Home again, Home Again…

Well, we arrived last night into Louisville, safe and sound, praise and thanks to our Lord.  The trip had no obstacles to report and was smooth as could be expected.

We accomplished everything we needed to accomplish, so praise and thanks to the Lord for that.  I acquired all the information pertaining to the mss of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs that we needed.  I read through all of the CPA and Dr. Gentry and I collated about half of the material on the plane and during the lay over in Atlanta, and we will finish it next week sometime.  Dr. Gentry had most all of his final questions pertaining to his edition answered by the Leiter.  It was a very productive trip, and I’m already thinking about how to make it happen again .

But I’m so glad to be home again with my wife and daughter.

Goettingen Day 5

Well, we are coming to the end of our trip.  In fact if I get a chance to post tomorrow, it will have to be from Frankfurt in the evening.  We leave Goettingen sometime between 1:15 and 3:15 PM tomorrow afternoon so that we can make our early morning flight on Wednesday.

Well, I went to get the broetchen again this morning.  I think I did a better job of communicating, but I am certainly the English speaker in a foreign land .  The picture below is of the baeckerei to which I went every morning.  Not sure if we will get rolls for lunch tomorrow since our departure time is close to lunch.  I hope I taste that goodness one more time .

The picture to the right is of the St. Albani Kirche, where the church service was held.  It is a beautiful building.

I also have some pictures of where I have been working the past week.  The stand up desk behind me was actually Alfred Rahlfs’.  I found it to be pretty neat.

Well, I will finish the CPA tomorrow.  Basically, I have Eccl. 12:1-2 to read through, and then I will be in a position to collate the the CPA of Eccl. to Gentry’s edition.  It has been an interesting exercise in methodology, since we have chosen to collate a daughter version to a nearly finished critical edition, rather than collating the daughter version to the collation book from the start.  I’m actually checking a previous collator as I work through the CPA, and I’m correcting some mistakes he made.  But I’m in a better position to do this because I’m collating the version to the edition, not to the collation book, which sometimes but not always agrees with Gentry’s lemma.  Thus, I start by comparing the CPA with Gentry’s reconstruction of the OG.  Most times the CPA agrees with this Version, but sometimes it does not.  When it does not, the CPA usually agrees with one of the variant readings and its place in the text history can be discerned clearly.  In a couple places, CPA agrees with the Syro-hexapla and these two witnesses are the only witnesses to a particular variant, which is interesting, since these are two Aramaic versions of the LXX.  This may indicate a genetic relationship, but with the Versions it is always difficult to prove these relationships.  Anyways, now I’m rambling on and on, and I need to get back to work.

I will also finish scanning and photographing mss. tonight and tomorrow.  I think I will sleep well tomorrow night .

Goettingen Day 4

Today, I had time to learn more about German culture.  My day started with Dr. Gentry calling and asking me to pick up the broetchen (rolls or small bread) on my own.  I have observed him do it the last three days and so I thought I could give it a shot.  I just needed to order vier broetchen bitte “four rolls please” and ask for a receipt mit cassenbon bitte “with a receipt please.”  The awkward part happened when she gave me the look of, “will that be all for you today?, and I had no response for this.  I think I said something like genau “exactly” when I should of said something like das ist  genug “that is enough.”  Anyways, it was exciting and I plan on doing it again tomorrow.

After this errand, we went to an ecumenical church service between the local baptist and lutheran churches in town.  There were some parts liturgical and some parts contemporary.  It was all in German so I did not understand much of it, but the singing was fun and I was trying to translate the lyrics.

After church we hopped on a train for Northeim Germany (10 minute train ride north of Goettingen) to eat lunch with a wonderful Christian German family that Dr. Gentry knows from previous visits.  They graciously paid for our meal and drove us from the restaurant back to Goettingen.  It was a wonderful time and I will not forget the generosity extended.

When we returned to the Institute, I immediately set out to work on the mss.  and the CPA.  I have only one fragment left of the CPA, which can be split over the two days left.  So I’m on target here.  I have still more mss. to look at.

I still need to walk by Walter Bauer’s house to check it out.  I like that Germany memorializes these scholars by placing plaques on their houses with the scholar’s name and area of expertise.  Then in the case of the Lagarde Haus at least, the discipline is carried on in the house.  It’s wonderful, really.

Goettingen Day 3

Well, I do not have a lot of time to write, but I wanted to mention a few things.

In terms of research, it looks like I will meet my goals for this trip.  I have a manageable chunk of the CPA left, which I should finish on Tuesday morning and I will collate it with Dr. Gentry’s edition on the plane ride home .  Although there is a paucity of CPA material for Ecclesiastes, it has been interesting to see how it translated the Greek text.  I have found a few interesting variants that I might share later.

I’m still working at tracking down the mss for Job, and so far there has been success here.  I hope I have enough time to finish .  Dr. Gentry also has me working on Ecclesiastes mss.  If I get all of this done, there is yet another project I can do for him [updating the Gregory of Agregentius commentary in the apparatus].  The edition is due out this year, so I guess this is what you call crunch time.

Today, we went to the market and bought some Wurst and broetchen for lunch.  I’m becoming a connoisseur since I can now taste the difference between good Wurst and better Wurst.  After this we ran our usual errands, but we had to plan ahead since on Sunday the stores are closed.  About the only thing we will buy tomorrow will be the broetchen for dinner.

I hope to get out and walk around sometime, but with the combination of less than desirable weather and lots of work to do, so far I have not managed to get out to see all I have wanted to see.

Goettingen Day 2

Well, I slept soundly from 6:30 PM to 5:00 AM this morning.  I’m told that “jet lag” sometimes wakes one up in the middle of the night for an hour or so and then one can fall sleep again.  However, I did not have this problem .  The Lord caused me to sleep well and he gave me a fairly productive day considering the learning curve.  I had to find alot of light switches in the dark in the Lagarde Haus, take my first shower in Germany [not any different than in the US], ready and eat breakfast etc.  Shortly after this, Dr. Gentry and I went to get the daily bread.  There is a bakery not five minutes walk from the Unternehmen, where we buy fresh bread every day.  The bread was very tasty with cheese or with honey.

Today, I began work on the Christian Palestinian Aramaic fragments (CPA of Ecclesiastes (5th-8th C).  It is basically Syriac, but it has a slightly different script and its morphology is different in places, but overall it is not much more difficult to read than Syriac.

The Unternehmen has three Job mss. that I will be able to use for my research, which is exciting.  More on that at a later time.

Notes on Germany. The weather here reminds me of New England in the winter.  It is dark and overcast and cool (-0.8 C) during the day.  Unfortunately this makes the walks into town a little less enjoyable than they could be, but I still find the town to be quite beautiful.  I have yet to take my camera out, but I hope to do so in the next couple of days.  Saturday and Monday look like they will be clearer, but we shall see.

For now, I must get back to the research.  Tschuss.

In Goettingen Safe and Sound

Well, we arrived in Germany this morning at 1:20 AM Eastern Time, 7:20 Frankfurt time.  The Lord blessed our travels by working things out for us to catch the next immediate ICE (Intercity-Express) train with a direct route to Goettingen.  The plane was on time and our luggage was near the front of the line, so we were able to make the 8:45 train, rather than wait two hours for the next train.

By 12:30 PM Goettingen time we were settled at the Septuaginta-Unternehmen and then we went to buy groceries.  This errand is a little different here than at home, since we only buy groceries for one day at a time.  We bought what we needed for today and tomorrow morning, but we will go back to Kaufland (Shopland) for the rest of tomorrow’s groceries.

All in all it was a productive day.  Now, we need to stay awake until 6:30-7:00 and get a full night’s sleep and Lord willing tomorrow begin those research projects .

Thanks for your prayers and may you continue praying for us.

Departure for Goettingen Today

Well, only in the providence of God would it happen that a young aspiring Septuagint scholar, like me, would have the opportunity to visit the Septuaginta-Unternehmen in Goettingen, Germany (this is the “Mecca” of LXX studies).  I’m accompanying Peter Gentry for the next week and he will be putting me to work on collating the few fragments of Ecclesiastes preserved in the Christian Palestinian Aramaic version for his critical edition.  In addition to this task, I will also be trying to track down some Catenae mss. for my own project on the Hexapla of Job.  Nancy Woods has finished the Hexapla for Job 1-21 and she made great use of the Goettingen edition by Ziegler and the new edition by the Hagedorns (The Nachlese), but she listed some “unused mss,” which were not collated or used by either Ziegler or the Hagedorns.  I want to track down as many of these mss. as I am able so that our work on Job will be complete in this area.  I also look forward to walking around Goettingen and taking in as much as is possible in one week .

Please pray for safe travels for me and Dr. Gentry and pray that our short trip (Jan. 13-20) will be very productive.  I will post if the research becomes interesting.

Highlights from SBL 2009

Well, the meeting in New Orleans has come and gone, and I want to give some of the highlights from the papers I had the privilege of hearing.

1. Probably, one of the more insightful presentations I heard was Michael Sokoloff’s paper “Lexical Archaeology: The Case of Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum.”  Sokoloff has prepared and published a translation and revision of Brockelmann’s lexicon and this paper succinctly described Brockelmann’s method and Sokoloff’s approach to revision.  His presentation was based on the introduction to his lexicon so the reader is directed there for the details. Perhaps the most interesting part of the presentation was the background to Syriac Lexicography and his comparison between Payne Smith and Brockelmann.  In short, I will be using Brockelmann/Sokoloff for my Syriac research in the future.

2. Johann Cook asked the question: “Were the LXX Versions of Proverbs and Job Translated by the same Person?”  He answered in the negative, since there seems to be too radically different translation approaches in the two books.

3. Larry Perkins gave a solid and thorough paper on proper names in Greek Exodus.

4. Phillip Marshall presented on Aramaic Influence on the (Old) Greek Bible. This was an insightful paper because it reminded us that the Greek translators were influenced by Aramaisms from time to time. Particularly, his third category, “Heb. and Aram. lexemes are the same, but OG translator chose a Greek equivalent that matched the sense of the Aramaic,” was insightful.

5. Claude Cox made a defense for the daughter versions of the LXX with particular place for the Armenian version.  In essence, Cox exhorted us to continue to study the daughter versions for three reasons: 1) They remain one type of evidence for textual criticism, 2) the sub-versions remain relatively early witnesses, and 3) these versions increase our understanding of the textual history of the Bible.

6. I gave my first presentation at SBL on the commentary of Biblia Hebraica Quinta and the textual problem of holelot in Ecclesiastes 1:17.  I received some helpful feedback on the paper including some encouragement to publish the paper as well as some germane critique, which I will incorporate into the revision and final draft.

SBL New Orleans 2009

Well, it is that time of year when one must decide which sessions one will attend at the SBL national meeting, which will be here in less than a week.  Due to a friend’s wedding, I will not be able to make it for Saturday, but fortunately for me, it appears that I will not miss any of the LXX (IOSCS) sessions that I wanted to attend.

I plan to be at the following sessions, when I’m not at the book tables .

Sunday Schedule

Greek Bible

Joint Session With: Greek Bible, International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies

11/22/2009

9:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Room: Napoleon A2 – SH

Theme: Greek Minor Prophets

Cameron Boyd-Taylor, University of Cambridge, Presiding

Jennifer Dines, University of Cambridge

“We have hated evil and loved good.” “Restore justice …” (Amos 5.15 LXX): The Book of the Twelve as protreptic philosophy? (30 min)

W. Edward Glenny, Northwestern College-St. Paul

“The Translation of Visually Ambiguous Phenomena in the Septuagint of Amos” (30 min)

Karen H. Jobes, Wheaton College

“The Minor Prophets in James” (30 min)

Stephen Moyise, University of Chichester

“Paul’s use of LXX Hosea” (30 min)

Bogdan G. Bucur, Duquesne University

“The Vision of Habakkuk in the Septuagint and its Christian Reception” (30 min)

International Syriac Language Project

11/22/2009

1:00 PM to 3:30 PM

Room: Edgewood AB – SH

Peter Williams, Tyndale House, Presiding

Regine Hunziker-Rodewald, University of Strasbourg, France

Celebrating the Full Moon: Northwest Semitic Terminology for Concepts of Time (30 min)

Steven Shaw, Whitley College, University of Melbourne

Verbal Valence in the Early Syriac Translations of the New Testament with Special Attention to the Peshitta Version (30 min)

Michael Sokoloff, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

Lexical Archaeology: The Case of Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum (30 min)

Reinier de Blois, United Bible Societies

The Semantic Structure of Biblical Hebrew (30 min)

Discussion (30 min)

Mark

11/22/2009

4:00 PM to 6:30 PM

Room: Oak Alley – SH

Theme: Power and Authority in the Second Gospel

James W. Voelz, Concordia Seminary, Presiding

Adam Winn, Fuller Theological Seminary

Power or Suffering?: Reconsidering Mark’s Christological Presentation (10 min)

Geert Van Oyen, Universite Catholique de Louvain

The Vulnerable Authority of the Evangelist: (Re-)reading the Paradoxes in the Gospel of Mark (10 min)

Discussion (30 min)

Rikk E. Watts, Regent College

In the Power and Authority of God: Yahweh-Christology in Mark (10 min)

Tom Shepherd, Andrews University

Power and Authority in Mark 1 and 16 in Codex W (10 min)

Discussion (30 min)

Discussion (50 min)

Monday Schedule

23-127International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies

11/23/2009

9:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Room: Studio 5 – MR

Johann Cook, University of Stellenbosch

“Were the Septuagint Versions of Proverbs and Job Translated by the Same Person?” (30 min)

Larry Perkins, Northwest Baptist Seminary

“Proper Names in Greek Exodus: A Translational Challenge” (30 min)

John D. Meade, Southern Seminary

“Evaluating Evaluations: The Commentary of BHQ and the Problem of holelot in Ecclesiastes 1:17″ (30 min)

Phillip S. Marshall, Houston Baptist University

“Aramaic Influence on Greek Translations of the Hebrew Bible” (30 min)

Bernard A. Taylor, Loma Linda University

“The Rahlfs-Hanhart Septuagint Text: An Analysis” (30 min)

23-222International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies

11/23/2009

1:00 PM to 4:00 PM

Room: Studio 1 – MR

Cameron Boyd-Taylor, University of Cambridge

“Made from the Image” (30 min)

David Andrew Teeter, Harvard University

“The Septuagint and Early Jewish Halakhah: Problems and Perspectives in Modern Research” (30 min)

Robert Hiebert, Trinity Western Seminary and Nathaniel N. Dykstra, Trinity Western University

“Septuagint Textual Research in the Early Twenty-First Century” (30 min)

John D. Barry, Logos Bible Software

“Using the Göttingen Septuagint Digital Version to Solve Age-Old Text Critical Problems” (30 min)

Claude Cox, McMaster Divinity College

“An Apology for the So-called Sub-versions or “Daughter Versions” of the Bible, with Specific Reference to the Armenian Version of the Book of Job” (30 min)

Business Meeting (30 min)

I’m particularly interested in John Barry’s presentation on the use of the digital version of the Goettingen Septuagint edition in research.  I’m also looking forward to Claude Cox’s paper on the Daughter Versions of Job, since Greek Job research is about to become a major part of my life as I embark on Hexaplaric research of this book.

More On God as Creator from II Maccabees

Introduction

As I was reading through II Maccabees again, I was struck by the references to God as creator and the Jewish mother’s exact confession of God as Creator in chapter 7.  Regardless of whether chapter 7 was originally in Jason’s history (2:19-23) or an interpolation of the epitomator, the view she confesses is still from the second century BC at latest (see NETS, 503, for details).

Texts Pertaining to Creation

7:23 τοιγαροῦν ὁ τοῦ κόσμου κτίστης ὁ πλάσας ἀνθρώπου γένεσιν καὶ πάντων ἐξευρὼν γένεσιν καὶ τὸ πνεῦμα καὶ τὴν ζωὴν ὑμῖν πάλιν ἀποδίδωσιν μετ᾽ ἐλέους, ὡς νῦν ὑπερορᾶτε ἑαυτοὺς διὰ τοὺς αὐτοῦ νόμους.

Therefore indeed the Creator of the world, the one who formed the beginning of humanity and invented the beginning of all things will give both spirit and life to you again with mercy, as/because now you watch yourselves on account his laws.

7:28 ἀξιῶ σε, τέκνον, ἀναβλέψαντα εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν καὶ τὰ ἐν αὐτοῖς πάντα ἰδόντα γνῶναι ὅτι οὐκ ἐξ ὄντων ἐποίησεν αὐτὰ ὁ θεός, καὶ τὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος οὕτω γίνεται.

I ask that you, child, after looking into heaven and earth and seeing all things in them, know that God did not make them from existing matter/things, and the race of men came about in the same way.

Some observations that stand out: 1) God invented the beginning of all things, which has to include all matter.  2) This view of creation is the ground for believing that God will raise the dead and supply them again with spirit and life.  Thus the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo functions as the ground for the life in the new creation.  3) 7:28 expresses negatively what was already expressed positively in 7:23: God did not make them (the heavens and the earth) from existing things.

Conclusion

Although these texts are late compared to the rest of the OT, these texts depend on the doctrine of creation contained therein.  The Jews were certainly reading the text that we have, and concluding from it that God created all things and he did not create them from existing matter.  Their interpretation is not inspired, but it certainly enjoys a long tradition, and it is also the conclusion of the Author to the Hebrews in 11:3: Πίστει νοοῦμεν κατηρτίσθαι τοὺς αἰῶνας ῥήματι θεοῦ, εἰς τὸ μὴ ἐκ φαινομένων τὸ βλεπόμενον γεγονέναι and the Gospel of John 1:3: πάντα δι᾽ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν and other place in the NT.