Jewish Reception of Greek Bible Versions: Studies in Their Use in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Text & Studies in Medieval & Early Modern Judaism)

342 Pages·2009·2.44 MB·English

by  Nicholas De Lange

Preface
This collection of studies was conceived and executed in the framework of
the research project ‘The Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism’, which was
funded by a research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC) and based in the Centre for Advanced Religious and Theological
Studies (CARTS) within the Faculty of Divinity of the University of Cam-
bridge.
Most of the studies originated as papers read to an international collo-
quium held in Wolfson College, Cambridge, from 9 to 11 July, 2007, as
part of the project. Additional funding for this colloquium was provided by
the British Academy, and administrative support was supplied by the Uni-
versity of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences
and Humanities (CRASSH).
A few studies were originally presented to seminars of the project. One
(Veltri) was specially written for this collection.
The main purpose of the project is to collect and publish scattered re-
mains of the Greek Bible versions used by Byzantine Jews. We also attach
great importance, however, to detailed study of these scanty relics of a
once far more extensive literature, including setting them in their context
within biblical studies, Byzantine studies, Jewish studies and indeed the
history of scholarship in these various areas. The present volume is di-
rected to this end. The contributors have been deliberately drawn from a
wide range of disciplines; several of them had not previously considered
the issues discussed, and we are particularly grateful to them for their will-
ingness to examine from a novel point of view materials with which they
were familiar.
We regret that it was not possible, for various reasons, to publish all the
papers read at the colloquium and the various seminars.
The editors would like to express their gratitude to all the institutions
mentioned above for their invaluable support. They also wish to thank the
series editor, Peter Schäfer, for accepting the volume, as well as Dr Hen-
ning Ziebritzki, the Editorial Director for Theology and Jewish Studies,
and other members of the staff of Mohr Siebeck, for their unfailing help-
fulness and courtesy.
Nicholas de Lange
Julia G. Krivoruchko
Cambridge, August 2008 Cameron Boyd-Taylor
Table of Contents
Preface .....................................................................................................V

Nicholas de Lange
Introduction ..............................................................................................1
History of Research
William Horbury
The Septuagint in Cambridge ....................................................................9

Natalio Fernández Marcos
Non placet Septuaginta: Revisions and New
Greek Versions of the Bible in Byzantium ..............................................39
The Background in Late Antiquity
James K. Aitken
The Jewish Use of Greek Proverbs .........................................................53

Philip S. Alexander
The Cultural History of the Ancient Bible Versions:
the Case of Lamentations ........................................................................78

Alison Salvesen
The Relationship of LXX and the Three in Exodus 1–24
to the Readings of Fb .............................................................................103

Silvia Cappelletti
Biblical Quotations in Greek Jewish Inscriptions
of the Diaspora ......................................................................................128

Giuseppe Veltri
The Septuagint in Disgrace: Some Notes on the Stories
on Ptolemy in Rabbinic and Medieval Judaism ....................................142
VIII Table of Contents
The Medieval Setting
David Jacoby
The Jewish Communities of the Byzantine World from the Tenth
to the Mid-Fifteenth Century: Some Aspects of Their Evolution ..........157

Ben Outhwaite
Byzantium and Byzantines in the Cairo Genizah:
New and Old Sources ............................................................................182
Testimonies and Influences
Saskia Dönitz
Sefer Yosippon and the Greek Bible ......................................................223

Patrick Andrist
The Greek Bible Used by the Jews in the Dialogues
Contra Iudaeos (Fourth-Tenth Centuries CE) .......................................235

T. M. Law
The Use of the Greek Bible in Some Byzantine Jewish
Glosses on Solomon’s Building Campaign ...........................................263
Manuscript Studies
Dries De Crom
The Book of Canticles in Codex Graecus Venetus 7 .............................287

Natalio Fernández Marcos
Greek Sources of the Complutensian Polyglot ......................................302

List of Contributors ...............................................................................317

Indexes
Biblical References ...............................................................................319
Greek Words .........................................................................................328
Manuscripts ..........................................................................................330
Modern Authors ....................................................................................331
Subjects ................................................................................................337

Introduction
by
Nicholas de Lange
The transmission and use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Mid-
dle Ages is a subject that has so far received very little scholarly attention.
The purpose of this collection of studies is to contribute to a better under-
standing of it by setting it within its various contexts, tackling it from a
broad and interdisciplinary perspective, and devoting special attention to a
number of key aspects.
‘Cambridge has been for many years the home of Septuagint study,’
wrote a prominent American specialist in 19101. Cambridge holds a special
place in the study of the medieval Jewish tradition of Greek Bible transla-
tion, if only because so many of the manuscripts (mainly but not exclu-
sively those from the Cairo Genizah) are kept there. William Horbury
rightly draws attention to the importance of Cambridge in the story of
study of the Greek Bible in general, beginning in the earliest days of the
University in the thirteenth century. From the point of view of our subject,
however, it is the nineteenth century developments that are of greatest in-
terest, starting with Frederick Field and his edition of the remains of Ori-
gen’s Hexapla (1875), and continuing through the arrival in Cambridge in
1897 of the vast haul of mainly fragmentary manuscripts from the Cairo
Genizah under the aegis of Charles Taylor, through the hard work of
Solomon Schechter and with the practical support of the University Librar-
ian Francis Jenkinson. The same year, astonishingly, F.C. Burkitt managed
to publish his edition of some Genizah fragments of Kings in Aquila’s
translation, and some further fragments of Aquila’s translation of the
Psalms appeared three years later, in 1900. In due course the Genizah was
to yield more fragments testifying to continuing use of Greek translations
in the tradition of Aquila, as noted by Horbury, who draws particular atten-
tion to the fruitful co-operation in Cambridge between Jewish and non-
Jewish scholars.
The wider history of research is discussed by Natalio Fernández Mar-
cos, whose pioneering introduction to the Greek versions of the Bible (first

1 Edgar J. Goodspeed, Classical Philology 5 (1910), 239.
2 Nicholas de Lange
published in 1979) for the first time set forth the Jewish transmission of
such versions in parallel to the better known Christian transmission. In his
essay ‘Non placet Septuaginta’ he insists on an unbroken chain of Jewish
Greek Bible translations linking the ancient Alexandrian version of the
Pentateuch to that printed in Constantinople in 1547. Key names in this
story are those of the second-century CE revisers Aquila and Symmachus,
representing two different and in a sense opposed approaches to the task of
revision. For Aquila the goal is to reproduce the original Hebrew as faith-
fully as possible, while for Symmachus it is to achieve a more elegant and
appealing Greek style. Of the two, it was Aquila whose model secured last-
ing influence in the Jewish tradition, while that of Symmachus was per-
haps more present in the Christian Church. Turning to the medieval heri-
tage, Fernández Marcos distinguishes two types of evidence, both consist-
ing largely of stray words and phrases: those written in Hebrew characters,
most of them recovered from the Cairo Genizah, and those inscribed in
Greek characters in the margins of Christian biblical manuscripts. A spe-
cial case is the so-called ‘Graecus Venetus’, a translation of the Pentateuch
and some other books of the Bible written in Greek characters and follow-
ing the tradition of Symmachus in paying close attention to Greek style,
even if it also occasionally betrays the influence of Aquila; this version
was probably made by a Christian translator who had made a study of Jew-
ish exegesis. All these various translations attest dissatisfaction with the
Septuagint. And yet in some ways this ancient Jewish version was the most
successful of all: unlike the medieval Jewish versions and the Constantin-
ople Pentateuch it liberated itself from the Hebrew and replaced it, for a
time in synagogues and more lastingly in Christian churches.
Although the main focus of our project is on the Middle Ages, the an-
cient roots of Byzantine civilization can never be ignored, and the Jewish
Bible translations are no exception in this respect. James Aitken concludes
from a close study of citations of the Book of Proverbs as well as the ex-
tant Aramaic and Syriac translations that the extant Greek version did not
leave a mark on Jewish literature until the first century CE, and that it con-
tinued to be known and cited (side by side with Aquila and other, un-
named, versions) into Late Antiquity. Particularly interesting is his discov-
ery of citations based on the Greek in rabbinic writings. This is a subject
that deserves to be investigated further, and extended to the whole Bible.
The relationship between the Greek translation and the targum is another
subject that he recommends for further research.
The rabbinic movement within Judaism is often portrayed, mislead-
ingly, as being in open conflict with Greek-speaking Judaism. Particularly
interesting in this regard is the attitude of the Rabbis to the translation of
the biblical books into Greek. The Greek translation of Lamentations,
Introduction 3
Philip Alexander suggests, was made in the decades following the destruc-
tion of the Jerusalem temple with a liturgical end in view, in connection
with the commemoration of the destruction in Greek-speaking synagogues:
it is part of the ‘outreach’ of the fledgling rabbinic movement to the Greek
Diaspora. The Rabbis, he argues, sponsored new translations of the biblical
books to replace the Septuagint, and they encouraged public reading of the
books in Hebrew. The Greek version of Lamentations may have been
promulgated by the rabbis so as to counter the extreme theology of the ca-
tastrophe being promoted by contemporary apocalyptic works such as 2
Baruch.
Christian witnesses play a key role in unravelling the history of Jewish
translations. Origen, in the third century, incorporated a number of Jewish
translations in his monumental Hexapla (extant only in fragments), notably
the versions of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, known collectively as
‘the Three’. An intriguing later phenomenon is the presence in the margins
of some Christian biblical manuscripts of readings that bear a distinctive
similarity to the medieval Jewish versions. The best-known of these manu-
scripts is the early uncial Codex Ambrosianus, known as F. The marginal
annotations have been given the siglum Fb. Some of them have similarities
with Aquila and Symmachus, others with the Constantinople Pentateuch of
1547. Alison Salvesen classifies some readings from Exodus, illustrating
the diversity of connections. Is it possible that they were all taken from a
single medieval Jewish translation? In that case the translation in question
combined a surprising and somewhat incoherent variety of approaches to
translation. An alternative explanation is that the readings come from dif-
ferent sources, reflecting Jewish and Christian traditions. Either way, it is
clear that some, at least, of the readings derive from a medieval Jewish
version or versions, and (if we can distinguish these readings from others
perhaps drawn from elsewhere) provide valuable evidence about such ver-
sions.
One of the most valuable sources of evidence for Greek-speaking Juda-
ism in Late Antiquity is the epigraphic record. Silvia Cappelletti examines
as an epigraphist the biblical quotations found in Greek Jewish inscrip-
tions. The rarity of such quotations is intriguing: clearly reference to the
Bible was not a marker of Jewish identity. But how widely was the Bible
known? And which translations were used? The meagre evidence indicates
knowledge of the Septuagint, Aquila, and some unidentified versions.
Giuseppe Veltri investigates explicit references to the Greek translations
in rabbinic sources. These differ from Greek Jewish and Christian sources
in identifying the aim of the translation as being for Ptolemy (presumably
for his personal use), rather than for the royal library of Alexandria. The
general attitude to the translation in the rabbinic sources is very positive,
4 Nicholas de Lange
or at least neutral; a small number of late texts presenting a negative vision
of the translation are associated with the elaboration of a liturgy for the
Fast of Tevet.
The Jews of the Byzantine empire constitute a missing chapter in the
Jewish history of the Middle Ages: that is why we felt it was important in
this volume to present the basic facts about this forgotten Jewry. David
Jacoby surveys the physical presence of Jews in the Byzantine empire and
in closely related areas such as the Venetian islands of Crete and Negro-
ponte (Euboea). It emerges that Jewish communities were widely dispersed
throughout the Byzantine world, and were overwhelmingly urban. There
were very few obstacles to their mobility, and so they moved freely from
town to town, both within the empire and across its borders. While Jews
spoke vernacular Greek in their everyday life, Hebrew was the language of
Jewish liturgy and written culture in the Byzantine world from the ninth or
tenth century on. The use of Hebrew facilitated communication between
Byzantine Jews and Jews elsewhere, and indeed between Rabbanites and
Karaites within the empire. The general level of scholarship seems to have
been high, to judge by the fact that scholars and schools were to be found
not only in large urban centres but also in small communities. This is the
concrete setting against which the evidence for use of Greek Bible versions
has to be set.
The nine letters from the Cairo Genizah published by Ben Outhwaite
help to flesh out this account, with personal details and local colour. Be-
cause they were discovered in Old Cairo, the letters bring out an aspect
that might have otherwise eluded us, the close contacts between Jews in
Byzantium and in Egypt, where several Byzantine Jewish families seem to
have lived more or less permanently. But they also shed light on everyday
Jewish life in Byzantium.
The reworking of Josephus known as Sefer Yosippon, probably the first
extant Hebrew work written in Europe, originated in an area of Italy where
both Greek and Latin were known. It was widely copied and read by Jews
in Byzantium and in other regions. Saskia Dönitz suggests that its success
is due in part to the use it makes of stories from the Greek Bible (perhaps
in Latin translation) which are lacking in the Hebrew, notably 1–2 Macca-
bees and the additions to Esther. It is unclear whether the author knew
these works from Jewish tradition or discovered them from the Christian
environment. A much later Italian author, Jerahmeel, who took an interest
in the additions to Daniel in the Greek Bible, states that these texts were
translated by Todos (i.e. Theodotion), a clear indication that he was famil-
iar with the Christian Bible, where this translation of Daniel had generally
replaced the Septuagint version; the author of Sefer Yosippon, however,
was working at a time when among Jews Hebrew was just beginning to
Introduction 5
replace Greek and Romance languages in Italy, and so the possibility re-
mains that part of his aim was to rescue the living but threatened heritage
of Greek-reading Judaism for a Hebrew-reading posterity.
Patrick Andrist examines the Christian literature in which a Christian is
shown debating with a Jew, and asks whether the Jewish character ever
quotes a biblical text which is different from the Bible of the Christian, i.e.
the Septuagint. Generally the answer is negative. Yet, in the face of seem-
ingly insuperable difficulties, a small number of cases can be assembled in
which there is a disagreement between the two speakers about the text of
the Bible, and in some of these there is at least a distinct possibility that
genuine Jewish readings are preserved in the Christian polemical texts. So
it turns out that this is a potentially fruitful line of enquiry after all.
T.M. Law scrutinizes one of the Cairo Genizah fragments containing
Greek biblical glosses in the context of the diversity of Greek versions
known to have circulated nearly a thousand years earlier. He shows that, in
contrast to the practice in the Christian churches, where essentially a single
Greek version held sway, among the Jews the old diversity persisted, and
what is more that the influence of the ancient versions, not only Aquila and
Symmachus but also Theodotion and other, unnamed, versions, was still
felt in the Middle Ages.
As mentioned earlier, the 14th-century ‘Graecus Venetus’ is often con-
sidered to be a Christian translation, despite the presence in it of certain
Jewish elements. Dries De Crom, in his minute study of the translation of
the Song of Songs, detects traces of Aquila and Symmachus as well as the
Septuagint, but also of medieval Jewish exegesis. Moreover the book, al-
though in Greek, is written from right to left like a Hebrew book. Turning
in a postscript to the vexed question of the authorship of the translation,
and noting the presence of both Christian and Jewish elements, he endorses
an earlier suggestion that the translator was a convert from Judaism to
Christianity.
The earliest printed text of the Greek Bible, the Complutensian Poly-
glot, is the subject of a second contribution by Natalio Fernández Marcos.
Among the various manuscript sources on which this edition was based, at
least one displays striking similarities with a medieval Jewish text of Exo-
dus which is partially preserved in additions to the previously-mentioned
Codex Ambrosianus. This text has left no other surviving traces. Did the
Complutensian editors know it from the Codex Ambrosianus, or from an-
other source, now lost? This is only one of the intriguing issues associated
with the Complutensian edition.

Clearly there is a long way to go before all the questions raised by the
medieval Jewish translations can be answered. Indeed, given the very
6 Nicholas de Lange
fragmentary nature of the surviving evidence it is likely that some of them
will never be resolved. Certain key points arise, however, from the contri-
butions to this book.
Firstly, it is clear that Greek-speaking Jews throughout the Middle Ages
made use of translations of the biblical books from Hebrew into Greek. We
are not in a position to determine whether this situation prevailed through-
out the Greek-speaking regions of the world; in the absence of indications
to the contrary it is probably safe to assume that it did.
Secondly, there was not a single, authorised translation (such as existed
in the Greek Church), but there were several circulating side by side. Some
of the sources, both Jewish and Christian, cite alternative renderings of the
same Hebrew word.
Thirdly, while they present some novel features, these translations were
generally very traditional, and retain clear traces of the ancient translations
and revisions, and notably that of Aquila, which is cast in very distinctive
Greek and follows a distinctive approach to the task of translation. In the
sixth century it seems that the translation of Aquila itself was in use (to
judge by the palimpsest fragments found in the Cairo Genizah). Later,
however, Aquilanic renderings are just one element, combined with other
features, including words that only entered the Greek language after
Aquila’s time, and morphological features belonging to medieval vernacu-
lar Greek.
Fourthly, while these translations were made from the Masoretic He-
brew text, the books and parts of books present in the Septuagint but ab-
sent from the Masoretic Text were not entirely forgotten among Jews.
Finally, the use of these translations was not limited to the Jewish
communities. They found their way into the hands of Christian scribes and
scholars, and have left a distinct trace in some Christian Bibles.