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.