Wed Aug 7 16:20:19 1996

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Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 16:18:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: "James R. Adair" 
To: tc-list@scholar.cc.emory.edu
Subject: Re: Is 1:25
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On Wed, 7 Aug 1996, Dave Washburn wrote:

> Tim McLay wrote in part:
> > So, my point was that we need to give equal weight to the witness of a
> > retroverted variant from a version as we give to MT when that retroverted
> > variant rests on a solid reconstruction.  
> 
> I just finished reviewing Sollamo's "Repetition of the Possessive 
> Pronoun in the Septuagint" for the online journal TC, and it seems to 
> me that in the majority of cases in that book she says we can't know 
> for sure whether the translator took some liberties or had a 
> different vorlage.  I was quite impressed with her tentativeness at 
> saying "this is what the translator's Hebrew text said;" in most 
> cases it appears to be pretty much of an open question (I make this 
> statement only regarding the specific passages in the Pentateuch that 
> she treated in the book, not as a sweeping generalization).

Dave's review will appear shortly on the virtual pages of TC.  In an
article in JNSL 20 (1994) entitled "A Methodology for Using the Versions
in the Textual Criticism of the Old Testament," I proposed one model for
dealing with the problem of retroverting Greek and Latin texts back into
Hebrew.  In brief, I think that calling something a "literal translation" 
is not particularly helpful, since the translation can be very literal in
some regards (e.g., word order), only somewhat literal in other ways
(e.g., consistent rendering of Hebrew "stem" by a particular Greek voice),
and quite free in still other ways (e.g., the translation of
conjunctions).  It is important to determine how consistent the translator
was in rendering lexical items, word classes, grammatical categories,
segmentation (rendering compound words in the source language with
compound words in the target language), and word order.  Only then can one
judge the probability of making a valid retroversion in any specific case. 
However, I agree with Tim that a reasonably sure retroversion should be
given as much credence in text-critical decisions as a reading in the MT. 
A careful study of the translation technique of a particular version in a
particular book will help in determining which retroversions are
"reasonably sure." 

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
---------------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu <-----------------

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