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!
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!
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