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.
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