the Minor Prophets

The translations of these prophetic texts are entirely anarthrous when it comes to translating Adonai into the nominative (29 times) and the genitive (twice).

Daniel's few contributions to Adonai are mainly vocative “O Lord”, but there is one nominative κύριος in 1:2, rendered anarthrously. Hosea has a single nominative κύριος in 12:14, also rendered anarthrously. Next, Amos is a major Adonai user, if you remember the concentrations I reported, featuring the highest Adonai concentration in the entire Hebrew Bible. Its 24 occurrences mean that one word in every 126 is “Adonai”. Amos translator is pretty varied in his approach to the 21 Adonai-Yahweh combos: usually he'll tend to avoid the possibility of repeating “κύριος κύριος”, but not always (5:3, 7:2, 7:5, 9:5), and the avoidance tactics are twofold: either condensing into a single κύριος or replacing one of the κύριος with “ὁ θεός” (God, e.g. 8:9).

Obadiah in 1:1, Habakkuk in 3:19 and Zephaniah in 1:7 all solve their respective Adonai-Yahweh combos in line with Amos' “ὁ θεός” substitution method and Micah uses the condensing method for 1:2. Micah is also anarthrous when he translates a combo and a simple Adonai occurrence, all within his second verse!

Zechariah is interesting in that he borrows a pre-existing Greek translation lexical unit as a new tactic for redundancy avoidance on the Adonai-Yahweh problem, we could call it his borrowed “παντοκράτωρ” substitution method - Pantokrator, sounds like some kind of cool dinosaur or transformer or something (Pantokrator was already employed alongside kyrios in 2 Samuel 7 and Chronicles, before seeing a markedly heavy usage into the prophets). Actually, in keeping with the powerful dinosaur image, the word came to mean “Almighty”, although originally was associated with “hosts” or “armies”.

Rounding off the Hebrew Bible, Malachi remains in perfect keeping, it would seem, with the sharing of the anarthrous rule to Adonai translations, with an anarthrous genitive κυρίου in 1:12 and an anarthrous nominative κύριος in 3:1.

Ok - erm, John, wait a minute, haven't you forgotten about the Psalms?!

Psalms: the Outlier

Don’t worry, I definitely have not forgotten the Psalms! As stated, Psalms appears in a different state in the current critical Greek text to the rest of the Septuagint with respect to its translation of Adonai now on at least three independent criteria:

1    1.     Greek articles: Adonai to nominative Kyrios and genitive Kyriou translation “arthricity” rate of 50% relative to Yahweh rate of 18%.
2.       ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον: it turns out that "ἐπὶ" before κύριον when translating "to Yahweh" systematically removes the accusative article τὸν: Ps 4:5, Ps 21:7, Ps 22:8, Ps 31:24, Ps 32:10 and 11, Ps 37:3, Ps 40:3, Ps 55:22. Not so in Psalm 130:6 translating Adonai.
3.       Adonai-Yahweh redundancy indifference: Psalms translator makes by far the least effort of any of the translators to remove the redundancy of Adonai-Yahweh combos (only one time out of thirteen, in 30:8).

What should NETS or other modern translations do with this information? First I need to think about what am I going to do with this information? As I already confessed, I used to think, erroneously, that Psalms was the example for the rest of the LXX. Now, on the above criteria, it is the clear outlier. But Pietersma handed me another important criterion: synonymy. Here, Psalms does much better, even falls into step with the rest of the LXX and should not be neglected.

Psalm 38:15:   For I hope in You, O LORD;

                         You will answer, O Lord my God.

(ὅτι ἐπὶ σοί κύριε ἤλπισα σὺ εἰσακούσῃ κύριε ὁ θεός μου)

Psalm 97:5:    The mountains melted like wax at the presence of the LORD, 

                                                                  At the presence of the Lord of the whole earth.

(ἀπὸ προσώπου κυρίου
    ἀπὸ προσώπου κυρίου!)

Maybe in the months and years ahead a more detailed analysis will reveal more reasons for the Psalms grammatical differentiation, e.g. in relation to the more modest increase in Greek articles for Yahweh translations, the specific genre and poetic goals of the translators within their understanding of the genre and so on. But these examples should still serve as a witness that even Psalms translator sees Adonai and Yahweh as synonymous at critical points.

Another hypothesis well worth testing out in my view: that the Psalms translation took place earlier (or later) than the bulk of the other translations and represents an earlier and less complete assimilation of Adonai to Yahweh.

Some options for translations based on this research

Because of this synonymy criterion, NETS and other translations are probably safe to continue treating Adonai and Yahweh similarly, perhaps even scrapping the small caps “Lord” system or applying it to non-combo Adonai also. If you want to borrow the idea of translating the Hebrew into “Lord” from the Greek translators, why not do it as they did it? Sometimes, however, we have seen translation committees opt for transliteration, both in ancient and more recent times.

• 1.       Transliterate both Adonai and Yahweh. If we want to be most faithful to the most original form of the Old Testament text, then we should consider the possibility of simply stating “Adonai” for ינָדֹאֲ and “Yahweh” for הוִ֗היְ֝ . That, however, would lose a sense of lordship that would have been there for the Hebrews on Adonai.
• 2.       Transliterate Yahweh but translate Adonai to “Lord”. A problem here is that once you introduce a title for either term, then the issue of the article comes up in an artificial way since we have seen it affects both terms. However, given the scarcity of Adonai references and the space for removing articles that “Lord Yahweh” still provides, that might not be a major problem.
• 3.       Translate Yahweh and Adonai to one of the following

a.       “the Lord”

b.      “the Lord”

c.       “Lord”

d.      “Lord”

This option also helps make sense of reading the New Testament’s many citations of the Greek Old Testament.

For a translation like NETS that seems to want to highlight specific book translations and structure, my money is on a representative version of 3, where the grammatical distinctions of both Psalms and human Lords could be represented via the presence or absence of the English definite article, “the”.

For a more harmonising translation, the rendering needn’t be complicated by Psalms’ divergent grammatical practice and could translate Yahweh and Adonai consistently throughout as “Lord” or “Lord”.

OK, that pretty much wraps it up for today, I hope you have found it interesting or informative and my handling of Adonai careful. My next steps are to proceed with the Yahweh arthricity rates, which is a much significant data set than Adonai (readers may recall that I have myself only done Psalms and Ezekiel for the time being).

Related posts:

How does the Adonai cookie crumble? (part 2: Hebrew)

How does the Adonai cookie crumble?

Adonai vs Yahweh - Two Charts for the One Lord

“Euphemism”: A Critical Response to Koog Hong

Some of the disagreement about origins of the divine Name translation laid out

Yahweh's STUFF!

Kyrios (aka the LORD) in the Psalms: Results

Is Jesus' Other Name “Yahweh” for the first-century church? Part 1: The Data

Why This Research Matters

Larry Perkins: paper review

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[i] Judges 13:8 also mentions Αδωναιε alongside κύριε, albeit in the reverse order and constitutes a simple addition (i.e. does not serve to remove an Adonai-Yahweh redundancy) and Jeremiah in 34:5 uses αδων to translate a theatricalised scene of subjects calling out in lament for their human master.

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