Forerunners and Heirs of Origen's Hexapla

This weekend I received in the mail my contributor's copy of a new book on the Hexapla. My mom happened to be visiting us in Alabama from Kentucky, and she saw me open the package and examine the volume, prompting her question, "What's a hexapla?" 

The hexapla is an ancient parallel Bible—the Jewish Scriptures, the Christian Old Testament—six columns in two different languages (Hebrew and Greek), compiled under the direction of Origen, the Greek Christian author who died in the mid-third century. The two Hebrew columns featured (1) the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and (2) Greek transliteration of the Hebrew text, while the other four columns contained four Greek translations of the text, those known as (3) Aquila, (4) Symmachus, (5) LXX, and (6) Theodotion. The Hexapla would have been enormous, and while portions of it were copied, there was probably no second copy of the whole thing, and it has largely been lost to time. Only fragments of portions of the Hexapla have been preserved. 

The new volume—blessedly open access—contains 12 studies by various scholars covering different aspects of the study of the Hexapla. Most of the papers were presented at a conference at Phoenix Seminary in November 2021, the inaugural conference of the Text & Canon Institute (TCI). The volume was edited by John Meade, my one-time co-author and the co-director with Peter Gurry of the TCI. 

There are two bonus studies in the volume: a brief paper by Felix Albrecht on "Origen's Fifth Column/Old Greek of Psalms" that was not presented at the conference; and a classic paper by Dominique Barthélemy on "Origène et le Texte de l'Ancien Testament," now translated into English by Peter Gentry. 

My contribution is called "The Hexapla in the Church According to Jerome," and the basic idea is to study what Jerome (the Latin scholar at the turn of the fifth century) said about the influence the Hexapla had on the church's Bible. Jerome's testimony is important both because he had actually seen the Hexapla (or so he says) and because he was the foremost biblical textual scholar of his day. He used Origen's text critical on the Old Testament as a model for his own work, though Jerome pushed beyond Origen in various ways. My essay contains two appendices: (1) a collection of all of Jerome's comments on the Hexapla (in Latin and English), along with discussion about the information about the Hexapla to be gleaned from Jerome; and (2) a translation of Jerome's four preserved prefaces to his translation of the LXX. I think this might be the first English translation published for some of these prefaces. 

Let me briefly explain what that second appendix contains. (And, again, the volume is open access, so go have a look yourself.) Jerome is most famous today as the chief translator of the Latin Vulgate, which for most of the Old Testament contains Jerome's translations of the Hebrew Bible into Latin. Jerome also published some Latin translations of the LXX—specifically, translations of Origen's new and improved recension of the LXX. We have the Latin text of these translations for the Psalms (that's the Gallican Psalter, which is in the Vulgate), Job, and Song of Songs, and we have prefaces to Jerome's translation of Greek Chronicles and the Greek Solomonic Books (not just Song of Songs, but also Proverbs and Ecclesiastes). So we know Jerome published these four translations of the LXX. Again, those are the Psalms, Chronicles, Solomonic books, and Job. We don't have all the translations, but we do have the prefaces. He may have produced more translations of the LXX, but we lack the evidence to say for sure. The second appendix of my paper in this volume contains an English translation of the four preserved prefaces of Jerome's translations of the LXX. 

Podcast About Scripture

For a couple of years now, I have presented (almost) weekly chapel lessons at my place of employment, Heritage Christian University. These are lessons are usually recorded, and the video is put up on YouTube (here), while the audio is made available as a podcast called About Scripture. You can find it on most podcast distributors. 

This past semester (Spring 2024) my series of chapel talks was on the book of Daniel. I try as best I can to make a devotional point in these lessons, and sometimes I achieve moderate success. I try to combine academic biblical studies with a theological and confessional approach to the text. My approach is decidedly non-dispensational; there's a lot in the text I take as intentionally figurative. 

These episodes on Daniel just dropped on the podcast maybe a day or two ago, so I thought it would be a good time to mention it on this blog. Earlier seasons of the podcast (i.e., earlier semesters of chapel talks) involved study of the character of Joseph in the book of Genesis and a study of what the Bible says about angels and demons. 

A new semester is about to begin (!), so I'm trying to figure out what topic will occupy me in my weekly chapels. 

Robert Kennedy (Sr.) and Edith Hamilton

At the gravesite for Robert F. Kennedy (wikipedia) in Arlington National Cemetery, one of the inscriptions (image, another one) quotes Kennedy quoting Aeschylus.

Aeschylus...wrote, "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

This quotation from Kennedy is from his famous, impromptu announcement of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the great speeches in American history, certainly one of the greatest more-or-less unplanned speeches in American history. See the Wikipedia entry on the speech, and watch it below. 

It's a remarkable speech that shows starkly the value of a humanities education. To be able to pull that quote from Aeschylus—well, that doesn't just happen. That takes preparation, not for this specific moment, but just for life in general. The ability to deliver such a speech in such a moment requires deep reflection on these issues years beforehand, in conversation with some of the great minds in world history. See this ten-minute video documentary on RFK's speech. 

Where does the quotation from Aeschylus come from? The basic answer is that the lines quoted by Kennedy come from the opening choral ode in the play Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy called The Oresteia, first performed in 458 BC. 

More specifically, Kennedy's quotation came from the translation of these lines by Edith Hamilton in her first published work, the popular book The Greek Way (1930), at the very end of her chapter on Aeschylus. 

I was reminded of Kennedy's affection for Hamilton a couple days ago when I was alerted to a new review of a recent biography of Hamilton. The biography (which I have not read) is Victoria Houseman, American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton (Princeton, 2023), and the review is by Robert L. Pounder at BMCR (here). (By the way, Pounder really liked the book.)

In his first paragraph, Pounder recounts a fleeting encounter he had with RFK in Athens in 1966. Pounder reports that the memory of this brief meeting is still fresh. 

Almost sixty years later I can still see the intense look in Kennedy’s eyes as he asked me my name, where I was studying, and whether I had read Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. When I responded that I had not read the Hamilton book, a collection of essays on mythological, literary, archaeological, philosophical, and historical topics first published in 1930, a cloud of disbelief passed over Kennedy’s face as his interest in me waned. It was as if I had committed heresy or disgraced myself shamefully. I was a big disappointment.

This wonderful anecdote provides more context for Kennedy's speech in April 1968. 

The translation of those lines by Aeschylus as quoted by Kennedy—and, by the way, Kennedy's memory failed him at one or two points, especially substituting "despair" for Hamilton's "despite"—was not the only translation produced by Edith Hamilton for those lines. She later produced a full translation of the Agamemnon, in which she offers this translation. 

Knowledge won through suffering.

Drop, drop—in our sleep, upon the heart

sorrow falls, memory’s pain, 

and to us, though against our very will,

even in our own despite,

comes wisdom

by the awful grace of God. (p. 170)

Kennedy was clearly relying on Hamilton's translation from The Greek Way and not from her full translation of the play. Hamilton herself had a deep affection for this passage from Agamemnon, as she highlights in his her aforementioned chapter on Aeschylus in her first work, as well as in the preface to the play in her translation of the full work (p. 161). Sarah Ruden has more recently translated the Agamemnon (here), and she also calls attention to this particular passage in her preface to her translation (p. 48). Her translation of the passage goes like this: 

Zeus puts us on the road

to mindfulness, Zeus decrees

we learn by suffering. 

In the heart is no sleep; there drips instead

pain that remembers wounds. And to unwilling 

minds circumspection comes. 

But this is the gods’ favor, I suppose, 

claiming by violence the place of awe, the helmsman’s bench.

(Agamemnon 176–183)

Finally, for reference, here is the Greek text and the prose translation by Herbert Weir Smyth in the LCL edition. I've also included in the English translation my attempt to determine which Greek words were being rendered by Smyth's English. 

τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ-

σαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος

θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. 

στάζει δ᾽ ἔν θ᾽ ὕπνῳ πρὸ καρδίας

μνησιπήμων πόνος· καὶ παρ᾽ ἄ-

κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. 

δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βί-

αιος σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων. 

Zeus, who (τὸν) leadeth (ὁδώσαντα) mortals (βροτοὺς) the way of understanding (φρονεῖν), Zeus, who (τὸν) hath stablished (θέντα) as a fixed ordinance (κυρίως ἔχειν) that “wisdom cometh by suffering” (πάθει μάθος) But even as trouble (πόνος), bringing memory of pain (μνησιπήμων), droppeth (στάζει) o’er the mind (πρὸ καρδίας) in sleep (ἔν ὕπνῳ), so to men in their despite (παρ᾽ ἄκοντας) cometh wisdom (ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν). With constraint (βίαιος), methinks (που), cometh the grace (χάρις) of the powers divine (δαιμόνων) enthroned (ἡμένων < ἧμαι) upon their awful seats (σέλμα σεμνὸν). (p. 19)

One more thing: Kennedy quotes "the Greeks" another time in his brief speech; on that quotation, see this article. 

LXX Canon: New JBL Article

I just received my offprint for a forthcoming article titled "Suddenly and Then Gradually: The Growth of the Septuagint and Its Canon," Journal of Biblical Literature 143 (2024): 303–22. Below I paste the abstract of the article. I'll update this post with the link to the online source for the article when it is published. [Update, July 6, 2024: see here.] And, in accordance with the SBL publishing agreement, after 18 months I'll post the offprint of the article at my academia.edu page. 

Readers will find on the first page that the article is dedicated to Jim Aitken, a renowned LXX scholar at Cambridge whose sudden death last year shocked and saddened me, along with many others (see here). I did not know Prof. Aitken well. During the Covid lockdowns, he offered a couple seminars via Zoom, and I joined in some of those sessions as an observer. He was an editor, along with Bruce Longenecker, of a forthcoming volume that features an essay by me on "The Use of the LXX in the Early Church." (The volume is called The Apocrypha and Septuagint, and it is to be volume 1 of this Zondervan series.) Besides these encounters, Prof. Aitken had a direct impact on this JBL article, as he was present at the session of the IOSCS in which I presented the paper in November 2022. He expressed interest in the paper and encouraged me to continue pursuing the subject, and he advised me on some ways to refine the argument. 

Let me also note how much I appreciate and admire the current JBL editor, Susan Hylen. In my experience publishing papers via biblical studies journals, I can say that she as an editor dedicated an unusual amount of time to my article, partly due to my own stubbornness. She patiently waited for me to realize the wisdom of her counsel. The review process for JBL is a long one, but one of the payoffs is getting to work with and learn from Prof. Hylen. 

By the way, this post sorta continues a series that I started years ago, on the LXX Canon, a renewal of that series after seven years. See here and follow the links back. Also, the subject of this article picks up on the topic of chapter four in my book on the LXX, a book that I seem to have never mentioned on this blog—not too surprising since this is my seventh post on this blog in four years or so (but the second in the past couple weeks!). 

Abstract:

The Septuagint defies easy definition. Biblical scholars routinely use the term to designate the Greek Old Testament, though they recognize that such language is similar to talking about “the English Bible” or “the German Bible”: there is no such thing, or rather there are many such things. This paper urges closer attention to the way ancient people described the translation, particularly its scope. While modern scholars often seem (tacitly or not) to assume that the Septuagint began as the Greek Torah and then expanded its borders to welcome new Jewish scriptural books as they continued to be translated into Greek, ancient authors did not depict the Septuagint in this way. All ancient Jewish sources that mention the translation restricted the Septuagint to the Pentateuch, whereas most patristic sources attributed a Greek version of the entire Hebrew Bible to the Seventy translators. The the most significant moment in the “growth of the Septuagint” is when it suddenly swelled from five books to perhaps a couple dozen or more. These ancient ideas on the extent of the Septuagint have implications for our notions of the Septuagint canon and for the use of this Greek version in the New Testament.