In May 2018 I completed the mammoth project of tracking all 6,866 Yahweh translations into the Greek, something that no-one has taken the time to do before, and it yielded some fascinating results. Please note that all these results are subject to my copyright - you must ask me to use them, please.
Please find below the slightly updated table (some of the links were no longer working so I have updated and corrected it slightly). In bold we have Deuteronomy, since the data seems to suggest it to have been the archetype for translating Yahweh with Kyrios without the article (regardless of Greek case). Results in grey are to indicate that the overall number of occurrences are too few to really draw too many conclusions, at least in isolation. Results in dark red indicate some deviation from the anarthrous rule, while still clearly showing awareness of its existence and permitting its influence. Only Job is in vibrant red, representing its uniquely deviant result. In other words, the translator of Job knew nothing of the anarthrous rule at all.
Please find below the slightly updated table (some of the links were no longer working so I have updated and corrected it slightly). In bold we have Deuteronomy, since the data seems to suggest it to have been the archetype for translating Yahweh with Kyrios without the article (regardless of Greek case). Results in grey are to indicate that the overall number of occurrences are too few to really draw too many conclusions, at least in isolation. Results in dark red indicate some deviation from the anarthrous rule, while still clearly showing awareness of its existence and permitting its influence. Only Job is in vibrant red, representing its uniquely deviant result. In other words, the translator of Job knew nothing of the anarthrous rule at all.
Now I'd like to share schematically the results of the project again, showing this time results for all Greek cases (this will demonstrate my previous point about Deuteronomy being a likely archetype):
Green: accusative (38.4%)
Red: genitive (4.8%)
Blue: nominative (2.8%)
Thanks. Very interesting. I wonder how such findings will relate to recent arguments that IAW was the way YHWH was treated in many early Greek renderings. Many levels of textual management?
ReplyDeleteHi ParaManic and thank you for your comment and encouragements. It seems that if the results confirm anything it is to reiterate what Perkins has been saying since 2008, namely: "I would also observe that if the translator did use Hebrew characters to represent the Tetragram in his translation, the inconsistent use of the article, particularly when rendering the phrase ליהוה is even more difficult to understand. The common anarthrous use of κύπιορ in Greek Exodus to represent the Tetragram demonstrated bythis investigation confirms that syntactically it functions primarily as a proper name." Vasileiadis is categorically incorrect about a "consensus" on kyrios being a Christian invention. Yet we see in the pre-Christian extant manuscripts a fairly rich variety of practices (the many levels of textual management you refer to). The depth and extent of grammatical and literary care surrounding the kyrios rendering is staggering when we analyse the data CCAT have kindly and carefully assembled from Rahlfs edition, seemingly confirming Perkins' and others predictions (Wevers, Rosel, Pietersma, and [Pietersma tells me] Robert Hanhart). So anarthrous kyrios was concurrent with the other practices archaelogy has evidenced in the last 2 centuries before Christ, but it also most likely is the original Pentateuch translation. And no way on Earth it could have been a Christian invention for Paul to be using as a rapprochement in the early 50s to the Corinthians and the Romans.
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