Syro-hexaplar version

Last updated February 26, 2019

The Syro-hexaplar version (also Syro-Hexapla) is the Syriac translation of the Septuagint based on the fifth column of Origen's Hexapla. The translation was made by Bishop Paul of Tella, around 617, from the Hexaplaric text of the Septuagint.^[1]^[2] A Palestinian Syriac version, extant in fragments, is known to go back to at least 700.^[3]

Syriac, also known as Syriac/Syrian Aramaic or Classical Syriac, is a dialect of Middle Aramaic. Having first appeared in the early first century CE in Edessa, classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from the 4th to the 8th centuries, preserved in a large body of Syriac literature. Indeed, Syriac literature comprises roughly 90% of the extant Aramaic literature. Syriac was once spoken across much of the Near East as well as Anatolia and Eastern Arabia.

Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible and other books into the Greek language

The Septuagint is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures from the original Hebrew. It is estimated that the first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Torah or Pentateuch, were translated in the mid-3rd century BCE and the remaining texts were translated in the 2nd century BCE. Considered the primary Greek translation of the Old Testament, it is quoted a number of times in the New Testament, particularly in the Pauline epistles, by the Apostolic Fathers, and later by the Greek Church Fathers.

Hexapla is the term for a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible in six versions, four of them translated into Greek, preserved only in fragments. It was an immense and complex word-for-word comparison of the original Hebrew Scriptures with the Greek Septuagint translation and with other Greek translations. The term especially and generally applies to the edition of the Old Testament compiled by the theologian and scholar Origen, sometime before the year 240 CE.

This version is important for the study of the Septuagint, for Swete believed that it often includes the symbols Origen used to mark the differences he observed between the Septuagint text and the Hebrew text.^[4] Since many later copies of the Septuagint dropped Origen's symbols, the Syro-Hexapla is one of the primary ways that textual critics can identify hexaplaric material in the Septuagint.^[5]

Henry Barclay Swete British academic. Biblical scholar

Henry Barclay Swete, FBA was an English Biblical scholar. He became Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1890. He is known for his 1906 commentary on the Book of Revelation, and other works of exegesis.

Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language native to Israel; the modern version of which is spoken by over 9 million people worldwide. Historically, it is regarded as the language of the Israelites and their ancestors, although the language was not referred to by the name Hebrew in the Tanakh. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date from the 10th century BCE. Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language left, and the only truly successful example of a revived dead language.

Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants in either manuscripts or printed books. Scribes can make alterations when copying manuscripts by hand. Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic might seek to reconstruct the original text as closely as possible. The same processes can be used to attempt to reconstruct intermediate versions, or recensions, of a document's transcription history. The objective of the textual critic's work is a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of texts. This understanding may lead to the production of a "critical edition" containing a scholarly curated text.

Being a direct translation from the Greek of the Septuagint into Syriac, it should be distinguished from the Peshitta, which is a Syriac translation directly from the Hebrew.

Koine Greek, also known as Alexandrian dialect, common Attic, Hellenistic or Biblical Greek, was the common supra-regional form of Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire, and the early Byzantine Empire, or late antiquity. It evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East during the following centuries. It was based mainly on Attic and related Ionic speech forms, with various admixtures brought about through dialect levelling with other varieties.

The Peshitta is the standard version of the Bible for churches in the Syriac tradition.

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The Vulgate is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible that became the Catholic Church's officially promulgated Latin version of the Bible during the 16th century. The translation was largely the work of Jerome, who in 382 had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Vetus Latina Gospels then in use by the Roman Church. Jerome, on his own initiative, extended this work of revision and translation to include most of the books of the Bible, and once published, the new version was widely adopted and eventually eclipsed the Vetus Latina; so that by the 13th century, it had taken over from the former version the appellation of versio vulgata or vulgata for short, and in Greek as βουλγάτα ("Voulgata").

A dagger, obelisk, or obelus is a typographical symbol that usually indicates a footnote if an asterisk has already been used. It is present in Unicode as U+2020†DAGGER. The term "obelisk" derives from the Greek: ὀβελίσκος, which means "little obelus"; from ὀβελός meaning "roasting spit". It was originally represented by the subtraction and division symbols by Ancient Greek scholars as critical marks in manuscripts.

Gregory Bar Hebraeus, also known by his Latin name Abulpharagius or Syriac name Mor Gregorios Bar Ebraya, was a maphrian-catholicos of the Syriac Orthodox Church in the 13th century. He is noted for his works concerning philosophy, poetry, language, history, and theology; he has been called "one of the most learned and versatile men from the Syriac Orthodox Church".

Symmachus (translator) author of biblical texts

Symmachus translated the Old Testament into Greek. His translation was included by Origen in his Hexapla and Tetrapla, which compared various versions of the Old Testament side by side with the Septuagint. Some fragments of Symmachus's version that survive, in what remains of the Hexapla, inspire scholars to remark on the purity and idiomatic elegance of Symmachus' Greek. He was admired by Jerome, who used his work in composing the Vulgate.

1 Esdras, also Greek Esdras, Greek Ezra, or 3 Esdras, is an ancient Greek version of the biblical Book of Ezra in use among the early church, and many modern Christians with varying degrees of canonicity. First Esdras is substantially the same as Masoretic Ezra.

The priestly breastplate was a sacred breastplate worn by the High Priest of the Israelites, according to the Book of Exodus. In the biblical account, the breastplate is sometimes termed the breastplate of judgment, because the Urim and Thummim were placed within it. These stones were, at times, used to determine God’s will in a particular situation. Using these stones did not always determine God's will

Aquilaof Sinope was a translator of the Old Testament into Greek, proselyte, and disciple of Rabbi Akiva, sometimes assumed to be one and the same as Onkelos.

A polyglot is a book that contains side-by-side versions of the same text in several different languages. Some editions of the Bible or its parts are polyglots, in which the Hebrew and Greek originals are exhibited along with historical translations. Polyglots are useful for studying the history of the text and its interpretation.

Theodotion was a Hellenistic Jewish scholar, perhaps working in Ephesus, who in c. 150 CE translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Whether he was revising the Septuagint, or was working from Hebrew manuscripts that represented a parallel tradition that has not survived, is debated. In the 2nd century Theodotion's text was quoted in The Shepherd of Hermas and in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho. His finished version, which filled some lacunae in the Septuagint version of the Book of Jeremiah and Book of Job, formed one column in Origen of Alexandria's Hexapla, c. 240 CE. The Hexapla, now only extant in fragments, presented six Hebrew and Greek texts side-by-side: two Greek versions, by Aquila and Symmachus, and Theodotion's version following it, apparently reflecting a contemporary understanding of their historical sequence.

In the Bible, the Cherethites and Pelethites, the former also spelled Kerethites, are two ethnic groups in the Levant. Their identity has not been determined with certainty. The Cherethites are mentioned independently three times, and as the "Cherethites and Pelethites" seven times. They are interpreted to have been a group of elite mercenaries employed by King David, some of whom acted as his bodyguards, and others as part of his army.

Frederick Field (1801–1885) was an English theologian and biblical scholar.

"They have pierced my hands and my feet" is a phrase that occurs in some English translations of Psalm 22:16. The text of the Hebrew Bible is obscure at this point, and Jewish and some Christian commentators translate this line differently, although there is no evidence of a deliberate mistranslation.

The Armenian Bible is due to Saint Mesrob's early-5th-century translation. The first monument of Armenian literature is the version of the Holy Scriptures. Isaac, says Moses of Chorene, made a translation of the Bible from the Syriac text about 411. This work must have been considered imperfect, for soon afterwards John of Egheghiatz and Joseph of Baghin were sent to Edessa to translate the Scriptures. They journeyed as far as Constantinople, and brought back with them authentic copies of the Greek text. With the help of other copies obtained from Alexandria the Bible was translated again from the Greek according to the text of the Septuagint and Origen's Hexapla. This version, now in use in the Armenian Church, was completed about 434.

The English Hexapla is an edition of the New Testament in Greek, along with what were considered the six most important English language translations in parallel columns underneath, preceded by a detailed history of English translations and translators by S. P. Tregelles. The six English language translations provided are Wiclif's (1380), William Tyndale's (1534), Cranmer's, the Geneva Bible (1557), Rheims (1582), and the Authorised, or King James Bible, (1611), arranged in columns underneath.

Codex Chisianus 45 is a 10th-century biblical manuscript, first edited in 1772.

Jewish Koine Greek, or Jewish Hellenistic Greek, is the variety of Koine Greek or "common Attic" found in a number of Alexandrian dialect texts of Hellenistic Judaism, most notably in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible and associated literature, as well as in Greek Jewish texts from Palestine. The term is largely equivalent with Greek of the Septuagint as a cultural and literary rather than a linguistic category. The minor syntax and vocabulary variations in the Koine Greek of Jewish authors are not as linguistically distinctive as the later language Yevanic, or Judeo-Greek, spoken by the Romaniotes Jews in Greece.

The ms. Ambrosiano O 39 sup. – is a manuscript of the Hexapla of Origen dated to the late ninth century C.E. written in a codex form. This is a palimpsest. The manuscript is designated with the number 1098 in the list of the septuagint manuscripts as the classification of Alfred Rahlfs.

Kristin Mimi Lieve Leen De Troyer is professor of Old Testament at the University of Salzburg and president of the European Society of Women in Theological Research. She holds the title of honorary professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of St. Andrews School of Divinity. Before her current appointment, she has worked from 1998 to 2008 as professor of Hebrew Bible at the Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California.

References

↑ The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences, by Ighnāṭyūs Afrām I (Patriarch of Antioch). ISBN 9781931956048. p.313.
↑ A Short Commentary on the Book of Daniel by A. A. Bevan. ISBN 9781107669949. p.43.
↑ Encyclopædia Britannica - Paul of Tella
↑ "The Origenic signs were scrupulously retained", p. 112 Swete, Henry Barclay. 1914. Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek. Cambridge.
↑ 1953. Charles Fritsch. The treatment of the Hexaplaric signs in the Syro-Hexaplar of Proverbs. Journal of Biblical Literature 72.3: 169-181.

External links

http://www.hexapla.org/

Syro-hexaplar version

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