Faith & Scripture: LXX

Showing posts with label LXX. Show all posts

Friday, 1 March 2019

First-century Christians not responsible for solving the Tetragrammaton conundrum with kyrios

Some scholars have argued for a “later” Christian convention on naming the Tetragrammaton (Yahweh) kyrios, on the basis of a lack of extant Jewish manuscripts from the period. Unfortunately, not only is this presupposition terribly vague, but it fails to account for a) the general scarcity of pre-Christian LXX manuscripts b) the fact that this convention would have had to have been established by a very small and early pre-Pauline Jewish-Christian community for Paul to use it without any worry from 1 Corinthians onward (approx. 53 AD) contra the pattern received by Paul from his great Jewish rabbi Gamaliel, c) this community undertaking the vast project of revising the entire Septuagint with their important update to the perennial Tetragrammaton pronunciation problem, and d) this revision confusingly mimicking evidence of a more piecemeal translation process spanning many decades.

This fourfold argument is, in my view, a slam-dunk for a pre-Christian solution to the Jewish Tetragrammaton issue. I will be defending in particular this fourth point in the fourth chapter of my upcoming book Bye-Bye Lord via the Septuagint research I am presenting there. It should push Septuagint scholars instead to ask what the few desert community Greco-Jewish LXX fragments mean when they deviate from kyrios, rather than assuming that they represent the Bible the apostle Paul read and cited.

A post-Christian era kyrios innovation just does not make any sense of the data.

Friday, 29 June 2018

Let's (at last) translate Yahweh and Kyrios into modern English!

So where does all this research into ancient Divine Name translation take us for modern-day translation?

Let's take Yahweh first. Reverting back to "Yahweh", simply transliterated into English, was a preference of mine for a couple of years. When reading or studying the Old Testament, I even began tricking my brain to replace LORD with "Yahweh", which is kinda freaky!

So could Catholicism-endorsed "Yahweh" be a good solution?

Part of my research has included an international survey of different translations*, which I think could be further analysed into families. Like French Catholics, for instance, Eglish-speaking Catholics use the Jerusalem Bible that states in Deuteronomy 6:4: 'Listen, Israel: Yahweh our God is the one (or "Yahvé", in French). Like these Catholic translations, I noticed some Asian and new translation languages (maybe a Wycliffe policy) preferring transliteration too. Strangely, the mainline Italian translation, however, doesn't agree with this transliteration business practiced by Catholics elsewhere! The Vatican-endorsed Italian Conferenza Episcopale Italiana goes with the more (Protestant?) il Signore (the Lord). So even the Catholics seem to be either lost or in a state of disunity on this question of how to translate Yahweh, as they actually endorse both possibilities!

LORD?

The entrenchment of LORD (Signore, Seigneur, etc.) is interesting and everywhere. It actually speaks to the underrated significance of the ancient Greek Septuagint, itself a fascinating but complex window on potentially earlier Hebrew texts than those we access via the Aleppo and Leningrad codexes and perhaps even earlier than (or geographically distinct from) the dead sea scrolls discovered mid 20th century in Israel. There are deep-seated and complex arguments both ways as to the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls differences on the translation/transliteration choices. Why does it matter? Simply because no-one yet has a good argument to satisfactorily explain the LORD development with consistent dating. Dating matters because if translating the Old Testament's Yahweh, we want to know if there were even "Lord" undertones, overtones, or any tones at all. Well, a fascinating comparison between 1 Chronicles 17 and 2 Samuel 7 by Koog Hong suggests that there is indeed a link, even if he dots his "i"s and crosses his "t"s in an illogical way to my mind. The point is that it is possible that it may have entered Jewish practice to read one thing with your eyes but say another out loud in the context of religious gatherings.

I could go on for ages about this, sorry, but I'm trying to stick to the point: there are two problems with the English LORD that concern translation:

1. It is prefixed by the definite article, "the". So it is not quite true to say that "LORD" translates Yahweh in may translations, but rather "The LORD". That is obviously neither true of Yahweh, but nor is it true of the Septuagint.

2. Hardly anyone says "Lord" any more, although many Christians don't realise this.

GOD?!

ONE translation I hadn't looked at yet in my international survey of Yahweh and Kyrios translations (and weirdly this idea came to me in the early hours!) was to check Eugene Peterson's famous The Message - check it out! Peterson is super respected and not only have his books sold well but his Message translation has been very successful and seems to be standing the test of time. He went and translated, I'm guessing, all the 6867 Yahwehs that I counted "GOD"! I say, result! There's a score right there, BUT I would be surprised if he had explored like me how every single one of those Yahwehs were translated into koine Greek (not modern Greek). So I guess I'm excited, because, like with the Triune Hub, my proposal is going to sit predominantly on and tie together happily accepted practices.

So Peterson is a solid reference, but translating Yahweh by GOD does not solve everything, it's simply clearing the first of at least 7 hurdles. First, what does it solve? Both the above points, in fact. In English, we quite happily use this title as a name, which seems to be exactly what those early Greek Septuagint translators were aiming for. So GOD is faithful to that principle. Secondly, "God" is still as used and understood as ever, unlike "Lord".

Thursday, 28 June 2018

Yahweh Translation Survey Results Out Here!

Hi everyone, I have just completed an apparently needed survey of the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint to examine exactly how the most significant names of the Israelite god, Yahweh and Adonai, were translated into the Greek Kyrios, while also factoring in Greek case. Yahweh, it has long been considered, was convened as "anarthrous" in the Greek translation *Kyrios*, now at last we know quite how much, and what that looks like right across the OT canon. The upshot of this is that Peterson seemed to have sensed something significant when he translated Yahweh by GOD in The Message, not the redundant "the LORD".

But let's get back to the data before we run away with English translation implications.

This first graph tells us that the rates of article before Kyrios (nominative "the LORD") and Kyriou (genitive "of the LORD") are typically very scarce indeed, with Job being a radical outlier. Let's exclude Job now to zoom in on the rest.

So now we can access a more nuanced picture of the rest of the canon. We can summarise it to say that the Pentateuch is, as expected, super low and precedent-setting, although even those first five books we will see some interesting further variation in the following graph. The traditionally ranked "first" historical books of Joshua and Judges seem to follow that pattern before rates increase for 1 Samuel through 1 Kings. 2 Kings, Chronicles, Nehemiah and Ezra bring the rates back down. That is significant in re-evaluating Hong's claim that an early euphemism is evidenced in 1 Chronicles 17, "after" 2 Samuel 7 was written (there is clear literary dependence between the two, but either the Chronicler changes Adonai Yahweh into Yahweh Elohim (Hong) OR Samual changes Yahweh Elohim into Adonai Yahweh. This survey, along with other historical data around the trickiness of the Yahweh Name in particular, might favour the latter scenario, contra Hong. That's quite significant.

Psalms provides the greatest number of arthrous translations of Yahweh into ho kyrios and tou kyriou: 56 by my count. Clearly, this translator and the translator of Proverbs (if not the same) were aware of the translational practice but did not feel quite as bound to it. On the minor prophets, what we notice is quite a wide range of fluctuation of this awareness, which fits well into the likely ad-hoc nature of the establishment of the translation of the latter parts of the Hebrew Bible.

What about the other Greek cases?

Well, they're all over the place, mostly. Deuteronomy is a notable exception, however, and could point to it being the original blueprint for the anarthrous rule.

Note, the graphs exclude the books Esther, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon, none of which have retainable data on the question.

Wednesday, 20 June 2018

Only Two Cases Matter: Demonstrated

I AM EMBARKED on a huge and groundbreaking survey of the Septuagint Greek translations of Yahweh and Adonai. At present we are focusing on Yahweh. I can now confirm to have categorised 6867 Yahweh translations into Greek based on the current critical text of the Septuagint. For quite some time I have pointed out that any meaningful research needs to focus on certain cases only and today I am going to demonstrate that definitively: only nominative and genitive are the relevant cases.

There is a lot of data in the above chart, but that is part of the point: not of all it is relevant. The key thing to look for is the green and purple bars, representing the Greek translations in the accusative and dative cases. They tend to be much, much higher than the blue and orange bars, representing the nominative and genitive cases, sometimes maxing out at or near 100%. Let us translate what that means: generally speaking, when a Greek translator came across an instance of Yahweh that seemed to require an accusative or dative translation, they become unpredictable on whether or not to add the relevant article, apparently "torn" between a special rule on Yahweh translations (requiring as few articles as possible) and the pull of the Greek grammar.

Let us illustrate this with an "arthrous" example of each, to give a feel for the accusative and dative scenarios frequently faced by the translators:

1. Accusative example. In Proverbs 28:5, we read Evil men do not understand justice, But those who seek the LORD [Yahweh] understand all things.

➟ ἄνδρες κακοὶ οὐ νοήσουσιν κρίμα οἱ δὲ ζητοῦντες τὸν κύριον συνήσουσιν ἐν παντί

2. Dative example. In 2 Kings 23:21, we read Then the king commanded all the people saying, “Celebrate the Passover to the LORD [Yahweh] your God as it is written in this book of the covenant.”

➟ καὶ ἐνετείλατο ὁ βασιλεὺς παντὶ τῷ λαῷ λέγων ποιήσατε τὸ πασχα τῷ κυρίῳ θεῷ ἡμῶν καθὼς γέγραπται ἐπὶ βιβλίου τῆς διαθήκης ταύτης

Numbers and Deuteronomy, however, should catch our eye. In fact, when broken down by case, we see more fluidity than my original results suggested in the first five books. A few weeks ago, as I started releasing my results on my blog and wrote Pentateuch Translations of Yahweh, I showed a robust picture of consistent low article rates with the nominative and genitive cases. That remains true, but depending on the book and the case, it seems that there was an application of the "grammatical signature", as I sometimes call it, even wider than that, especially in Deuteronomy.

So what might that suggest? It suggests, like many historical phenomena, development. Development is messy because it produces big results from often untraceable or imprecise origins (like world religions, for instance!) Here's a caricature: a gifted bilingual Jewish scribe and translator is authorised and required to oversee a translation project of the Torah. The project exceeds his own capacity and requires a team effort, but he remains the leader. Steeped in Jewish history, belief and maybe even collective national pain of being an unfulfilled and deported people, he is deeply aware of the Adonay-Yahweh relationship and devises or rigorously adopts the anarthrous rule as he goes about translating Deuteronomy, whether he needs a "kyrios", a "kyriou", a "kyrion" or a "kyrio". He informs and instructs his fellow translators to do likewise. These translators, also gifted bilingual Jewish scribes, understand the basic principles of Deuteronomy Translator, but also are sensitive to the needs of their target language and make a few compromises, beginning to include articles in accusative and dative situations. The weight of this authoritative publication will continue to have strong albeit varied influence for the various translations as the rest of the canon was translated in the subsequent centuries, the most sustainable cases, however, being those most consistently upheld in the Pentateuch: nominative and genitive.

(Alongside the authoritative editions of the massive works, of which only one or two copies would have coexisted, other ad-hoc translations would also have existed. The tiny fragmentary texts that have survived from this period I believe may have been for usage in diaspora synagogues and were still hampered, however, by the perceived risks of pronouncing the divine Name, and used various systems to avoid even writing kyrios, either because of an alternative translation tradition or because of the likelihood that these were the copies to be read out. It is well established in Jewish tradition that two forms of the text exist)

To the critics of the early kyrios situation: how do you account for a relatively sudden Christian creation of this practice given the variations you see evidenced above? I still can't see it.

Saturday, 9 June 2018

Do the Prophets Line Up With the Torah (translation-wise)?

I HAVE YET to comment on the final section of the Septuagint survey of Yahweh translations: the Prophets. Thus far we have seen a very consistent pathway created by the first five books of the Old Testament, by translating the great Name of the Israelite god, Yahweh, as "Kyrios", Greek for "Lord", but without the article. This is known in the field as an "anarthrous" translation, as it lacks the definite article the. I have speculated that this may have followed other traditions for people-group leaders, divine, semi-divine or human, where the article could also be dropped. e.g. Pharaoh. The same is true in English: "Chief", "Boss", "Sheriff", and so on.

As the survey works through the canon, the rates of article inclusion remain typically pretty low, except for Psalms, Proverbs and Job, the last of which disregards the "anarthrous rule" almost completely, showing no sign of awareness even of its existence (in my view).

This leaves the final section of the prophets open for scrutiny. Here's what happens:

What can we say? It's patchy - although that is perhaps not surprising. It is assumed by many scholars working in the area of the Septuagint that translations may have occurred at different times and locations. However, what has not been known until today, I think, is that we can state with considerable confidence that there was a common awareness of the anarthrous usage of Kyrios as a translation for Yahweh (and Adonai for that matter, see How does the Adonai cookie crumble into Greek Yoghurt?). The least careful of all the translating hands we see represented above is that of Hosea, who opted for the article with Kyrios and Kyriou five times out of twenty-four. That means that nineteen times he still opted for no article, even though we doggedly add the "the" to "the LORD". Other less careful hands are represented in red are Joel, Micah and Zephaniah translators.

You'll also notice there are several titles that I have put into a grey colour - this is simply because I do not feel it fair to comment when so few instances of Yahweh are present. Who can say that Daniel translator is especially anarthrous in his translation style when he only has 8 Yahweh occurrences to translate (and only 6 of those are in the relevant nominative and genitive cases)? Or that Habakkuk translator is surprisingly "arthrous" when he makes one of his seven relevant translations carry the article?

Isaiah 49:14 is interesting. I already mentioned it in passing during my survey of the Adonai translations, hyper-linked above. Let's have a quick look at it here though, as it may shed light on an interesting intermediary stage of translation practice no longer directly available to us and evidenced by the varying degrees of article application:

But Zion said, “The Lord [Yahweh] has forsaken me,
the Lord [Adonai] has forgotten me.”

Here, Isaiah translator is faithful to the anarthrous translation of Kyrios for Yahweh, the first "Lord" of line 1. Line 2, however, witnesses the only arthrous translation of Kyrios in the whole book for Adonai, when placed alongside Yahweh. At some stage in translation and copying history, as Adonai and Yahweh were fused into Kyrios, Adonai lost its article that it may have originally held.

A Christian Invention?

Some scholars posit that Kyrios was a Christian translation invention, since there are no pre-Christian era extant manuscripts that actually use it. This is a complex debate, but there is now a new argument in the mix: how does the Christian invention argument cater for the variation of rates of articles we have seen across the Septuagint in translating Yahweh?

Tuesday, 29 May 2018

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!

Sunday, 20 May 2018

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.

Saturday, 19 May 2018

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.

Friday, 11 May 2018

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).

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

[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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