A Lexical Study of the Septuagint Version of the Pentateuch

CHAPTER VIII
LEXICAL EVIDENCE FOR
THE DATE OF THE
PENTATEUCH TEXT
The major importance in LXX studies of the problem of
establishing the text is well known. The great complexity of
the textual history of the LXX and subsequent recensions creates
difficulties which have occupied scholars' attention for several
generations and are even now only in the process of solution.
These difficulties have also given rise to two fundamentally
opposed types of approach to the study of the text. Kahle, on
the one hand, maintained the impossibility of recovering an
original LXX version, since in his view there arose, in the same
way as the Aramaic Targums, not one but a number of Greek trans­
lations , and the 'LXX' as we know it was the end product of a
long process of assimilating different versions and isolated
fragments of translation. 1
The opposite view, represented
notably by Rahlfs and other Göttingen editors and by Katz and
Orlinsky, is that an original, 'official', LXX version does lie
behind the Christian recensions and that by analysing the mass
of variants and isolating secondary recensions it is possible to
recover it.
Kahle's view now finds few supporters. Indeed, as Jellicoe
has put it, 'the very data adduced by Kahle have been increasingly
turned against him in vindication of the Lagardian
3
hypothesis'. In particular, Kahle's claim that the recently
discovered Dodekapropheton fragments support his position has
1. See especially The Cairo Geniza, 2 ed., Oxford, 1959.
2. See e.g. P. Katz, 'Septuagintal Studies in the Mid-Century',
in The Background of the NT and its Eschatology,ed. W.D. Davies
and D. Daube, Cambridge, 1956, 205f.; J.W. Wevers, 'Proto-
Septuagint Studies', in The Seed of Wisdom. Essays in honour of
T.j. Meek, ed. W.S. McCullough, Toronto, 1964, 58-77.
3. SMS 62.