The Text of the Septuagint: Its Corruptions and Their Emendation

1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
The LXX is the largest body of writing in non-literary unaffected κοινή
Greek of the pre-Christian period. As such it was for long in an isolated
position which made comparison, judgement, and emendation difficult.
But now we are in possession of a vast amount of inscriptions, extending
throughout the whole range from the archaic dialects down to the
Byzantine period, and, moreover, of innumerable papyrus documents
which cover the centuries in which the LXX came into being, and
equally the Imperial centuries, during which repeated copying affected
its transmission. Thus we have abundant material for comparison, and
such comparison is greatly facilitated by the intensive study which has
been devoted to these ancient documents.
This could not have been achieved without the growth to maturity of
nineteenth-century comparative philology. From it there resulted the
Greek Grammars of G. Meyer (1880, 1897 3
) and K. Brugmann (1885,
1913 4
by A. Thumb, now superseded by E. Schwyzer's two volumes
1939 and 1950). Compared with them R. Kiihner's Grammar, rewritten
by F. Blass and B. Gerth (1890-1904 3
), retains its value mainly
as a rich and indispensable collection of material, whereas the philological
judgement of Blass, who was responsible for Phonetics, Accidence,
and Word-Formation, was already obsolete when his volumes
were published.
In 1885 K. Meisterhans first classified the grammatical evidence of
the Attic inscriptions on stone and vases. For the vases P. Kretschmer's
Die griechischen Vaseninschriften, 1894, came to be a classic, so that
Schwyzer, in the final edition of Meisterhans, 1900 3
, was able to confine
himself to the inscriptions. In 1898, under his original name, Schweizer,
he had produced that brilliant model of a grammatical monograph on a
locally limited circle of Hellenistic inscriptions (Grammatik der pergamenischen
Inschriften) which gave rise to many similar publications. In
the same decade W. Schmid had studied the Atticistic writers and shown
how to exploit their evidence both for what these artificial writers
wished to avoid and what they considered its Attic substitute. His
friend, E. Mayser, as early as 1898 and 1900 published two Gymnasialprogramme
on Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemäerzeit, which
have since developed into six stout indispensable volumes, partly