Its Text. The Septuagint is probably the first translation of large scope that was ever undertaken, and its importance, notable then, has even to the present remained scarcely di minished. It gave a distinct stamp to all Bibli cal Greek, supplies even now the clew not only to the New Testament but to all Greek litera ture kindred and derived, and is the most trust worthy collateral witness to the contents of Hebrew Scriptures in the two centuries imme diately before our era. Accordingly, it be comes a matter of signal interest to determine just what this translation was in its original form, but at the same time a matter of per plexing difficulty. The manuscript and testi monies do indeed vastly abound, as seen in the fact that the critical apparatus (of 20 uncials and 277 cursives) amassed by Holmes and Parsons fills five huge volumes (1798 1827), but their witness is inordinately con tradictory and uncertain. Indeed the problem proper of the Septuagint, so brilliantly attacked by Lagarde in his on the Greek Translation of Proverbs' (1863), remains yet one of the most embarrassing in textual crit icism. The reason for this should be briefly stated.
Other Versions. Under the Roman irri tation and especially after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (70 A.D.), as the national Jewish feeling became extremely intense, the cleft opened between the Jewish consciousness and the Christian widened, through two gen erations, into a chasm in the time of Hadrian. The Jewish race, recoiling from its pagan en vironment, fenced itself more and more firmly within its own institutions, especially its re ligious and sacred books, becoming a stricter and stricter constructionist. The highest imper sonation of this tendency was the illustrious Rabbi Aqiba. Inasmuch as the Christians de pended almost wholly on the Septuagint, the latter became unpopular with the Jews, not solely because of its inaccuracies and diver gencies from the synagogal text. Hence arose a demand for a new and faithful rendering of the latter, since the dispersed Jews could not now dispense with a Greek translation. This demand was met (about 132?) in the spirit of Aqiba by the version of Akyla (Aquila), slav ishly faithful, turning the Hebrew word for word. Meantime it was widely perceived that the official Palestinian text could not be that used by the Seventy, and accordingly still other translations of the former were now under taken, as by Symmachus and Theodotion into Greek, and also into Syriac (Peshitta). The version of Symmachus is highly praised by the Fathers for its elegance and clarity, in con trast with Akyla s, often obscurer than the original; Theodotion's is thought to display a rather inferior scholarship.
The Hexapla. Here, then, were four ver sions, and more than one edition of some, often divergent. Such apologists as Justin, assuming that the Septuagint was perfectly made from a perfect text, charged the Jews with corrupting their own Scriptures; others assumed (with many generations of moderns) that the Palestinian was the true aboriginal and hence discredited the Septuagint and other ver sions, and Origen even proposed to himself the superhuman task of tnaking a collation, at first in four, then in six (or even in nine) parallel colturms, of the Hebrew (in Hebrew and also in Greek characters), of Aquila's, of Sym machus,' of the LXX, and also of Theodotion's translation, a formidable array of deadly par allelsi called the Sextuple (Hexapla). The
Septuagint he then corrected as seemed best, prefixing an asterisk (*) to each insertion and an obelus (t) to each deletion, and suffixing a metobelos (+) to each of both,a scheme that could be carried out only very imperfectly.
Chaos. The example and authority of Origen stimulated to endless attempts at im proving the Septuagint, all of which ended in making confusion worse confounded. Half a century after his death (254) three rnain types of text appeared and established themselves on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean: as named in order by Jerome (Preface to Chron.), that of Hesychius in Egypt, of Lucian in ASia Minor from Constantinople to Antioch, of Eusebius and Pamphilus in Palestine, this lat ter being really Ongen's fifth column; and the most, but not all, of the manuscripts still fall under these three types.
Targums. Still another, though far in ferior, index to the old Hebrew text, is found in the Targums, or Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament Scriptures. The two most im portant are those of Onkelos* and (Pseudo-) Jonathan, the latter called Palestinian. But the former is by far the more valuable, be cause of its fidelity to the Hebrew, whereas pseudo-Jonathanl- has adorned his scroll with all manner of more or less vivid pictorial ad ditions and elucidations. Thus he assures us, athe Lord made the firmament, poising it with his three fingers," and to the serpent is said, °tby skin thou shalt cast off once every seven years)); in this way the text is expanded by nearly one-half, a fact that is interesting as showing a manner of literary growth. The Targums attest the Hebrew text as it was ex pounded to the people of the 1st century of our era, and in parts perhaps two centuries earlient Samaritan. Still further, the Samaritan Pentateuch, i.e., the Hebrew text in Samaritan characters, as current among Samaritans, is an important witness to the text of the Law. First brought from Damascus to Europe in 1616 by Pietro della Valle, it has long been a bone of bitter but indecisive contention. At many points diverging from the MT, it agrees with the Septuagint at many, but critics still debate whether it represents a truly different tradition or only a faulty retranslation from the Greek. Its witness is by no means yet proved neg ligible, but rather gains steadily in considera tion.