Category: text criticism

N.T. Wright on learning Greek, and a review of A Reader’s Hebrew and Greek Bible by Zondervan

I met N.T. Wright briefly in January at a worship symposium and asked him how to improve my Greek. He said, “Read the text, read the text, read the text.”

He told me to really get the feel of the language. Don’t think of Greek just as a code for English; get into the Greek itself. I asked him about reading with a diglot, but he encouraged me to check the English translation only after reading an entire Greek paragraph, and then, only as necessary.

The same holds true with Hebrew. Read the text, read the text, read the text. Reading it out loud is even better, and better still is trying to speak it to others.

Zondervan has published what is to my knowledge the only “reader’s” edition of the Hebrew Bible. It’s a masterpiece. The font is clear, sized perfectly, and easy to read (see at right, and click to enlarge). It uses the Leningrad Codex. It has no textual apparatus (which could be a distraction in a “reader’s edition”), but instead footnotes rarely occurring vocabulary. Not counting proper nouns, editors Philip Brown and Bryan Smith footnote all words that occur less than 100 times in the Hebrew Bible. Here they give “glosses,” which give the reader the basic meaning of the word. Aramaic words that occur less than 25 times are listed in the footnotes in the page on which they occur.

For readers who blank on a word that occurs, say, 150 times in the Hebrew Bible, a glossary at the back will allow them to look up even additional words.

Brown used HALOT and BDB to write the glosses. The bottom of the page looks like this (click for larger):

Note in #s 2, 7, and 8 that there is also listed what the verb stem is for a given use. What makes this feature especially easy to use is the bolding of the words before their glosses.

The only thing to critique in the Hebrew reader’s edition is that proper nouns, which are to appear in grey font since they’re not footnoted, occasionally go missed. Brown has posted an errata list here, many of which have been fixed in recent printings.

For a preview of the Hebrew reader’s edition, see here (PDF) and here (PDF).

Zondervan’s Greek reader’s New Testament has not met with such universal acclaim. It’s a good resource to have on hand, to be sure, but in my view it’s not as well executed as the Hebrew reader’s Bible.

Rather than being based on the scholarly editions of the NA27 or UBS4, the text is “the eclectic text that underpins the Today’s New International Version.” The scholars who produced the TNIV, in other words, made different textual decisions in some instances than did the editors of the “Standard Text” of the NA27/UBS4. Where this is the case, a limited textual apparatus notes it. While this could be problematic for textual criticism, the text is not vastly different from the standard one, and is certainly fine for reading.

As with the Hebrew reader’s edition, the Greek reader’s Bible footnotes and explains words that occur less than 30 times in the Greek New Testament. One unfortunate decision is that, unlike the Hebrew, the Greek footnotes do not have the glossed word in bold. This makes navigating the footnotes more cumbersome:

Font is perhaps a personal preference. While Philip Brown did a magnificent job of typesetting the Hebrew, the Greek font leaves something to be desired. It’s not the easiest Greek font I’ve read. It’s not unreadable as fonts go, but it’s thin. I got used to it after a while, so it’s not unmanageable, but the font in the UBS Greek Reader’s New Testament is easier to read. The latter also puts the footnoted glosses into two columns, which makes referencing them quicker.

Not long ago Zondervan combined the Hebrew and the Greek into one mammoth, leather-bound Reader’s Hebrew and Greek Bible. The volume is large (but how could it not be?) and impressive. It’s constructed well. The binding is sewn (rejoice!), so it will last for a while.

This combination carries with it the great advantage that its user has both the Hebrew and the Greek Bibles under one cover. Now I just have to carry one geeky Bible to church rather than two! Huge benefit.

Another nice thing about this edition is that with Hebrew going from right to left and Greek from left to right, the Greek New Testament starts at the “front” and the Hebrew Bible starts at the “back,” just as both would be in their separate volumes.

The introduction to each half explains well how the text is laid out, the footnoting of the vocabulary, and so on. All the glory of Brown’s Hebrew edition is there, and the less-than-ideal Greek font is there in the Greek portion. One thing to add in appreciation of the Greek part, however, is that Old Testament quotations appear in bold, with their references listed at the bottom of the page. The eight pages of color maps between the two sections are a nice bonus, too.

The construction of the two Bibles combined is executed quite well. I’m happy to only have to take one original language Bible with me to church now.

Thanks to Zondervan for the review copy of A Reader’s Hebrew and Greek Bible. They provided me with one in the hopes of my reviewing it on my blog, but with no expectation as to the content of the review. Find Zondervan’s product page here.

BHS, the Göttingen Septuagint, and other critical editions: a basic orientation to what they are

Image source: http://www.usc.edu/ (click on image for more details)

Most students of the Hebrew Bible who read Hebrew know of the premier scholarly edition, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS, here on Amazon).  The BHS is now being updated by the BHQ (Q=Quinta), about which you can read more here. Both the BHS and BHQ are “diplomatic” editions of the text, which means that they reproduce a single “best” manuscript, the Leningrad Codex, in their cases. The footer in each page contains a critical apparatus, which lists variant readings from other manuscripts and versions that the editors have deemed to be of importance for getting even closer to the “original” (now often being called the “earliest attainable text”). In some cases, the editors may wish to show where another manuscript or version differs from the Leningrad Codex; the critical apparatus is where they do it.

There are two other similar projects underway for the Hebrew Bible. One is the Hebrew University Bible Project, also a diplomatic edition, but unlike BHS and BHQ, based on the Aleppo Codex. The HUB includes a more extensive critical apparatus than BHS, so that readers can see more textual variants.

The other scholarly edition of the Hebrew Bible is the Oxford Hebrew Bible Project, “a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible featuring a critical text and extensive text-critical introduction and commentary.” Though the BHQ contains commentary, too, the OHB differs in being an “eclectic” text, meaning that, as R.S. Hendel says (quoted in Tov),

The practical goal for the OHB is to approximate in its critical text the textual “archetype,” by which I mean the earliest inferable textual state.

Though the textual apparatuses of the BHS/BHQ and HUB can theoretically aid the reader in approximating the textual “archetype,” the text of the OHB offers that approximation rather than reproducing an actual manuscript (as the diplomatic editions do). Hence, the OHB is an “eclectic” edition. (So, too, are the two major scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament, the NA27 and UBS4.)

The Septuagint–the Greek translation of these Jewish Scriptures–has various scholarly editions, too.

On its Website the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies (IOSCS) has a great primer on the various editions of the Septuagint. Below, “OG” stands for “Old Greek.” They write:

The creation and propagation of a critical text of the LXX/OG has been a basic concern in modern scholarship. The two great text editions begun in the early 20th century are the Cambridge Septuagint and the Göttingen Septuagint, each with a “minor edition” (editio minor) and a “major edition” (editio maior). For Cambridge this means respectively H. B. Swete, The Old Testament in Greek (1909-1922) and the so-called “Larger Cambridge Septuagint” by A. E. Brooke, N. McLean, (and H. St. John Thackeray) (1906-). For Göttingen it denotes respectively Alfred Rahlfs’s Handausgabe (1935) and the “Larger Göttingen Septuagint” (1931-). Though Rahlfs (editio minor) can be called a semi-critical edition, the Göttingen Septuaginta (editio maior) presents a fully critical text, as described below.

Beginning Septuagint students are likely to own just “Rahlfs” (the Handausgabe mentioned above). But those who want to do more detailed text work with the Septuagint want more than the mini-apparatus in that edition.

Between Accordance (here) and Logos (here), nearly everything listed in the above quotation is available in electronic form. Accordance has Rahlfs’s Apparatus, parts of the larger Göttingen edition, and both the smaller (Swete) and most of what is currently available in the larger Cambridge Septuagint. Logos has all the volumes of Göttingen that have been completed to date.

There is more here about the scholarly versions of the Septuagint, including a volume-by-volume listing of both the Cambridge and Göttingen projects.

I have been fortunate to receive a review copy of BHS and BHQ Hebrew Bible editions from Accordance, as well as the existing volumes of the Göttingen Septuagint from Logos. I’ll be reviewing each in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: My review of BHS in Accordance is here. My BHQ review is here. Part 1 of a short primer on using the Göttingen Septuagint is here.

A wife for Jesus?

Front of papyrus fragment, Karen L. King, 2012

Did Jesus have a wife? Does it matter?

In the last two days I’ve seen about 50 Facebook status updates from friends and groups I follow, each with their own take on the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” papyrus that Harvard Professor Karen L. King recently announced. (Nerdy grammatical excursus: King has titled the papyrus with Jesus’s, but I follow Strunk and White and prefer Jesus’.)

The Harvard Divinity School press release is here. It begins,

Four words on a previously unknown papyrus fragment provide the first evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus had been married, Harvard Professor Karen King told the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies today.

The papyrus has been dated to the 4th century and is written in Coptic, the alphabet of which has overlap with the Greek alphabet. King has postulated, in fact, that the Coptic in this little fragment may have translated a Greek original.

The key quote from the papyrus is translated, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife….'” It then gets cut off. Go here for a full translation, as well as helpful Q&A with Professor King.

It seems to me there are two primary questions on folks’ minds right now. First, is this thing real or a fake? Second, did Jesus have a wife, or could he have?

In pursuit of these questions, I spoke with two Professors of Biblical Studies at Gordon College, a top Christian liberal arts school, located just north of Boston. Was Jesus married?

“Is there anything in the Gospels that would give us a hint he was married? I don’t think so,” noted Professor Marvin R. Wilson. “If he was married, how come he says to his beloved disciple at the cross, ‘Take my mother,’ not ‘Take my wife’?”

The significant woman in Jesus’ life, for whom he is looking out in his final hours, is his mother Mary, not a wife.

All the same, Wilson said, “It’s a good question. One who had no marriage would certainly have been the exception. We have an exception in Jeremiah, but that was a divinely commanded celibacy.”

Wilson noted, however, that the assertion that Jesus had a wife is still an argument from silence. “Certainly he had a wonderful ministry with women. We know the 4th century was a time of theological clarification (Council of Nicea) as well as turbulence. This Coptic text may have represented a small sect of aberrant Christians that had broken away from the larger–yet still emerging–traditional community.”

Is there much at stake in the question of whether or not Jesus had a wife?

“Certainly I don’t think any key issues of the Christian faith are at stake here. If Jesus had a self-imposed celibacy because of the work he was called to accomplish, that would make him unusual, but not unique.”

Professor Steven Hunt noted, “There’s so much we don’t know about it yet. It’s apparently a very small fragment.”

Regarding the authenticity of the papyrus, he added, “I’m perfectly willing to go with [Professor King] and say that it’s an authentic fragment of some document that’s now lost, but it’s probably speaking more to the nature of debates in the 3rd and 4th century about sex and marriage… it’s almost certainly not giving us accurate information about the historical Jesus.”

More interesting than the fragment itself, Hunt noted, is the question, “Would Christians be troubled to find out Jesus was married? The fact that many would, may really be quite suggestive, especially if their reaction was rooted in a negative attitude toward bodily existence in general and sexuality in particular.

“So, while there’s no good historical evidence that he was [married], from my perspective,” Hunt said, “it’s not really theologically problematic to suggest that he could have been. Since the Bible affirms the essential goodness of marriage and sexuality, what would be the problem with that?”

New scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament

The Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (Greek New Testament) releases in its 28th edition soon. Here is a description from the NA28 Website:

The long-awaited 28th edition of the Novum Testamentum Graece has now been published. Once again the editors thoroughly examined the critical apparatus and they introduced more than 30 textual changes in the Catholic Letters, reflecting recent comprehensive collations. With the intent to make this book more user-friendly, the editors also revised the introductions and provided more explanations in English. This concise edition of the Greek New Testament, which has now grown to 1,000 pages, will continue to play a leading role in academic teaching and scholarly exegesis.

Prof. Dr. Holgar Strutwolf speaks more about it here:

And check out this page for the digital Web-based version of the text, with apparatus and full manuscript information (via Evangelical Textual Criticism).

Review of Malachi (Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Text), part 2

In this post I both explain the jarring Malachi 2:3-4 as well as offer part 2 of my review of Malachi: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text by Terry W. Eddigner (Baylor University Press, 2012). Part 1 of the review is here.

Eddinger begins each passage with his own English translation, then analyzes the Hebrew text verse by verse. Any reader will appreciate that Eddinger prints the full Hebrew text of a given verse, then reprints the various clauses and words when commenting on them. (This eliminates the need to constantly refer to another book when using Malachi.) The Hebrew font is large, clear, and easy to read. It’s fully pointed and includes the Masoretic markings that one would find in the BHS. Though at first I had wished to see the English translation verse-by-verse alongside the Hebrew, Eddinger’s decision to have English translations primarly at the beginning of a passage does force the reader more into the Hebrew itself. For the intended audience of “a second-year Biblical Hebrew student” whose focus is translation, grammar, and syntax, this is a good thing.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Eddinger discusses textual variants throughout the handbook. He especially focuses on LXX/Septuagint variants that receive attention from the BHS editors. His conclusions regarding variants often end with something like, “X makes sense in context and so should be retained.” Thoroughgoing text critics may be left wanting more evaluation or interaction with variants than this (as I was at times)–but this is a short handbook. The fact that the author highlighted such variants at all was an added bonus, as far as I’m concerned.

Eddinger gives excellent attention to grammatical and syntactical detail–down to an assimilated dagesh lene (1:13)! He treats clauses as wholes–for example, highlighting word order and fronting for emphasis. And he treats individual words and parts of speech. He never loses the forest for the trees, and he gives the trees their due attention, too. In conjunction with the “key words” chart at the beginning of a section and the appendix of all Hebrew words in Malachi, Eddinger often notes rare Hebrew words as such, giving something of their context in the rest of the Hebrew Bible. He seems to have HALOT, TDOT, BDB, and other technical commentaries readily at hand as he comments on the text. On 1:14 he writes,

נוֹכֵל is a rare word in the Masoretic Text, occurring only four times (only here in Malachi) and means “one who acts cleverly” or “deceitfully” thus, “a cheat.”

That is the sort of insight I could come to expect on a regular basis by the end of the handbook. I loved it for that.

In terms of grammar, his discussion of individual words includes syntax and morphology, with every single word parsed / morphologically analyzed and often more detail than that. Eddinger uses the qatal and yiqtol verb classification system. This may not line up with what every Hebrew student has read regarding tense/aspect in their first-year Hebrew class, but it does (at least according to some) carry significant advantages over “perfect” and “imperfect.” (See a mini-primer on the Hebrew verbal system here.)

Regarding the verses from Malachi with which I led off part 1 of this review, Eddinger explains them well:

פֶרֶשׁ refers to the contents of the bowels of sacrificed animals, which the priests were to burn as refuse at a location away from the altar (Exod 29:14; Lev 4:11; 8:17). The phrase [feces upon your faces] is a double entendre in meaning as the act is an act of humiliation and contact with the ‘unclean’ matter makes the priests ‘unclean’ for their priestly duties.

(I allude more to Malachi 2:3 here.)

I’ve found Malachi to be an indispensable companion for reading through Malachi in Hebrew. I do have one minor critique and one larger one, though.

First, the English Bible versification at the end of Malachi gives the book four chapters; it is just three in the Hebrew text. Malachi nowhere notes this (although it does note regarding the last three verses that “some LXX texts have these verses reordered.” Again, this is a handbook on the Hebrew text, but a simple explanatory note here as to why English Bibles have four chapters in Malachi and Hebrew Bibles three would have been beneficial.

Second, I found myself often distracted (though I didn’t want to be) by the presence of typographical errors or comma splices or run-on sentences. I hope future printings can correct these, since they take away from an otherwise great book. There would be no benefit in listing typos here, but there were some 20 or more spots where either a word was misspelled, there was disagreement of number between verb and subject, punctuation was missing, and so on. Fortunately the vast majority of these are in English and so easy enough to spot. (I.e., the reader can trust the Hebrew here.) But the author’s English translation sections especially seemed to be in want of a closer edit. I do hope future printings or editions can make adjustments here; I imagine students of Malachi will want to make use of this book for years to come.

Eddinger in the end is a worthy guide through the Hebrew of Malachi. The prophets often (suddenly!) shifted pronouns or speakers or subjects in their writing. Who is talking now: God, the prophet, both, or the people? Eddinger coolly walks the reader through such grammatical challenges, and others besides.

While the obvious use of Malachi is as a reference work in which to look up a given passage, it reads well as a whole, too. I eagerly await future books in the Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Bible series.

Thank you to Baylor University Press for providing me a free copy, in exchange for an unbiased review (which ends up being a two-part review in this case–by my choice). You can find the Baylor product page for Malachi: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text here. It’s on Amazon here.

Review of Malachi (Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Text), part 1

“Because of you I will rebuke your descendants; I will smear on your faces the dung from your festival sacrifices, and you will be carried off with it. And you will know that I have sent you this warning so that my covenant with Levi may continue,” says the Lord Almighty.

–Malachi 2:3-4 (NIV)

Although Words on the Word has since taken fuller shape, two primary motivations in my beginning this blog were (a) to read and review good books and commentaries and (b) to interact with the original Biblical languages. This post offers a good opportunity to do both. Here I review Malachi: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text by Terry W. Eddigner (Baylor University Press, 2012).

The Hebrew prophet Malachi holds a significant place in the Hebrew Bible. Malachi is the last prophet of the Book of the Twelve (minor prophets) and the last book in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The last two verses of Malachi are Yahweh’s promise to send the prophet Elijah–a promise fulfilled, Christians believe, by John the Baptist. It sets up the beginning of the Gospels well.

The Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Bible series is a deliberately unique contribution to the field of commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. Okay, I suppose all commentary series intend to make unique contributions, but this one really does. It fills a void. Although the student of the Hebrew of the minor prophets is fortunate to perhaps be able to access Baker’s fine exegetical commentary (Malachi is in this volume), there is still a dearth in general of OT commentaries that comment extensively on the Hebrew text and grammar. In that sense I’ve been happy to see the careful attention this series gives to the Hebrew text. (Bonus: this book and some the others in the series that I’ve briefly glanced through give good treatment of discourse analysis.)

It’s important to note from the outset that Malachi (as a book in this series) is not a “full blown commentary.” It’s a “Handbook on the Hebrew Text,” which does “not attempt to replace the second step of consulting commentaries and secondary literature….” In keeping with this aim, Terry W. Eddinger gives the reader a short (five pages) introduction, yet it is plenty to be able to work well within the Hebrew text of Malachi. (And a bibliography with references throughout points readers in the direction of other Malachi-related literature.) Eddinger especially emphasizes the structure and “literary forms and devices” in Malachi. He views the structure of Malachi as consisting of a superscription, six oracles, and two appendices. Literarily, Eddinger says, Malachi is a prose and poetry hybrid, “perhaps the best example of such in the Hebrew Bible.”

There is a linguistic glossary at the back of the book, so when Eddinger says, “Hortatory style is the predominate literary form and is found in all but two verses,” the uninitiated reader can quickly determine that hortatory means “a word, clause, or sentence of direct dialogue.” This is perhaps an over-general or vague definition (the Jonah book in this series has, “Hortatory discourse is meant to exhort someone to act in a particular manner”), but I found that not to be the norm for the succinct and useful glossary.

One commendable feature is the “key words” chart at the beginning of each oracle. Malachi is the first book in this series to offer such a feature. Eddinger highlights important words that the reader will want to know as he or she makes his or her way through a pericope. Then–in what was my favorite part of this book–Eddinger has a chart at the back of the book that lists every Hebrew word in Malachi and verse references for all its occurrences. (Future printings or editions of this book could soup up this chart even more with English glosses of the Hebrew words, for the purposes of vocabulary acquisition.) Several times in making my way through Malachi and this handbook, I referred to the Hebrew word chart.  A second appendix lists all the times the “divine messenger formula” (e.g., אָמַר יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת) occurs in Malachi.

Eddinger begins each passage with his own English translation, then analyzes the Hebrew text verse by verse. In part 2 of this review (to post Monday), I’ll look at the guts of Eddinger’s handbook, that is, the verse-by-verse exposition, including his explanation of the verses that led off this post.

UPDATE: Part 2 of the review is here.

Thank you to Baylor University Press for providing me a free copy, in exchange for an unbiased review (which ends up being a two-part review in this case–by my choice). You can find the Baylor product page for Malachi: A Handbook on the Hebrew Text here. It’s on Amazon here.

What language did Jesus speak?

In my top 10 reasons why you need the Septuagint I conclude with the #1 reason being that the Gospel writers record Jesus’ words as occasionally matching the Old Greek of the Hebrew Bible against the Hebrew. This has become a new research interest of mine, and there is no lack of scholarly opinion on the issue! It’s hard to tell if there’s scholarly consensus. The conventional wisdom seems to be that Jesus spoke Aramaic and read from and recited Hebrew scrolls, but that’s certainly not a universal view, from what I can tell. For example, Stanley E. Porter suggests:

… Jesus not only had sufficient linguistic competence to converse with others in Greek but also even to teach in Greek during his ministry. 

…I believe that, first, it can be firmly established that Jesus did speak Greek and that we do indeed have some of his actual words. 

Porter explores the question “Did Jesus Ever Teach in Greek?” here (pdf). Thanks to the LXX Yahoo! group for the link.

Junia

My wife and I just gave birth to our third child, Junia. The name Junia comes from Romans 16:7–she was an “outstanding” apostle, as noted by the apostle Paul.

There is nothing else about Junia in the New Testament except for the rest of what Paul says about her in that verse, the full text of which is, “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.”

What we know about Junia from Paul is:

  • She was a fellow Jew;
  • She is mentioned alongside Andronicus, presumed to be her husband and ministry partner;
  • She was in prison with Paul at some point;
  • She and Andronicus were “outstanding among the apostles”;
  • She and Andronicus were “in Christ” before Paul was.

There is a little bit of literature about Junia. She is the source of a short but dense scholarly study by Eldon Jay Epp (the cover is pictured above). Epp explores the difference that comes up in some English translations–i.e., why Junia occasionally (but incorrectly, according to him) appears as a male “Junias.” There is also an investigative journalist’s take on Junia, exploring some of the church’s history as to how and why the apostle Junia has sometimes been understood in the text (incorrectly, she also says) as a male Junias.

Finally, Scot McKnight has just come out with a short Kindle-only monograph called Junia is Not Alone, which explores Junia’s contribution to the church, as well as other “overlooked” women in Scripture and church history. (The publisher’s description unfortunately calls the essay “fierce.” I’ve not yet read it, but all that I’ve read and heard from Scot is anything but fierce. (UPDATE: I review it here.) He is a gentle and caring Biblical scholar, not polemical. Unless they mean “that’s fierce” in a Project Runway sense.) He posts about his e-book here.

UPDATE: Read all my Junia posts here.