The Text of the Septuagint: Its Corruptions and Their Emendation

philology, his contribution would certainly have become still more
valuable. Blass, however, could not render him this indispensable
service. For though Blass had a most intimate acquaintance with the
Attic orators, as a grammarian he was wholly in the pre-philological
tradition. Thus he was able in his NT Grammar to treat at length the
subject of word-formation without an inkling that the same problems
of word-formation, applied to the whole extent of what they are now
realized to involve, would have exercised a revolutionary influence on
the part dealing with phonetics. So it will not suffice merely to append
to Thackeray's Grammar a chapter on word-formation, as he intended to
do himself, for a good deal of his chapter on orthography and phonetics
must be re-written on this new basis. Much of my first section on the
grammatical corruptions serves this purpose.
My task has been greatly simplified by the publication of Rahlfs'
Stuttgart text. Before this appeared, it would have been necessary to
write almost a complete treatise on orthography and phonetics, since
the mistakes which are found in B, and consequendy in the Cambridge
editions, cover all aspects of phonetics. Yet Rahlfs, in principle at least,
intended to give the correct spellings which had resulted from the fresh
insights of the last generation. It is true that he is still some distance
from achieving this ambitious aim, but on the whole the progress
marked by his edition is enormous. I shall have to begin where he
ended.
It still remains briefly to indicate the principles upon which the
following suggestions for the emendation of grammatical corruptions in
the LXX are based. They are clearly distinct from those by which Hort
and his followers were guided. Their idea that the peculiarities of
spelling in the Greek Bible with its wide range of variety represented
the original sufficiently faithfully to be trusted, was a mere assumption
and represented a return to views which, as one would have thought,
had been definitely made obsolete by R. Bentley and K. Lachmann.
Some readings, for instance, obviously bear the mark of Byzantine or
Imperial origin. These can be recognized without any difficulty and
must be removed. Roughly speaking, Crönert's collections enable us to
excise the traces of later scribal corruptions, and Mayser's give us an
idea of the spellings and formations which a Ptolemaic author is likely
to have used. 2
But we must go a step further. The preservation of many orthographical
inconsistencies in faithful allegiance to Β and its correctors,
apart from having precarious consequences (cf. pp. 7 f.), is at variance