Vasileiadis: Aspects of rendering the sacred Tetragrammaton in Greek - a response

In my previous post, I began a short series on Pavlos Vasileiadis' 2014 paper, Aspects of Rendering the Sacred Tetragrammaton in Greek, which had me searching straight away to find the oldest record of the sacred name in Hebrew. We found this in the form of an Israelite amulet dating back to pre-exilic times, known as the silver scroll and written in a script that was significantly different to the Hebrew characters we are more familiar with today. The important point of that introduction was to note that there was initially no problem, no prohibition, no taboo about using the name of Yahweh. Further into the paper (p. 57 of the journal), Vasileiadis correctly refers to evidence arising from other neighbouring, rival nations who also referred to Israel's god. I checked this, and he's quite right - the earliest is astonishingly early and clearly points to a YHWH from an Egyptian hieroglyph, 14th century. You also have the Ugaritic texts that refer to him, albeit as one of 70 sons of Athirat (Asherah) and El. Finally, we have the Mesha Stele stone set up around 840-890 BC. Again, this name/Name was clearly not a taboo.

This was set to change, but why and how broadly?

Vasileiadis consistently points to a variety of practices and debate around what the variety implies. However, he commences with a somewhat bewildering list of factors that he enumerates as contributing to the subsequent non-pronunciation:

- Greek philosophy ('God has no name')

- Hellenization (leading to simple negligence?)

- Syncretism and gnosticism (perhaps implying a special 'secrecy' about the Name?)

- Entrenchment of *use* of Tetragrammaton by exclusivists?

- Paganisation and hypostatisation?

- Moral degradation.

Two of these are quite clear: Vasileiadis' first factor cites an impressive list of sources of possible Greek philosophical influence on the post-exilic growing reticence against pronouncing the name. However, he does not develop the relationship between Greek philosophers and Judaism, but does lift from Marmostein the Greek sources: "Aristotle, Seneca, Maxim of Tyre, Celsus, and Hermes Trismegistus". That said, I have been consistently enough exposed to evidence showing the joining of these two worlds (e.g. the style of the book of Hebrews, some of the theological tendences of the LXX, the NT strong preference for the LXX translation) to listen attentatively to this possibility.

The last factor of moral degradation is probably the most famous of the characteristics of the exiled people and frequently features in preaches from the pulpit. The story classically goes: the Jews so desperately wanted restoration and a wonderful anointed King to rule with them over the surrounding peoples that they were engrossed in a sort of superstitious belief that - since God is not in any way limited in power - he must still be very displeased with them. Any appeasement had to come via super-sanctified living, even exceeding that which was previously required, thus creating a "hedge" around those requirements. And *that's* where the non-pronunciation of the name comes in. Whereas before, you had to be super-careful as to when and how you said it, now it is simply easier to have the hedge around the Name and avoid saying it if at all possible.

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So those two factors make sense.

However, how negligence, Gnosticism, exclusivistic mindsets and hypostatisation fit into that picture is not completely clear and it is, in my view, a little unfortunate that Vasileiadis hasn't elaborated.

One final point of clarity: this tendency (in its variety of forms) reached a climax by 3rd century AD when Name-pronunciation became a capital offence.

Back tomorrow for more!

Oldest extant biblical "manuscript", wonky Hebrew?!

As a part of my research into the book I am writing on 'Lord's inadequacies, I have started going through an important paper on the Divine Name of Yahweh/Kyrios/LORD by Pavlos D. Vasileiadis. In fact, I will be writing a few more posts on this paper as I go through it, so I hope it's helpful!

In the opening lines, Vasileiadis reiterates what I already sense quite strongly to be the reality among the last centuries before Christ, that is of a diversity of practice on the divine name. Vasileiadis states it perfectly: "the sacred Tetragrammaton [was persistently used] as an effable, utterable name at least in some circles, despite the religious inhibitions against its pronunciation."

So in order to verify this diversity ("at least in some circles") we need to start as early as possible; and that means we need to talk extant manuscripts. This means actual surviving manuscripts, not copies. I didn't know this, but there is actually some verified Hebrew scripture that survives to this day that predates the famous Dead Sea Scrolls - the Silver Scrolls. I'm guessing the fact that they are made out of silver is also a huge reason why they have survived at all, but the amazing thing is that they date back to the period of time prior (although possibly only by a short period) to the Babylonian exile, which means 7th or even 8th century BC. Look at the characters, though, so interesting to see how different they look to Hebrew characters we are familiar with (see right column). This early written Hebrew is referred to as "Paleo-Hebrew". In it, we note with no particular surprise that there is no apparent reticence on writing down Yahweh. His Name, as Holy as it is, could be written and was written.

That point is significant when we realise that this small portion of Scripture, connected to passages in Deuteronomy 5 and 7 (although possibly elsewhere too) was actually also an amulet - an apotropaic amulet, i.e. to ward off evil (that is why I put "manuscript" in quotes in the title of this posting). In other words, some of the Israelites were pretty superstitious. Interesting that Christianity's ancestors combined being both theistic and superstitious. Back soon!

[Image taken from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Birkat_kohanim_22.jpg]

Vasileiadis article is available at: https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/opth.2014.1.issue-1/opth-2014-0006/opth-2014-0006.xml

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".

Other problems

So we still have some other hurdles ahead of us that we will begin to navigate in the next post:

1. "GOD our God" (the Message)
2. "God of gods and Lord of lords"
3. Hebrew "divine combos", esp. Adonai Yahweh and Yahweh Elohim
4. New Testament references to God the Father (e.g. "The kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ", Revelation 11:15)
5. The Lord Jesus: Jesus was "made Lord" (Acts 2:36); the Lord Jesus Christ" (most translations of Jesus' full title in Greek, e.g. Acts 11:17)

Obviously, I have nothing definitive to offer, but I think I may have at least some potential connections for most of these extra hurdles now that Peterson has helped us over the first and most formidable! (I will add any further hurdles I have forgotten here as I proceed).

I can already share that I believe I can tie 1, 2 and 4 together happily with accepted practices. For 1, I will be referring to N.T. Wright and Michael Heiser. For 3, I will be consulting multiple mainstream translations and the Septuagint interpretive pattern itself. For 4, I will be leaning on the French Darby translation and some of my own work on 2 Corinthians 3:16-18.

My suggestions for hurdles 2 and 5 are fresh (i.e. mine and therefore probably valid for quicly shooting down in flames) but avoid simplistic or systematic translation. I feel confident they can lead to workable outcomes if in agreement with the general diagnosis of a "Lord" overhaul. I hope 5 will become clearer as this work gains momentum and interaction. This hardest of hurdles, how to translate today the "Lord" title attached to Jesus, is a challenge that will never see a fully satisfactory translation due to diversification and politicisation of authority positions in our modern society. Nonetheless, 5. can legitimately follow Peterson's suggestion in some instances.

So there're a few more posts needed right there! Thank you so much for your interest.

* the survey I reference here is a slowly advancing and incomplete study that I haven't yet published

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!