Trevor V. Evans, «Some Alleged Confusions in Translation from Hebrew to Greek», Vol. 83 (2002) 238-248
Two remarkable passages in the Greek translation of Numbers have recently been identified by Anssi Voitila. Both show a clear influence from Hebrew verbal forms on the translator’s choices of Greek verbal forms which overrides the semantic indicators of the broader context. Confused translations result. Are they isolated phenomena or representative of translators’ habits in general? Voitila argues for the latter interpretation. He seeks to demonstrate a number of additional instances in the Greek Pentateuch and sees here support for the theory of segmentation in translation technique, as developed by the Helsinki School. The present paper reassesses his examples and draws the opposite conclusion.
fact have been v. 28 e)n
tou/tw| gnw/sesqe o#ti ku/rioj a)pe/steile/n me for ynxl#$ hwhy-yk Nw(dt t)zb.
Thus, the difficulty of this passage appears to lie in the translator’s
misinterpretation of rqb as a verb. But it is
precisely the context (including the following context), not specific Hebrew
forms, which shapes the translation. The Greek version of v. 5 makes good sense
in its own terms if we render ‘and he talked to Kore and to his whole group,
saying "God observes and knows those who are his and who are holy, and he
has drawn them to himself, and those whom he has chosen for himself he has drawn
to himself"’.
The preceding treatment raises a variety of objections to Voitila’s various identifications of confused renderings. In a few cases our disagreements arise inevitably from conflicting ideas on the grammatical semantics of both the Greek and Hebrew verbal systems. Most often, however, the different interpretations revolve around evaluation of the Greek contexts. In my view Voitila’s response to the Greek version is too heavily dictated by the sense of the Hebrew original28. My general argument is that the thirteen passages discussed cannot be proved to contain confusions in verbal renderings, since they are effectively integrated within their Greek contexts. Voitila has addressed the problem of proof in relation to possible confusion between present and future time-frames 29. It can be a difficulty of similar proportions for trying to identify muddles between past and future and also between present and past.
III. Causes of Confusion in Numbers 9 and 10
We may now turn to the question of why the translator became confused in rendering the Num 9,16-23 and 10,11-25 passages, the oddities of which were introduced in §I above. For Voitila, as we have seen, these sequences are representative examples of a widespread phenomenon among the Pentateuchal translators regarding verbal renderings. He applies the theory of short segment translation as developed by Soisalon-Soininen, according to which LXX translators worked on only short units of Hebrew text at a time, without reference to the surrounding context. Anacoluthic or quasi-anacoluthic phenomena of various sorts (such as apodotic kai/) have previously been cited as proof. They allegedly ‘show that the translators were seldom conscious of the following context, which had not yet been translated, and were better informed on the part of the text they had just translated’30. Voitila, the first writer to seek evidence in the translation of tense forms, suggests the translators ‘were not always aware of the previous context either’31. Yet,