02.01 - CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE OF THE GREEK BIBLE.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE OF THE GREEK BIBLE.

Ever since the language of the Greek Bible became a subject of consideration, the most astonishing opinions have been held with regard to the sacred text.

There was a time when the Greek of the New Testament was looked upon as the genuinely classical; it was supposed that the Holy Spirit, using the Apostles merely as a pen, could not but clothe His thoughts in the most worthy garb. That time is past: the doctrine of verbal Inspiration, petrified almost into a dogma, crumbles more and more to pieces from day to day; and among the rubbish of the venerable ruins it is the human labours of the more pious past that are waiting, all intact, upon the overjoyed spectator. Whoever surrenders himself frankly to the impression which is made by the language of the early Christians, is fully assured that the historical connecting-points of New Testament Greek are not found in the period of the Epos and the Attic classical literature. Paul did not speak the language of the Homeric poems or of the tragedians and Demosthenes, any more than Luther that of the Nibelungen-Lied. But much still remains to be done before the influence of the idea of Inspiration upon the investigation of early Christian Greek is got rid of. Though, indeed, the former exaggerated estimate of its value no longer holds good, it yet reveals itself in the unobtrusive though widely-spread opinion that the phrase “the New Testament” represents, in the matter of language, a unity and a distinct entity; it is thought that the canonical writings should form a subject of linguistic investigation by themselves, and that it is possible within such a sphere to trace out the laws of a special “genius of language”. Thus, in theological commentaries, even with regard to expressions which have no special religious significance, we may find the observation that so and so are “New Testament” ἅπαξλεγόμενα,¹⁴⁰ and in a philological discussion of the linguistic relations of the Atticists we are told, with reference to some peculiar construction, that the like does not occur “in the New Testament”—a remark liable to misconception.¹⁴¹ Or again the meaning of a word in Acts is to be determined: the word occurs also elsewhere in the New Testament, but with a meaning that does not suit the passage in question nearly so well as one that is vouched for say in Galen. Would not the attempt to enrich the “New Testament” lexicon from Galen stir up the most vigorous opposition in those who hold that the “New Testament” language is materially and formally of a uniform and self-contained character? They would object—with the assertion that in the “New Testament” that word was used in such and such a sense, and, therefore, also in the Acts of the Apostles. In hundreds of similar short observations found in the literature, the methodological presupposition that “the NewTestament” is a philological department by itself, somewhat like Herodotus or Polybius, reveals itself in the same manner. The notion of the Canon is transferred to the language, and so there is fabricated a “sacred Greek” of Primitive Christianity.¹⁴²

It is only an extension of this presupposition when the “New Testament” Greek is placed in the larger connection of a “Biblical” Greek. “The New Testament” is written in the language of the Septuagint. In this likewise much-favoured dictum lies the double theory that the Seventy used an idiom peculiar to themselves and that the writers of the New Testament appropriated it. Were the theory limited to the vocabulary, it would be to some extent justifiable. But it is extended also to the syntax, and such peculiarities as the prepositional usage of Paul are unhesitatingly explained by what is alleged to be similar usage in the LXX. The theory indicated is a great power in exegesis, and that it possesses a certain plausibility is not to be denied. It is edifying and, what is more, it is convenient. But it is absurd. It mechanises the marvellous variety of the linguistic elements of the Greek Bible and cannot be established either by the psychology of language or by history. It increases the difficulty of understanding the language of biblical texts in the same degree as the doctrine of verbal Inspiration proved obstructive to the historic and religious estimate of Holy Scripture. It takes the literary products which have been gathered into the Canon, or into the two divisions of the Canon, and which arose in the most various circumstances, times and places, as forming one homogeneous magnitude, and pays no heed to the footprints which bear their silent testimony to the solemn march of the centuries. The author will illustrate the capabilities of this method by an analogy. If any one were to combine the Canon of Muratori, a fragment or two of the Itala, the chief works of Tertullian, the Confessions of Augustine, the Latin Inscriptions of the Roman Christians in the Catacombs and an old Latin translation of Josephus, into one great volume, and assert that here one had monuments of “the” Latin of the early Church, he would make the same error as the wanderers who follow the phantom of “the” biblical Greek. It cannot be disputed that there would be a certain linguistic unity in such a volume, but this unity would depend, not upon the fact that these writings were, each and all, “ecclesiastical,” but upon the valueless truism that they were, each and all, written in late-Latin. Similarly we cannot attribute all the appearances of linguistic unity in the Greek Bible to the accidental circumstance that the texts to which they belong stand side by side between the same two boards of the Canon. The unity rests solely on the historical circumstance that all these texts are late-Greek. The linguistic unity of the Greek Bible appears only against the background of classical, not of contemporary “profane,” Greek.

It is important, therefore, in the investigation of the Greek Bible, to free oneself first of all from such a methodological notion as the sacred exclusiveness of its texts. And in breaking through the principle, now become a dogma, of its linguistic seclusion and isolation, we must aspire towards a knowledge of its separate and heterogeneous elements, and investigate these upon their own historical bases.

We have to begin with the Greek Old Testament. The Seventy translated a Semitic text into their own language. This language was the Egypto-Alexandrian dialect. Our method of investigation is deduced from these two facts.

If we ignore the fact that the work in question is a translation, we thereby relinquish an important factor for the understanding of its inguistic character. The translation is in method very different from what we nowadays call such. We see the difference at once when we compare the Alexandrian theologians’ way of working with, say, the method which Weizsacker applied in his translation of the Epistles of Paul. Was it mere clumsiness, or was it reverence, which caused them to write as they often did? Who shall say? One thing is certain; in proportion as the idea of making the sacred book accessible in another language was at that time unheard-of, so helpless must the translators have felt had they been required to give some account of the correct method of turning Semitic into Greek. They worked in happy and ingenuous ignorance of the laws of Hermeneutics,¹⁴³ and what they accomplished in spite of all is amazing. Their chief difficulty lay, not in the lexical, but in the syntactical, conditions of the subject-matter. They frequently stumbled at the syntax of the Hebrew text; over the Hebrew, with its grave and stately step, they have, so to speak, thrown their light native garb, without being able to conceal the alien’s peculiar gait beneath its folds. So arose a written Semitic-Greek¹⁴⁴ which no one ever spoke, far less used for literary purposes, either before or after.¹⁴⁵ The supposition, that they had an easy task because the problem of the syntax was largely solved for them through a “Judaeo-Greek” already long in existence,¹⁴⁶ is hardly tenable. We have a whole series of other Jewish texts from Alexandria,¹⁴⁷ but do their idioms bear comparison even in the slightest with the peculiarities of the LXX, which arose quite incidentally?¹⁴⁸ So long as no one can point to the existence of actual products of an original Judaeo-Greek, we must be permitted to go on advocating the hypothesis, probable enough in itself, that it was never an actual living language at all. Thus the fact that the Alexandrian Old Testament is a translation is of fundamental importance for an all-round criticism of its syntax. Its “Hebraisms” permit of no conclusions being drawn from them in respect to the language actually spoken by the Hellenistic Jews of the period: they are no more than evidences of the complete disparity between Semitic and Greek syntax. It is another question, whether they may not have exercised an influence upon the speech of the readers of the next period: it is, of course, possible that the continually repeated reading of the written Judaeo-Greek may have operated upon and transformed the “feeling for language” of the later Jews and of the early Christians. In respect of certain lexical phenomena, this supposition may of course be made good without further trouble; the parts of the O.T. Apocrypha which were in Greek from the beginning, Philo, Josephus, Paul, the early Christian Epistle-writers, move all of them more or less in the range of the ethical and religious terms furnished by the LXX. It is also quite conceivable that some of the familiar formula and formulaic turns of expression found in the Psalms or the Law were borrowed from the one or the other, or again, that the occasional literary impressiveness is an intentional imitation of the austere and unfamiliar solemnity of that mode of speech which was deemed to be biblical. But any fundamental influence of the LXX upon the syntactic, that is to say, the logical, sense of a native of Asia Minor, or of the West, is improbable, and it is in the highest degree precarious to connect certain grammatical. phenomena in, say, Paul’s Epistles straightway with casual similarities in the translation of the O.T. A more exact investigation of Alexandrian Greek will, as has been already signified, yield the result that far more of the alleged Hebraisms of the LXX than one usually supposes are really phenomena of Egyptian, or of popular, Greek.¹⁴⁹ This brings us to the second point: the real language, spoken and written, of the Seventy Interpreters was the Egyptian Greek of the period of the Ptolemies. If, as translators, they had often, in the matter of syntax, to conceal or disguise this fact, the more spontaneously, in regard to their lexical work, could they do justice to the profuse variety of the Bible by drawing from the rich store of terms furnished by their highly-cultured environment. Their work is thus one of the most important documents of Egyptian Greek.¹⁵⁰ Conversely, its specifically Egyptian character can be rendered intelligible only by means of a comparison with all that we possess of the literary memorials of Hellenic Egypt from the time of the Ptolemies till about the time of Origen.¹⁵¹ Since F. W. Sturz¹⁵² began his studies in this subject there has passed nearly a century, which has disclosed an infinite number of new sources. Why, if the Inscriptions in Egyptian Greek, when systematically turned to account, could put new life into Septuagint research even then, the Papyrus discoveries have now put us in the position of being able to check the Egyptian dialect by document—so to speak—through hundreds of years. A large part of the Papyri, for us certainly the most valuable, comes from the Ptolemaic period itself; these venerable sheets are in the original of exactly the same age as the work of the Jewish translators¹⁵³ which has come down to us in late copies. When we contemplate these sheets, we are seized with a peculiar sense of their most delightful nearness to us—one might almost say, of historical reality raised from the dead. In this very way wrote the Seventy—the renowned, the unapproachable—on the same material, in the same characters, and in the same language! Over their work the history of twenty crowded centuries has passed: originating in the self-consciousness of Judaism at a time of such activity as has never been repeated, it was made to help Christianity to become a universal religion; it engaged the acuteness and the solicitude of early Christian Theology, and was to be found in libraries in which Homer and Cicero might have been sought for in vain; then, apparently, it was forgotten, but it continued still to control the many-tongued Christianity by means of its daughter-versions: mutilated, and no longer possessed of its original true form, it has come to us out of the past, and now proffers us so many enigmas and problems as to deter the approach not only of overweening ignorance but often of the diffidence of the ablest as well. Meanwhile the Papyrus documents of the same age remained in their tombs and beneath the rubbish ever being heaped upon them; but Our inquiring age has raised them up, and the information concerning the past which they give in return, is also helpful towards the understanding of the Greek Old Testament. They preserve for us glimpses into the highly-developed civilization of the Ptolemaic period: we come to know the stilted speech of the court, the technical terms of its industries, its agriculture and its jurisprudence; we see into the interior of the convent of Serapis, and into the family affairs which shrink from the gaze of history. We hear the talk of the people and the officials—unaffected because they had no thought of making literature. Petitions and rescripts, letters, accounts and receipts—of such things do the old documents actually consist; the historian of national deeds will disappointedly put them aside; to the investigator of the literature only do they present some fragments of authors of greater importance. But in spite of the apparent triviality of their contents at first sight, the Papyri are of the highest importance for the understanding of the language of the LXX,¹⁵⁴ simply because they are direct sources, because they show the same conditions of life which are recorded in the Bible and which, so to speak, have been translated into Egyptian Greek. Naturally, the obscure texts of the Papyri will often, in turn, receive illumination from the LXX; hence editors of intelligence have already begun to employ the LXX in this way, and the author is of opinion that good results may yet be obtained thereby. In some of the following entries he hopes, conversely, to have demonstrated the value of the Egyptian Papyri and Inscriptions for Septuagint research. It is really the pre-Christian sources which have been used;¹⁵⁵ but those of the early impenal period also will yet yield rich results. One fact observation appears to put beyond question, viz., the preference of the translators for the technical expressions of their surroundings. They, too, understood how to spoil the Egyptians. They were very ready to represent the technical (frequently also the general) terms of the Hebrew original by the technical terms in use in the Ptolemaic period.¹⁵⁶ In this way they sometimes not only Egyptianised the Bible, but, to speak from their own standpoint, modernised it. Many peculiarities from which it might even be inferred that a text different from our own lay before them, are explained, as the author thinks, by this striving to make themselves intelligible to the Egyptians. Such a striving is not of course justifiable from the modern translator’s point of view; the ancient scholars, who did not know the concept “historic,” worked altogether naïvely, and if, on that account, we cannot but pardon their obliteration of many historical and geographical particulars in their Bible, we may, as counterbalancing this, admire the skill which they brought to bear upon their wrongly-conceived task.¹⁵⁷ From such considerations arises the demand that no future lexicon to the LXX¹⁵⁸ shall content itself with the bringing forward of mere equations; in certain cases the Greek word chosen does not represent the Hebrew original at all, and it would be a serious mistake to suppose that the LXX everywhere used each particular word in the sense of its corresponding Hebrew. Very frequently the LXX did not translate the original at all, but made a substitution for it, and the actual meaning of the word substituted is, of course, to be ascertained only from Egyptian Greek. A lexicon to the LXX will thus be able to assert a claim to utility only if it informs us of what can be learned, with regard to each word, from Egyptian sources. In some places the original was no longer intelligible to the translators; we need only remember the instances in which they merely transcribed the Hebrew words—even when these were not proper names. But, in general, they knew Hebrew well, or had been well instructed in it. If then, by comparison of their translation with the original, there should be found a difference in meaning between any Hebrew word and its corresponding Greek, it should not be forthwith concluded that they did not understand it: it is exactly such cases that not seldom reveal to us the thoughtful diligence of these learned men.

What holds good of the investigation of the LXX in the narrower sense must also be taken into consideration in dealing with the other translations of Semitic originals into Greek. Peculiarities of syntax and of style should not in the first instance be referred to an alleged Judaeo-Greek of the translators, but rather to the character of the original. We must, in our linguistic criticism, apply this principle not only to many of the Old Testament Apocryphal writings, but also to the Synoptic Gospels, in so far, at least, as these contain elements which originally were thought and spoken in Aramaic.¹⁵⁹ So far as regards these Apocryphal books, the non-existence of the original renders the problem more difficult, but the investigator who approaches it by way of the LXX will be able to reconstruct the original of many passages with considerable certainty, and to provide himself, at least in some degree, with the accessories most required. The case is less favourable in regard to the Synoptic sayings of Jesus, as also those of His friends and His opponents, which belong to the very earliest instalment of the pre-Hellenistic Gospel-tradition. We know no particulars about the translation into Greek of those portions which were originally spoken and spread abroad in the Palestinian vernacular; we only know, as can be perceived from the threefold text itself, that “they interpreted as best they could”.¹⁶⁰ The author is unable to judge how far retranslation into Aramaic would enable us to understand the Semitisms which are more or less clearly perceived in the three texts, and suspects that the solution of the problem, precisely in the important small details of it, is rendered difficult by the present state of the text, in the same way as the confusion of the traditional text of many portions of the LXX hinders the knowledge of its Greek. But the work must be done: the veil, which for the Greek scholar rests over the Gospel sayings, can be, if not fully drawn aside, yet at least gently lifted, by the consecrated hand of the specialist.¹⁶¹ Till that is done we must guard against the illusion¹⁶² that an Antiochian or Ephesian Christian (even if, like Paul, he were a product of Judaism) ever really spoke as he may have translated the Logia-collection, blessed—and cramped—as he was by the timid consciousness of being permitted to convey the sacred words of the Son of God to the Greeks. Perhaps the same peculiarities which, so far as the LXX were concerned, arose naturally and unintentionally, may, in the translators of the Lord’s words, rest upon a conscious or unconscious liturgical feeling: their reading of the Bible had made them acquainted with the sound, solemn as of the days of old, of the language of prophet and psalmist; they made the Saviour speak as Jahweh spoke to the fathers, especially when the original invited to such a procedure. Doubtless they themselves spoke differently¹⁶³ and Paul also spoke differently,¹⁶⁴ but then the Saviour also was different from those that were His.

Among the biblical writings a clear distinction can be traced between those that are translations, or those portions that can be referred to a translation, and the other genus, viz., those in Greek from the first. The authors of these belonged to Alexandria, to Palestine, or to Asia Minor. Who will assert that those of them who were Jews (leaving out of account those who belonged to Palestine) each and all spoke Aramaic—to say nothing of Hebrew—as their native tongue? We may assume that a Semitic dialect was known among the Jews of Alexandria and Asia Minor, but this cannot be exalted into the principle of a full historical criticism of their language. It seems to the writer that their national connection with Judaism is made, too hastily, and with more imagination than judgment, to support the inference of a (so to speak) innate Semitic “feeling for language”. But the majority of the Hellenistic Jews of the Dispersion probably spoke Greek as their native tongue: those who spoke the sacred language of the fathers had only learned it later.¹⁶⁵ It is more probable that their Hebrew would be Graecised than that their Greek would be Hebraised. For why was the Greek Old Testament devised at all? Why, after the Alexandrian translation was looked upon as suspicious, were new Greek translations prepared? Why do we find Jewish Inscriptions in the Greek language,¹⁶⁶ even where the Jews lived quite by themselves, viz., in the Roman catacombs? The fact is, the Hellenistic Jews spoke Greek, prayed in Greek, sang psalms in Greek, wrote in Greek, and produced Greek literature; further, their best minds thought in Greek.¹⁶⁷ While we may then continue, in critically examining the Greek of a Palestinian writer, to give due weight to the influence of his Semitic “feeling for language,”—an influence, unfortunately, very difficult to test—the same procedure is not justified with regard to the others. How should the Semitic “spirit of language” have exercised influence over them? And how, first of all indeed, over those early Christian authors who may originally have been pagans? This “spirit” must be kept within its own sphere; the investigator of the Greek of Paul and of the New Testament epistle-writers must first of all exorcise it, if he would see his subject face to face. We must start from the philological environment in which, as a fact of history, we find these authors to be, and not from an improbable and, at best, indefinable, linguistic Traducianism. The materials from which we can draw the knowledge of that philological environment have been preserved in sufficient quantity. In regard to the vocabulary, the Alexandrian Bible stands in the first rank: it formed part of the environment of the people, irrespective of whether they wrote in Alexandria, Asia Minor or Europe, since it was the international book of edification for Hellenistic Judaism and for primitive Christianity. We must, of course, keep always before us the question whether the terms of the LXX, in so far as they were employed by those who came after, had not already undergone some change of meaning in their minds. Little as the lexicon of the LXX can be built up by merely giving the Greek words with their corresponding Hebrew originals, just as little can Jewish or early Christian expressions be looked upon as the equivalents of the same expressions as previously used by the LXX. Even in express quotations one must constantly reckon with the possibility that a new content has been poured into the old forms. The history of religious terms—and not of religious ones only—shows that they have always the tendency to become richer or poorer; in any case, to be constantly altering.¹⁶⁸ Take the term Spirit (Geist). Paul, Augustine, Luther, Servetus, the modern popular Rationalism: all of these apprehend it differently, and even the exegete who is well schooled in history, when he comes to describe the biblical thoughts about Spirit, finds it difficult to free himself from the philosophical ideas of his century. How differently must the Colossians, for example, have conceived of Angels, as compared with the travelling artisan who has grown up under the powerful influences of ecclesiastical artistic tradition, and who prays to his guardian angel! What changes has the idea of God undergone in the history of Christianity—from the grossest anthropomorphism to the most refined spiritualisation! One might write the history of religion as the history of religious terms, or, more correctly, one must apprehend the history of religious terms as being a chapter in the history of religion. In comparison with the powerful religious development recorded in the Hebrew Old Testament, the work of the Seventy presents quite a different phase: it does not close the religious history of Israel, but it stands at the beginning of that of Judaism, and the saying that the New Testament has its source in the Old is correct only if by the Old Testament one means the book as it was read and understood in the time of Jesus. The Greek Old Testament itself was no longer understood in the imperial period as it was in the Ptolemaic period, and, again, a pagan Christian in Rome naturally read it otherwise than a man like Paul. What the author means may be illustrated by reference to the Pauline idea of Faith. Whether Paul discovered it or not does not in the meantime concern us. At all events he imagined that it was contained in his Bible, and, considered outwardly, he was right. In reality, however, his idea of faith is altogether new: no one would think of identifying the πίστις of the LXX with the πίστις of Paul. Now the same alteration can be clearly perceived in other conceptions also; it must be considered as possible in all, at least in principle; and this possibility demands precise examination. Observe, for example, the terms Spirit, Flesh, Life, Death, Law, Works, Angel, Hell, Judgment, Sacrifice, Righteousness, Love. The lexicon of the Bible must also discuss the same problem in respect of expressions which are more colourless in a religious and ethical sense. The men of the New Testament resembled the Alexandrian translators in bringing with them, from their “profane” surroundings, the most varied extra-biblical elements of thought and speech.

When, then, we undertake to expound the early Christian writings, it is not sufficient to appeal to the LXX, or to the terms which the LXX may use in a sense peculiar to themselves: we must seek to become acquainted with the actual surroundings of the New Testament authors. In What other way would one undertake an exhaustive examination of these possible peculiar meanings? Should we confine ourselves to the LXX, or even to artificially petrified ideas of the LXX,—what were that but a concession to the myth of a “biblical” Greek? The early Christian writings, in fact, must be taken out of the narrow and not easily-illuminated cells of the Canon, and placed in the sunshine and under the blue sky of their native land and of their own time. There they will find companions in speech, perhaps also companions in thought. There they take their place in the vast phenomenon of the κοινή. But even this fact, in several aspects of it, must not be conceived of mechanically. One must neither imagine the κοινή to be a uniform whole, nor look upon the early Christian authors, all and sundry, as co-ordinate with a definite particular phenomenon like Polybius. In spite of all the consanguinity between those early Christian Greeks and the literary representatives of universal Greek, yet the former are not without their distinguishing characteristics, Certain elements in them of the popular dialect reveal the fact of their derivation from those healthy circles bf society to which the Gospel appealed: the victorious future of those obscure brotherhoods impressively announces itself in new technical terms, and the Apostles of the second and third generation employ the turns of expression, understood or not understood, used by Paul, that “great sculptor of language”.¹⁶⁹

It is thus likewise insufficient to appeal to the vocabulary and the grammar of the contemporary “profane” literature. This literature will doubtless afford the most instructive discoveries, but, when we compare it with the direct sources which are open to us, it is, so far as regards the language of the early Christian authors, only of secondary importance. These direct sources are the Inscriptions¹⁷⁰ of the imperial period. Just as we must set our printed Septuagint side by side with the Ptolemaic Papyri, so must we read the New Testament in the light of the opened folios of the Inscriptions. The classical authors reach us only in the traditional texts of an untrustworthy later period; their late codices cannot give us certain testimony with regard to any so-called matters of form, any more than the most venerable uncials of the New Testament can let us know how, say, the Letter to the Romans may have looked in its original form. If we are ever in this matter to reach certainty at all, then it is the Inscriptions and the Papyri which will give us the nearest approximation to the truth. Of course even they do not present us with unity in matters of form; but it would be something gained if the variety which they manifest throughout were at least to overthrow the orthodox confidence in the trustworthiness of the printed text of the New Testament, and place it among the “externals”. Here, too, must we do battle with a certain ingenuous acceptation of the idea of Inspiration. Just as formerly there were logically-minded individuals who held that the vowel-points in the Hebrew text were inspired, so even to-day there are those here and there who force the New Testament into the alleged rules of a uniform orthography. But by what authority—unless by the dictate of the Holy Spirit—will anyone support the notion that Paul, for instance, must have written the Greek form of the name David in exactly the same way as Mark or John the Divine? But the help which the Inscriptions afford in the correction of our printed texts, is not so important as the service they render towards the understanding of the language itself, It may be that their contents are often scanty; it may be that hundreds of stones, tiresomely repeating the same monotonous formula, have only the value of a single authority, yet, in their totality, these epigraphic remains furnish us with plenty of material—only, one should not expect too much of them, or too little. The author is not now thinking of the general historical contributions which they afford for the delineation of the period—such as we must make for Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Europe, if we would understand the biblical writings (though for that purpose nothing can be substituted for them); but rather of their value for the history of the language of the Greek Bible, and particularly of the New Testament, Those witnesses in stone come before us with exactly the same variety as to time and place as we have to take into account when dealing with these writings: the period of most of them, and the original locality of nearly all, can be determined with certainty. They afford us wholly trustworthy glimpses into certain sections of the sphere of ideas and of the store of words which belonged to certain definite regions, at a time when Christian (churches were taking their rise, and Christian books being written. Further, that the religious conceptions of the time may receive similar elucidation is a fact that we owe to the numerous sacred Inscriptions. In these, it may be observed that there existed, here and there, a terminology which was fixed, and which to some extent consisted of liturgical formulae. When, then, particular examples of this terminology are found not only in the early Christian authors, but in the LXX as well, the question must be asked: Do the Christian writers employ such and such an expression because they ark familiar with the Greek Bible, or because they are unaffectedly speaking the language of their neighbourhood? If we are dealing, e.g., with the Inscriptions of Asia Minor and the Christians of Asia Minor, the natural answer will be: Such expressions were known to any such Christian from his environment, before ever he read the LXX, and, when he met them again in that book, he had no feeling of having his store of words enlarged, but believed himself to be walking, so to speak, on known ground: since, happily for him, there was no Schleusner at his disposal, when he found those expressions in the LXX—where, in their connection, they were perhaps more pregnant in meaning, perhaps less so,—he read them with the eyes of an inhabitant of Asia Minor, and possibly emasculated them. For him they were moulds into which he poured, according to his own natural endowment, now good, now less valuable, metal. The mere use of LXX-words on the part of an inhabitant of Asia Minor is no guarantee that he is using the corresponding LXX-conceptions. Take as examples words like ἁγνός,ἱερός,δίκαιος,γνήσιος,ἀγαθός,εὐσέβεια,θρησκεία,ἀρχιερεύς,προφήτης,κύριος,θεός,ἄγγελος, κτίστης,σωτηρία,διαθήκη, ἔργον,αἰών. With regard to all these words, and many others, common to both the LXX and the Inscriptions of Asia Minor of the imperial period, it will be necessary to investigate how far the Christians of Asia Minor introduced definite local shades of meaning into their reading of the Septuagint, and, further, how far they unconsciously took these shades of meaning into account either in their own use of them or when they heard them uttered by the Apostles. The same holds good of such expressions as embody the specifically favourite conceptions of primitive Christianity, e.g., the titles of Christ, υἱὸςθεοῦ,ὁκύριοςἡμῶν and σωτήρ. The author has, with regard to the first of these, set forth in the following pages in more detail the reasons why we should not ignore the extra-biblical technical use of the expression,—a use which, in particular, is authenticated by the Inscriptions. A similar investigation with regard to the others could be easily carried out. Even if it could be established that “the” New Testament always employs these expressions in their original, pregnant, distinctively Christian sense, yet who will guarantee that hundreds of those who heard the apostolic preaching, or of the readersof the Epistles, did not understand the expressions in the faded formulaic sense, in regard to which they reflected as little or as much as when they read a votive Inscription in honour of the υἱὸςθεοῦ Augustus, or of another emperor who was described as ὁκύριοςἡμῶν, or of Apollo σωτήρ? By the time of the New Testament there had set in a process of mutual assimilation¹⁷¹ between the religious conceptions already current in Asia Minor on the one hand, and “biblical” and “Christian” elements on the other. Biblical expressions became secularised; heathen expressions gained ecclesiastical colouring, and the Inscriptions, as being the most impartial witnesses to the linguistic usage previous to New Testament times, are the sources which most readily permit us a tentative investigation of the process.

Other elements, too, of the language of certain portions of the New Testament cannot seldom be elucidated by parallels from the Inscriptions; likewise much of the so-called syntax. M. Frankel¹⁷² has indicated what an “extraordinary agreement in vocabulary and style” obtains between the Pergamenian Inscriptions of pre-Roman times and Polybiusit is proved, he thinks, that the latter, “almost entirely wanting in a distinctive style of his own,” has “assumed the richly but pedantically developed speech of the public offices of his time”. The Inscriptions of Asia Minor have, as the author thinks, a similar significance for the history of the language of the New Testament. It may be readily granted to the outsider that many of the observations which it is possible to take in this connection have, of, course, “only” a philological value; he who undertakes them knows that he is obeying not only the voice of science but also the behests of reverence towards the Book of Humanity.¹⁷³ The author has, here and there throughout the following pages, endeavoured to carry out in practice the ideas of method thus indicated. He would request that to these should be added the observations that lie scattered throughout the other parts of this book. If he makes a further request for indulgence, he would not omit to emphasise that he is not thereby accommodating himself to the well-worn literary habit the real purpose of which is only the captatiobenevolentiae. The peculiar nature of the subject-matter, which first attracted the author, is certainly calculated to engender the feeling of modesty, unless, indeed, the investigator has been possessed of that quality from the outset.

ἀγγαρεύω.

Herodotus and Xenophon speak of the Persian ἄγγαροι. The word is of Persian origin and denotes the royal couriers. From ἄγγαρος is formed the verb ἀγγαρεύω, which is used, Mark 15:21 = Matthew 27:32 and Matthew 5:41 (a saying of, the Lord), in the sense of to compel one to something. E. Hatch¹⁷⁴ finds the earliest application of the verb in a letter of Demetrius I. Soter to the high-priest Jonathan and the Jewish people: κελεύωδὲμηδὲἀγγαρεύεσθαιτὰἸουδαίων ὑποζύγια, Joseph. Antt. xiii. 2 3. The letter was ostensibly written shortly before the death of the king, and, if this were so, we should have to date the passage shortly before the year 150 B.C. But against this assumption is to be placed the consideration that 1Ma 10:25-45, which was the source for the statement of Josephus, and which also quotes the said letter verbally, knows nothing of the passage in question. Indeed it rather appears that Josephus altered the passage, in which the remission of taxes upon the animals is spoken of (ver. 33 καὶ πάντεςἀφιέτωσαντοὺςφόρουςκαὶτῶνκτηνῶναὐτῶν), so as to make it mean that they should not be forced into public work. Even if, following Grimm,¹⁷⁵ we consider it possible that the passage in Maccabees has the same purport as the paraphrase of Josephus, yet the word—and it is only the word which comes into consideration here—must be assigned to Josephus, and, therefore, can be made to establish nothing in regard to the second century B.C., but only in regard to the first A.D. But we find the verb in use at a time much earlier than Hatch admitted. The Comedian Menander († 290 B.C.) uses it in Sicyon. iv. (Meineke, p. 952). It is twice employed in Pap. Flind. Petr. xx.¹⁷⁶ (252 B.C.), both times in reference to a boat used for postal service: τοῦ ὑπάρχοντοςλέμβουἀγγαρευθέντος ὑπόσου and ἀγγαρεύσαςτὸνἈντικλέουςλέμβον. This application of the word is established for the Egyptian dialect¹⁷⁷ of Greek by the Inscription from the Temple of the Great Oasis (49 A.D.),¹⁷⁸ in which there is other linguistic material bearing on the Greek Bible, and to which Hatch has already called attention μηδὲνλαμβάνεινμηδὲἀγγαρεύεινεἰμήτινεςἐμὰδιπλώματα ἔχωσι. In view of these facts the usage of the verb in the Synoptists¹⁷⁹ and Josephus falls into a more distinct historical connection: the word, originally applied only to a Persian institution, had gained a more general sense as early as the third century B.C.¹⁸⁰ This sense, of course, was itself a technical one at first, as can be seen from the Papyrus and the Inscription as well as from Josephus, but the word must have become so familiar that the Evangelists could use it quite generally for to compel.

ἀδελφός. The employment of the name brother to designate the members of Christian communities is illustrated by the similar use, made known to us by the Papyri, of ἀδελφος, in the technical language of the Serapeum at Memphis. See the detailed treatment of it in A. Peyron,¹⁸¹ Leemans,¹⁸² Brunet de Presle,¹⁸³ and Kenyon.¹⁸⁴—ἀδελφός also occurs in the usage of religious associations of the imperial period as applied to the members, cf. Schurer, in the Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1897, p. 207 ff., and Cumont, Hypsistos, Brussels, 1897, p. 13.

ἀναστρέφομαι. The moral signification se gerere in 2 Corinthians 1:12, Ephesians 2:3, 1 Peter 1:17, 2 Peter 2:18, Hebrews 10:33, Hebrews 13:18, 1 Timothy 3:15, is illustrated by Grimm,¹⁸⁵needlessly, by the analogy of the Hebrew . It is found in the Inscription of Pergamus No. 224 A.¹⁸⁶ (middle of the second century B.C.), where it is said of some high official of the king ἐνπᾶσινκα[ιροῖςἀμέμπτωςκαὶἀδ]εῶςἀναστρεφόμενος.—Further examples in III. iii. 1. [↓] ἀναφάλαντος.

LXX Leviticus 13:41 = גִּבֵּחַforehead-bald, frequent in personal descriptions in the Papyri of 237, 230 and 225 B.C.;¹⁸⁷ cf. ἀναφαλάντωμα = גִּבֵּחַת, LXX oLeviticus 13:42-43 [MT Leviticus 13:42-43].

ἀναφέρω. In 1 Peter 2:14 it is said of Christ: ὃςτὰςἁμαρτίαςἡμῶναὐτὸςἀνήνεγκενἐντῷσώματιαὐτοῦἐπὶτὸξύον,ἵναταῖς ἁμαρτίαιςἀπογενόμενοιτῇδικαιοσυνῃζήσωμεν. Many commentators consider the expression ἀναφέρειντὰςἁμαρτίας to be a quotation of LXX Isaiah 53:12 [MT Isaiah 53:12] καὶαὐτὸςἁμαρτίαςπολλῶν ἀνήνεγκε and demand that it be understood in the same sense as in Isaiah:¹⁸⁸to bear sins, i.e., to suffer punishment for sins. But even granting that the whole section is pervaded by reminiscences of Isaiah 53:1-12, yet it is not scientifically justifiable to assert that the writer must have used ἀναφέρειν in the very sense of the original which he followed. The cases are not few in which phrases from the LXX, given word for word, and introduced by the solemn formulae of quotation, have acquired another sense from the particular new context into which they are brought. The early Christian authors do not quote with that precision as to form and substance which must needs be shown in our own scientific investigations; these “practical” exegetes, in their simple devoutness, have an ethical and religious purpose in their quotations, not a scientific one. Thus their references cannot properly be called quotations at all: sayings, in our pregnant use of that term, would be the preferable expression. The “practical” exegetes of every age have considered the same absolute freedom with regard to the letter as their natural privilege. In regard to our passage, the addition of ἐπὶ τὸξύλον makes it certain that, even if the allusion is to Isaiah, ἀναφέρειν cannot be explained by its possible¹⁸⁹ meaning in the Greek translation of the book. If to bear be made to mean to sufferpunishment, then the verb would require to be followed¹⁹⁰ by ἐπὶ τῷ ξύλῳ : ἐπὶcum acc. at once introduces the meaning to carry up to.

What then is meant by Christ bearing our sins in His body upto the tree? Attention is commonly called to the frequently occurring collocation ἀναφέρειντιἐπὶτὸθυσιαστήριον, and from this is deduced the idea that the death of Christ is an expiatory sacrifice. But this attempt at explanation breaks down¹⁹¹ when it is observed that it is certainly not said that Christ laid Himself upon the tree (as the altar); it is rather the ἁμαρτίαιἡμῶν that form the object of ἀναφέρειν, and it cannot be said of these that they were offered up. That would be at least a strange and unprecedented mode of expression. The simplest explanation will be this: when Christ bears up to the cross the sins of men, then men have their sins no more; the bearing up to is a taking away. The expression thus signifies quite generally that Christ took away our sins by His death: there is no suggestion whatever of the special ideas of substitution or sacrifice. This explanation, quite satisfactory in itself, appears to the author to admit of still further confirmation. In the contract Pap. Flind. Petr. xvi. 2¹⁹² (230 B.C.), the followingpassage occurs: περὶδὲὧνἀντιλέγωἀναφερομεν [ . . . . ] ὀφειλημάτων κριθήσομαι ἐπ’ Ἀσκληπιάδου. The editor restores the omission by ων εἰςἐμέ and so reads ἀναφερομένων εἰς ἐμέ. In this he is, in our opinion, certainly correct as to the main matter. No other completion of the participle is possible, and the connection with the following clauses requires that the ἀναφερόμεναὀφειλήματα should stand in relation to the “I” of ἀντιλέγω. It can hardly be determined whether precisely the preposition εἰς¹⁹³ be the proper restoration, but not much depends on that matter. In any case the sense of the passage is this: as to theὀφειλήματαἀναφερόμεναupon (or against) me, against which I protest, I shall let myself be judged by Asklepiades.¹⁹⁴ It is a priori probable that ἀναφέρειντὰὀφειλήματα is a forensic technical expression: he who imposes¹⁹⁵ the debts of another upon a third desires to free the former from the payment of the same. The Attic Orators¹⁹⁶ employ ἀναφέρεινἐπί, in exactly the same way: AEsch. 3, 215, τὰςἀπὸ τούτωναἰτίαςἀνοίσεινἐπ’ἐμέ ; Isocr. 5, 32, ἢνἀνενέγκῃςαὐτῶν τὰςπράξειςἐπὶτοὺςσοὺςπρογόνους. That the technical expression was known to the writer of the Epistle cannot of course be proved, but it is not improbable.¹⁹⁷ In that case his ἀναφέρειν would take on its local colour. The sins of men are laid upon the cross, as, in a court of law, a debt in money¹⁹⁸ is removed from one and laid upon another. Of course the expression must not be pressed: the writer intends merely to establish the fact that Christ in His death has removed the sins of men. The nerve of the striking image which he employs lies in the correlative idea that the sins of men lie no more upon them. The forensic metaphor in Colossians 2:14 is at least quite as bold, but is in perfect harmony with the above: Christ has taken the χειρόγραφον, drawn up against mankind, out of the way, nailing it to His cross.

ἀντιλήμπτωρ.¹⁹⁹

Frequent in the LXX, especially in the Psalms; also in Sirach 13:22, Judith 9:11; nearly always used of God as the Helper of the oppressed. Not hitherto authenticated in extra-biblical literature.²⁰⁰ The word is found in Pap. Lond. xxiii.²⁰¹ (158-157 B.C.), in a petition to the king and queen, in which the petitioner says that he finds his καταφυγή in them, and that they are his ἀντιλήμπτορες; cf. the similar conjunction of καταφυγή and ἀντιλήμπτωρ in LXX2 Kings 22:3 [MT 2 Samuel 22:3].

ἀντίλημψις.²⁰²

Frequent, in the LXX and the Apocryphal books, for Help. This meaning is not²⁰³ peculiar to “biblical” Greek, but occurs frequently in petitions to the Ptolemies: Pap. Par. 26²⁰⁴ (163-162 B.c.), Pap. Lond. xxiii.²⁰⁵ (158-157 B.C.), Pap. Par. 8²⁰⁶(131 B.C.), Pap. Lugd. A²⁰⁷ Ptolemaic period); always synonymous with βοήθεια. The last two passages yield the combination τυχεῖνἀντιλήμψεως²⁰⁸ which also occurs in 2Ma 15:7 and 3Ma. 2:33.—See further III. iii. 3 below. [↓] This meaning of the word (known also to Paul, 1 Corinthians 12:28), like that of ἀντιλήμπτωρ, was found by the LXX, as it appears, in the obsequious official language of the Ptolemaic period. One understands how they could, without the slightest difficulty, transfer such terms of the canting and covetous court speech to religious matters when one reads of the royal pair being addressed as ὑμᾶςτοὺςθεοὺςμεγίστους καὶἀντιλήμπτορας, Pap. Lond. xxiii.²⁰⁹ (158-157 B.C.); the worship of the monarch had emasculated the conception θεός, and thus ἀντιλήμπτωρ and ἀντίλημψις had already acquired a kind of religious nimbus.

ἀξίωμα. The LXX translate the words בַּקָשָׁה (Esther 5:3-8, Esther 7:22 f.), תּחׅנָּו (LXX Psalms 119:170 [MT Psalms 119:170]) and the Aramaic בּעוּ (Daniel 6:7), which all mean request, desire, by ἀξίωμα. The word occurs in [3]1Es 8:4 in the same sense. It is “very infrequent in this signification; the lexica cite it, in prose, only from Plutarch, Conviv. disput. 1 9 (p. 632 C)”²¹⁰. The Inscriptions confirm the accuracy of its usage in the LXX: fragment of a royal decree to the inhabitants of Hierocome (date?) from Tralles;²¹¹ a decree of the Abderites (before 146 B.C.) from Teos;²¹² Inscription of Pergamus No. 13 (soon after 263 B. C.).²¹³ “In all these examples the word signifies a request preferred before a higher tribunal, thus acquiring the sense of ‘petition’ or ‘memorial’”²¹⁴.

ἀπό. Of the construction 2Ma 14:30ἀπότοῦβελτίστουin the most honourable way, in which one might suspect an un-Greek turn of expression, many examples can be found in the Inscriptions, as also in Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch.²¹⁵ ἀρεταλογία.²¹⁶

O. F. Fritzsche²¹⁷ still writes Sir 36:19 (14 or 16 in other editions) as follows: πλῆσονΣιὼνἆραιτὰλόγιάσουκαὶἀπὸτῆςδόξηςσουτὸνλαόνσου. M. W. L. de Wette implies the same text by his rendering: Fill Zion with the praise of Thy promises, and Thy people with Thy glory; he takes²¹⁸ἆραι in the sense of laudibus extollers, celebrare, and thus the verbal translation would run: Fill Zion, in order to extol Thy declarations, and Thy people with Thy glory. But against this Fritzsche²¹⁹ makes the objection that ἆραι must stand here in the sense of נָשׂא, and this, again, should be taken as receive, obtain, although, indeed, such a meaning cannot be vouched for by any quite analogous example. But leaving aside the fact that it is not good procedure to illustrate an obscure transl ation by referring to a meaning of the possible original which cannot be authenticated, the confusion of the parallelismus membrorum which, with their reading, disfigures the verse, must be urged against de Wette and Fritzsche.²²⁰ What then is the authority for this reading? The beginning of the verse has been handed down in the three principal Codices in the following forms:—

אΑ πλησονσιωναρεταλογιασου,

B πλησονσιωναρεταλογιασσου, B^bπλησιονσιωναραιταλογιασου. The last reading, that of the second reviser of B, has thus become the standard, except that the πλῆσον of the others has been retained instead of the πλησίον which it gives. H. B. Swete²²¹ considers it probable that also the αρε of אA. is to be taken as equivalent to αραι ; in such case the current text would be supported by אA as well. But in reality the matter stands quite otherwise; it is B which gives the original text: πλῆσονΣιὼνἀρεταλογίαςσου,²²²אA is deduced from this by the hemigraphy of the σσ in αρεταλογιασσου, and B^b is a correction by the misunderstood אA. The unwillingness to recognise this true state of the case (Fritzsche says of B’s reading: sed hoc quidem hic nullo modo locum habere potest) and indeed, to go further back, the alteration²²³ which was made by the reviser of B, who misunderstood the text, are due to a misconception of what ἀρεταλογία meant. If we consult, e.g., Pape,²²⁴ under ἀρεταλογία, we find that its meaning is given as buffoonery (Possenreisserei). Now it is clear that God cannot be invited to fill Zion with “aretalogy” in this sense; then comes the too precipitate deduction that the text must read differently, instead of the question whether the lexicon may not perhaps be in need of a correction. Even Symmachus, LXX Psalms 29:6 [MT Psalms 30:6], could have answered the question: in that passage he renders the word רׅנָה (shouting for joy) of the original by ἀρεταλογία,²²⁵ while he always translates it elsewhere by εὐφημία. The equation of Symmachus, ἀρεταλογία = εὐφημία, which can be inferred from this, and the parallelism of the passage in Sirach, ἀρεταλογία || δόξα mutually explain and support each other, and force us to the assumption that both translators used ἀρεταλογίαsensu bono, i.e., of the glorifying of God. The assumption is so obvious as to require no further support; for, to argue from the analogies, it is indisputable that the word, the etymology of which is certainly clear enough, at first simply meant, as a matter of course, the speaking of the ἀρεταί, and only then received the bad secondary signification. As to the meaning of ἀρετή which is the basis of this usage, cf. the next article.

ἀρετή.²²⁶ The observations of Hatch²²⁷ upon this word have added nothing new to the article ἀρετή in Cremer, and have ignored what is there (as it seems to the author) established beyond doubt, viz., that the LXX, in rendering חוֹד, magnificence, splendour (Habakkuk 3:3 and Zechariah 6:13) and תְּהִלּה, glory, praise, by ἀρετή, are availing themselves of an already-existent linguistic usage.²²⁸ The meaning of ἀρεταλογία is readily deduced from this usage: the word signifies the same as is elsewhere expressed by means of the verbal constructions, LXX Isaiah 42:12τὰςἀρετὰςαὐτοῦ [θεοῦ] ἀναγγέλλειν, LXX Isaiah 43:21τὰςἀρετάςμου [θεοῦ] διηγεῖσθαι, 1 Peter 2:9τὰςἀρετὰς [θεοῦ] ἐξαγγέλειν. It seems to the author the most probable interpretation that the ἀρεταί of the last passage stands, as in the LXX, for laudes, seeing that the phrase looks like an allusion to LXX Isaiah 42:12, more clearly still to Isaiah 43:20 f.. One must nevertheless reckon with the possibility that the word is used here in a different sense, to which reference has recently been made by Sal. Reinach,²²⁹ and which no doubt many a reader of the above-cited passages from the LXX, not knowing the original, found in these phrases. Reinach, arguing from an Inscription from Asia Minor belonging to the imperial period, advocates the thesis²³⁰ that ἀρετή, even in pre-Christian usage, could mean miracle, effet surnaturel. He thinks that this is confirmed by a hitherto unobserved signification of the word ἀρεταλόγος, which, in several places, should not be interpreted in the usual bad sense of one who babbles about virtues, buffoon, etc., but rather as a technical designation of the interprete de miracles, exegete who occupied an official position in the personnel of certain sanctuaries.²³¹The author is unable to speak more particularly about the latter point, although it does perhaps cast a clearer light upon our ἀρεταλογία. He believes however that he can point to other passages in which the ἀρετή of God signifies, not the righteousness, nor yet the praise of God, but the manifestationof His power. Guided by the context, we must Iltranslate Joseph. Antt. xvii. 5.6, αὖθιςἐνεπαρῴνειτῇ ἀρετῇτοῦθείου: he sinned, as if intoxicated, against God’s manifestation of His power.²³² Still clearer is a passage from a hymn to Hermes, Pap. Lond. xlvi. 418 ff.²³³:—

ὄφρα τε μαντοσύνας ταῖς σαῖς ἀρεταῖσι λάβοιμι. The original has μαντοσυναις; the emendation μαντοσύνας (better than the alternative μαντοσύνης also given by Kenyon) seems to be established.²³⁴ It can only mean: that I may obtain the art of clairvoyance by the manifestations of Thy power, and this meaning allows the text to remain otherwise unaltered (after A. Dieterich). This sense of ἀρεταί seems to have been unknown to other two editors; but they, too, have indicated, by their conjectures, that the word cannot signify virtues. Wessely²³⁵ emends thus:—

ὄφρατεμαντοσύνηςτῆςσῆςμέροςἀντιλάβοιμι, and Herwerden²³⁶ writes :—

ὄφρατεμαντοσύνηνταῖςσαῖςἀρεταῖσι (? χαρίτεσσι) λάβοιμι.

We must in any case, in 2 Peter 1:3, reckon with this meaning of ἀρετή, still further examples of which could doubtless be found. A comparison of this passage with the Inscription which Reinach calls to his aid should exclude further doubt. This is the Inscription of Stratonicea in Caria, belonging to the earliest years of the imperial period,²³⁷ which will subsequently often engage our attention; the beginning of it is given in full further on, in the remarks on the Second Epistle of Peter, and the author has there expressed the supposition that the beginning of the Epistle is in part marked by the same solemn phrases of sacred emotion as are used in the epigraphic decree. Be it only remarked here that the θείαδύναμις is spoken of in both passages, and that ἀρετή, in the context of both, means marvel, or, if one prefers it, manifestation of power.²³⁸ ἀρχισωματοφύλαξ. This occurs in the LXX as the translation of keeper of the threshold (Esther 2:21) and body-guard (literally, keeper of the head, LXX 1 Samuel 28:2 [MT 1 Samuel 28:2]). The translation in the latter, passage is correct, although σωματοφύλαξ (Jdt 12:7, [3] 1Es 3:4) would have been sufficient. The title is Egyptianised in the rendering given in Esther:²³⁹ the ἀρχισωματοφύλαξ was originally an officer of high rank in the court of the Ptolemies—the head of the royal body-guard. But the title seems to have lost its primary meaning; it came to be applied to the occupants of various higher offices.²⁴⁰ Hence even the translation given in Esther is not incorrect. The title is known not only from Egyptian Inscriptions,²⁴¹ but also from Pap. Taur. i.²⁴² (third century B.C.), ii.²⁴³ (of the same period), xi.²⁴⁴ (of the same period), Pap. Loud. xvii.²⁴⁵ (162 B.C.), xxiii.²⁴⁶ (158-157 B.C.), Ep. Arist. (ed. M. Schmidt), p. 15 ^4f.; cf. Joseph. Antt. xii. 2².

ἄφεσις.

1. The LXX translate water-brooks, Joel 1:20, and rivers of water, Lamentations 3:47, by ἀφέσεις ὑδάτων, and channels of the sea, LXX 2 Kings 22:16 [MT 2 Samuel 22:16], by ἀφέσειςθαλάσσης. The last rendering is explained by the fact that the original presents the same word as Joel 1:20, אֲפִיקִים, which can mean either brooks or channels. But how are we to understand the strange²⁴⁷rendering of the word by ἀφέσεις ? ²⁴⁸ One might be tempted to think that the rendering has been influenced by aph,²⁴⁹ the initial syllable of the original, but this does not explain ἀφέσεις = פְּלָגִיםLamentations 3:47, and why is it that such influence is not perceived in any other passage? The explanation is given by the Egyptian idiom. We have in Pap. Flind. Petr. xxxvii.²⁵⁰ official reports from the Ptolemaic period concerning the irrigation. In these the technical expression for the releasing of the waters by opening the sluices is ἀφίημιτὸ ὑδωρ; the corresponding substantival phrase ἄφεσιςτοῦὕδατος is found in Pap. Flind. Petr. xiii. 2²⁵¹ 258 B.C.), but—and in this the technical meaning reveals itself most clearly—the genitive may also be omitted. ἄφεσις standing alone is intelligible to all, and we find it so used in several passages in the first mentioned Papyrus. When one thinks of the great importance to Egypt of the irrigation, it will be found readily conceivable that the particular incidents of it and their technical designations must have been matter of common knowledge. Canals²⁵² were to the Egyptian what brooks were to the Palestinian; the bursting forth of the Nile waters from the opened sluices made upon the former the same deep impression as did the roar of the first winter-brook upon the Canaanite peasants and shepherds. Thus the Egyptian translators of Lamentations 3:47 have rendered, by ἀφέσεις ὑδάτων, the streams of water breaking forth before the eyes of the people—not indeed verbally, but, on behalf of their own readers, by transferring into the Egyptian dialect, with most effective distinctness, the image that was so expressive for the Palestinians. Similarly the distress of the land in Joel 1:20 is made more vivid for the Egyptians by the picture of the carefully-collected water of the canals becoming dried up shortly after the opening of the sluices (ἐξηράνθησανἀφέσεις ὑδάτων), than it would be by speaking of dried-up brooks.²⁵³

2. The LXX translate יוֹבֵלLeviticus 25:15, used, elliptically for Jobel-year,²⁵⁴ by the substantive σημασίαsign, signal, a rendering altogether verbal, and one which does, not fail to mark the peculiarity of the original. But they translate Jobel-year in Leviticus 25:10-13 (apart from the fact that they do not supply the ellipsis that occurs here and there in the Hebrew passages) by ἐνιαυτὸς or ἔτοςἀφέσεωςσημασίας, signal-year of emancipation.²⁵⁵ The technical expression signal-year was made intelligible to non-Hebrew readers by the addition of ἀφέσεως, which comes from Leviticus 25:10: διαβοησετεἄφεσινἐπὶτῆςγῆς, where ἄφεσις = דְּרוֹר. From this, again, it is explained how Jobel-year in the parts of Leviticus 25:1-55 which follow the verse quoted, and in Leviticus 27:1-34, is rendered by ἔτος or ἐνιαυτὸςτῆςἀφέσεως, which is not a translation,²⁵⁶ but an “explicative paraphrase”.²⁵⁷ Similarly in these passages the elliptical Jobel (standing in connection with what goes before) is imitated in a manner not liable to be mistaken by an elliptical ἄφεσις.

Now this usage of the LXX is not to be explained as a mere mechanical imitation: it found a point of local connection in the legal conditions of the Ptolemaic period. Pap. Par. 63²⁵⁸ (165 B.C.) mentions, among various kinds of landed property, τὰτῶνἐνἀφέσεικαὶτὴνἱερὰν γῆν.²⁵⁹ Lumbroso²⁶⁰ explains the lands thus said to be ἐνἀφέσει as those which were exempted from the payment of taxes, and points to several passages on the Rosetta Stone ²⁶¹ (196 B.C.), in which the king is extolled as having expressly remitted certain taxes (εἰςτέλοςἀφῆκεν).²⁶² With this seems to be connected also Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. 1 (260-259 B.C.) : ²⁶³ὅτανἡἄφεσιςδοθῇ; cf. previously τὰἐκφόρια. The LXX might have translated דְּרוֹרLeviticus 25:10 (the rendering of which was determinative for the whole of their subsequent usage) by a different word, but their imitation of the technical Jobel was facilitated just by their choice of ἄφεσις, a technical word and one which was current in their locality.

βαστάζω. In Matthew 8:17 there is quoted, as the word of “the prophet Isaiah,” aims αὐτὸςτὰςἀσθενείαςἡμῶν ἔλαβενκαὶτὰςνόσους ἐβάστασεν. “The passage Isaiah 53:4 is cited according to the original, but not in the historical sense thereof , . . . . nor according to the special typical reference which any one looking back from the Saviour’s healing of diseases to that prophetic saying, might have perceived to be the intention of the latter (Meyer); but with a free interpretation of the language. The Evangelist, that is to say, clearly takes λαμβάνειν in the sense of take away, as the נָשָׂא of the original may also signify—though not in this passage. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether he also understood βαστάζειν (סָבַל) in the sense of bear hence (John 20:15), an impossible meaning for the Hebrew . . . , or whether he is not thinking rather of the trouble and pains which the Saviour’s acts of healing, continued till far on in the evening, cost Him.”²⁶⁴ H. Holtzmann,²⁶⁵ like Weiss, similarly identifies λαμβάνειν with נָשָׂא, and βαστάζειν with סָבַל. But, if the author’s judgment is correct, the case is just the opposite: Matthew has not only discarded the translation given by the LXX, but has also, in his rendering, transposed the two clauses of the Hebrew sentence;²⁶⁶ he does not translate He bore our diseases and took upon Himself our pains, but He took upon Himself our pains, and bore our diseases.²⁶⁷ In that case it will not be סָבַל but נָשָׂא, which is represented by βαστάζειν.²⁶⁸ The LXX also translate נָשָׂא, in 2 Kings 18:14 and Job 21:3, Cod. A, by βαστάζειν; similarly Aquila in the four extant passages where he uses βαστάζειν: Isaiah 40:11²⁶⁹Isaiah 53:11²⁷⁰Isaiah 66:12²⁷¹ and Jeremiah 10:5²⁷² Of these last passages, Isa. 53 deserves special attention, as it approximates in meaning to the quotation in Matthew: καὶτὰςἁμαρτίαςαὐτῶναὐτὸς βαστάσει. If we should not assume, with E. Bohl,²⁷³ that the quotation is taken from an already-existent version, then it must be said that Matthew, or his authority, in their independent rendering of the נָשָׂא of the original by βαστάζειν, were acting in the same way as do the LXX and the Jewish translator of the second century A.D. in other passages. It does not of course necessarily follow from the fact that the LXX, Matthew, and Aquila all use βαστάζειν as the analogue of נָשָׂא, thatthe βαστάζειν of Matthew 8:17 must have the same meaning as the נָשָׂא of the Hebrew original. One must rather, in regard to this passage, as indeed in regard to all translations whatever, consider the question whether the translator does not give a new shade of meaning to his text by the expression he chooses. It will be more correct procedure to ascertain the meaning of βαστάζειν in this verse of Matthew from the context in which the quotation occurs, than from the original meaning of נָשָׂא —however evident the correspondence βαστάζειν = נָשָׂא superficially regarded, may seem. And all the better, if the meaning bear away, required here by the context for βαστάζειν,²⁷⁴ is not absolutely foreign to נָשָׂא —in the sense, at least, which it has in other passages. The same favourable circumstance does not occur in connection with ἔλαβεν, for the signification take away, which the context demands, does not give the sense of סָבַל. In the religious language of early Christianity the terms bear and take away, differing from each other more or less distinctly, and often having sin as their object, play a great part; the Synonymic²⁷⁵ of this usage must raise for itself the problem of investigating words like αἴρω,ἐξαίρω,βαστάζω,λαμβάνω,ἀναλαμβάνω,φέρω,ἀναφέρω, ὑποφέρω in theirvarious shades of meaning.

βεβαίωσις.

“The seller was required, in general, i.e., unless the opposite was stipulated, to deliver to the buyer the thing sold ἀναμφισβήτητον, without dispute, and had to accept of the responsibility if claims should be raised to the thing by others. . . . If he [the buyer], however, had obtained from the seller the promise of guarantee” . . . he could, if claims to the thing were subsequently raised by others, “go back upon the seller (this was called ἀνάγεινεἰςπράτην) and summon him to confirm—as against the person now raising the claim—that he himself had bought from him the thing now claimed, i.e., he could summon him βεβαιῶσαι. If the seller refused to do this, then the buyer could bring against him an action βεβαιώσεως.”²⁷⁶ In the language of the Attic Process, βεβαίωσις confirmation had thus received the technical meaning of a definite obligation of the seller, which among the Romans was termed auctoritas or eviction :²⁷⁷ the seller did not only make over the thing to the buyer, but assumed the guarantee to defend the validity of the sale against any possible claims of a third party. Among the historians of the ancient Civil Process there exist differences of opinion²⁷⁸ regarding the details of the δίκηβεβαιώσεως that might possibly be raised by the buyer, but these are immaterial for the determination of the idea corresponding to the word βεβαίωσις. This technical expression found admission into Egypt in the Ptolemaic period. The Papyrus documents speak not only of the βεβαιωτής,²⁷⁹ the sale-surety, the auctor secundus of Roman law, but also of the βεβαίωσις itself: Pap. Taur. i.²⁸⁰ (2nd cent. B.C.), Pap. Par. 62²⁸¹ (2nd cent. B.C.)—twice in the latter passage, once in the combination as εἰςτὴνβεβαίωσιν ὑποθῆκαι.²⁸² How thoroughly the expression had become naturalised in Egypt is shown by the fact that we still find the βεβαίωσις in Papyrus documents belonging to a time which is separated from the Lagides by seven hundred years. It is, indeed, possible that in these, as well as already in the Ptolemaic documents, βεβαίωσις has no longer exactly the same specific meaning as it has in the more accurate terminology of the highly-polished juristic Greek of Attica:²⁸³ but the word is certainly used there also in the sense of guarantee, safe-guarding of a bargain: Pap. Par. 21 bis²⁸⁴ (592 A.D.), Pap. Jomard²⁸⁵ (592 A.D.), Pap. Par. 21²⁸⁶ (616 A.D.). In these the formula κατὰπᾶσανβεβαίωσιν occurs several times, and even the formula εἰςβεβαίωσιν comes before us again in Pap. Par. 20²⁸⁸ (600 A.D.), having thus²⁸⁹ maintained itself through more than seven hundred years. Reference has already been made by Lumbroso²⁸⁹ to the striking similarity of a passage in the LXX with this idiom of Egyptian Civil law. βεβαίωσις is found only once in the Alexandrian translation, Leviticus 25:23, but there in the characteristic formula εἰςβεβαίωσιν: καὶἡγῆοὐπραθήσεταιεἰςβεβαίωσιν,ἐμὴγάρἐστινἡγῆ. The translation is not a literal one, but one of great fineness and accuracy. The Israelites are but strangers and sojourners in the land; the ground, the soil, belongs to Jahweh—therefore it may not be sold absolutely : such is the bearing of the original לצְמִתֻת (properly unto annihilation, i.e.,completely, for ever). Looked at superficially, the εἰςβεβαίωσιν of the LXX is the exact opposite of the unto annihilation of the original;²⁹⁰ considered properly, it testifies to an excellent understanding of the text.²⁹¹ A sale εἰςβεβαίωσιν is a definitive, legally guaranteed sale: mere sojourners could not, of course, sell the land which they held only in tenure,—least of all εἰς βεβαίωσιν. The reading εἰςβεβαίωσιν²⁹² of Codices xi., 19, 29, and others, also of the Aldine, is a clumsy mistake of later copyists (occasioned in part by LXX Leviticus 21:4), who only spoiled the delicately-chosen expression of the LXX by schoolboy literalness; on the other hand, the in confirmtionem of the Vetus Latina²⁹³ is quite correct, while the renderings of Aquila,²⁹⁴εἰςπαγκτησίαν, and Symmachus,²⁹⁵εἰςἀλύτρωτον, though they miss the point proper, yet render the thought fairly well. The LXX have shown the same skill in the only other passage where this Hebrew word occurs, viz., Leviticus 25:30: κυρωθήσεταιἡοἰκίαἡοὖσαἐνπόλειτῇἐχούσῃτεῖχος βεβαίωςτῷκτησαμένῳαὐτήν. That they did not here make choice of the formula εἰςβεβαίωσιν, in spite of the similarity of the original, reveals a true understanding of the matter, for, as the phrase was primarily used only of the giving of a guarantee in concluding a bargain, it would not have answered in this passage. The Alexandrian Christian to whom we owe the λόγοςτῆςπαρακλήσεως in the New Testament, writes, in Hebrews 6:16, ἄνθρωποιγὰρκατὰτοῦμείζονοςὀμνύουσινκαὶπάσηςαὐτοῖς ἀντιλογίαςπέραςεἰςβεβαίωσινὁὅρκος. The context of the passage is permeated by juristic expressions—as is the Epistle to the Hebrews as a whole. That this Egyptian legal formula, persistent through hundreds of years, occurs here also, deserves our notice. We do not need to give it the same sharply-defined sense which it had in Attic jurisprudence (guarantee in regard to a sale):²⁹⁶ it must be interpreted more generally; at all events it is still a technical expression for a legal guarantee.²⁹⁷ The use of βεβαίωσις elsewhere in biblical literature likewise appears to the author to be influenced by the technical meaning of the word. In Wis 6:19, in the magnificent hymn²⁹⁸ upon wisdom, occurs the gnomic saying προσοχὴ δὲνόμωνβεβαίωσιςἀφθαρσίας ; here νόμων suggests very plainly the juristic conception of the word: he who keeps the laws of wisdom has the legal guarantee of incorruption; he need have no fear that his ἀφθαρσία will be disputed by another.

βεβαίωσις has been spoken of more definitely still by the man upon whose juristic terminology the jurist Johannes Ortwin Westenberg was able to write an important treatise²⁹⁹ a hundred and seventy years ago. Paul, in Php 1:7, says καθώςἐστινδίκαιονἐμοὶτοῦτοφρονεῖν ὑπὲρπάντων ὑμῶνδιὰ τὸ ἔχεινμεἐντῇκαρδίᾳ ὑμᾶς ἔντετοῖςδεσμοῖςμουκαὶἐντῇἀπολογίᾳκαὶβεβαιώσειτοῦεὐαγγελίου: he is indeed in bonds, but he is standing on his defence, and this defence before the court will be at the same time an evictio or convictio of the Gospel. To the forensic expressions ἐντοῖςδεσμοῖς, and ἐντῇἀπολογίᾳ, which, of course,³⁰⁰ are not to be understood as metaphorical, ἐνβεβαιώσειτοῦεὐαγγελίου corresponds very well, and forms at the same time the final step of a very effective climax. That the Apostle was not ignorant of the older Attic signification of βεβαίωσις is rendered probable by a striking correspondence between the mode of expression he uses in other passages and the terms applied to the legal ideas which are demonstrably connoted by βεβαίωσις. Observe how Paul brackets together the conceptions ἀρραβών and βεβαιοῦν. Harpocration, the lexicographer of the Attic Orators, who lived in the Imperial period, writes in his lexicon, subβεβαίωσις:³⁰¹ἐνίοτεκαὶἀρραβῶνοςμονοςδοθέντοςεἶτα ἀμφισβητήσαντοςτοῦπεπρακότοςἐλάγχανιτὴντῆςβεβαιώσεωςδίκηνὁτὸνἀρραβῶναδοὺςτῷλαβόντι. Similarly in the ancient Λέξειςῥητορικαί, one of the Lexica Segueriana, edited by Imm. Bekker,³⁰²subβεβαιώσεως: δίκηςὄνομάἐστιν,ἣνἐδικάζοντοοἱὠνησάμενοικατὰτῶνἀποδομένων,ὅτεἕτερος ἀμφισβητοῖτοῦπραθέντος,ἀξιοῦντεςβεβαιοῦναὐτοῖςτὸπραθέν˙ἐνίοτεδὲκαὶἀρραβῶνοςμόνουδοθέντος. ἐπὶτούτο οὖνἐλάγχανοντὴντῆςβεβαιώσεωςδίκηνοἱδόντεςτὸν ἀρραβῶνατοῖςλαβοῦσιν,ἵναβεβαιωθῇ ὑπὲροὗὁἀρραβὼνἐδόθη. Now, although doubts do exist ³⁰³ about the possibility of basing a δίκηβεβαιώσεως upon the seller’s acceptance of the earnest-money, still thus much is clear, viz., that, in technical usage, ἀρραβών and βεβαιοῦν stand in an essential relation to each other.³⁰⁴ It is exactly in this way that Paul speaks—his indestructible faith representing the relation of God to believers under the image of a legally indisputable relation, 2 Corinthians 1:21 f. : ὁδὲβεβαιῶνἡμᾶςσὺνὑμῖνεἰςΧριστὸνκαὶχρίσαςἡμᾶςθεός,ὁκαὶσφραγισάμενος ἡμᾶςκαὶδοὺςτὸνἀρραβῶνατοῦπνεύματοςἐνταῖςκαρδίαιςἡμῶν. Apt as is the metaphor itself, intelligible as it would be in this verse and in 2 Corinthians 5:5, particularly to the Christians of that great commercial centre, it is in form equally apt. The Apostle, of course, could have chosen another verb³⁰⁵ equally well, without rendering the image unintelligible, but the technical word makes the image still more effective. A patristic remark upon the passage in question³⁰⁶ shows us, further, how a Greek reader could fully appreciate the specific nature of the metaphor: ὁγὰρἀρραβὼνεἴωθεβεβαιοῦντὸπᾶνσύνταγμα.

Hence we shall not err in construing βεβαιόω³⁰⁷ and βέβαιος,³⁰⁸ even where they occur elsewhere in the writings of Paul and his circle, from this standpoint, and especially as these words sometimes occur among other juristic expressions. By our taking confirm and sure in the sense of legally guaranteed security, the statements in which they occur gain in decisiveness and force. Symmachus ³⁰⁹ uses βεβαίωσις once: LXXPsalms 89:25 [MT Psalms 89:25] for אֱמוּנָה (LXX ἀλήθεια).

γένημα.³¹⁰

Very common in the LXX for the produce of the land; so also in the Synoptists: its first occurrence not in Polybius;³¹¹ it is already found in connection with Egypt in Pap. Flind. Petr. i. xvi. 2³¹² (230 B.C.): τὰγενήματατῶν ὑπαρχόντωνμοι παραδείσων, and in several other passages of the same age.³¹³ γογγύζω.

Very familiar in the LXX, also in Paul,³¹⁴ Synopt., John; authenticated in the subsequent extra-biblical literature only by Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus;⁴ but already used in the sense of murmur in Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. ix. 3³¹⁵ (241-239 B.C.);

καὶτὸπλήρωμα (men) γογγύζειφάμενοιἀδικεῖσθαι.

γραμματεύς. In the O.T. the person designated scribe ( סֹפֵרand שׂטֵר) is generally the official. The LXX translate verbally—γραμματεύς—even in those passages where scribe seems to be used in the military sense, i.e., of officers. One might conjecture that in this they were slavishly subjecting themselves to the original, the employment of γραμματεύς in the military sense being foreign to ordinary Greek usage. But their, rendering is altogether correct from their own point of view: in Egyptian Greek γραμματεύς is used as the designation of an officer. In Pap. Par. 63³¹⁶ (165 B.c.) we find the γραμματεὺςτῶνμαχίμων, and in Pap. Lond. xxiii.³¹⁷ (158-157 B.c,) the γραμματεὺςτῶνδυνάμεων. This technical meaning³¹⁸ of the word was familiar to the Alexandrian translators. So, e.g., 2 Chronicles 26:11, where the γραμματεύς stands with the διάδοχος ;³¹⁹cf. also LXX Jer. 44꞉15 [MT Jeremiah 37:15]³²⁰—if Jonathan the scribe, in this passage, is an officer. Similarly Judges 5:14³²¹ The following passages, again, are of great interest as showing indubitably that the translators employed the technical term as they had learned its use in their locality. The Hebrew of 2 Kings 25:19 is almost verbally repeated in Jeremiah 52:25, as is 2 Kings 24:18, 2 Kings 25:30 as a whole in Jeremiah 52:1-34. The Book of Kings speaks here of the scribe, the captain of the host.³²² But in our text of Jeremiah we read (the article is wanting before סֹפֵר) the scribe of the captain of the host. The LXX translate the first passage by τὸνγραμματέα³²³τοῦἄρχοντοςτῆςδυνάμεως, as if they had had our text of Jeremiah before them; Jeremiah 52:25, on the other hand, they render by τὸνγραμματέατῶνδυνάμεων, which agrees in sense with the traditional text of 2 Kings 25:19. Now, without having the least desire to decide the question as to the meaning of סֹפֵר in the Hebrew O.T., or as to the original text of the above two passages, the author yet thinks it plain that the LXX believed that they had before them, in Jeremiah 52:25,³²⁴ the γραμματεὺςτῶνδυνάμεων now known to us from the London Papyrus, not some sort of scribe of the commander-in-chief (Generalcommando).³²⁵ The choice of the plural δυνάμεων, which was not forced upon them by the singular of the original, is to be explained only by the fact that they were adopting a long-established and fixed connection.

Isaiah 36:22 is a most instructive case. Our Hebrew text has simply a סֹפֵר, there, without any addition; the LXX however, transfer him to the army with the rank of the γραμματεὺςτῆςδυνάμεως: they understood scribe to denote a military rank.³²⁶ The military meaning of γραμματεύς has been preserved in 1Ma 5:42; ³²⁷ probably also in Symmachus Judges 5:14,³²⁸ LXX Jer. 44꞉15 [MT Jeremiah 37:15]³²⁹ γράφω.

“In the sphere of Divine Revelation the documents belonging to it assume this³³⁰ regulative position, and the γέγραπται always implies an appeal to the incontestable regulative authority of the dictum quoted.”³³¹ “The New Testament usage of ἡγραφή . . . implies the same idea as is stamped upon the usage of the γέγραπται, viz., a reference to the regulative character of the particular document as a whole, which character gives it a unique position, in virtue of which ἡγραφή is always spoken of as an authority.”³³² In this explanation of terms Cremer has, without doubt, accurately defined the bases not only of “New Testament” usage but of the general idea that regulative authority belongs to scripture. Should the question be asked, whence it comes that the conception of Holy Scripture has been bound up with the idea of its absolute authority, the answer can only be a reference to the juristic idea of scripture, which was found ready to hand and was applied to the sacred documents. A religion of documents—considered even historically—is a religion of law. It is a particularly instructive, though commonly overlooked, fact in connection with this juristic conception of the biblical documents that the LXX translate תּוֹרָה by νόμος in the great majority of passages, although the two ideas are not by any means identical; and that they have thus made a law out of a teaching.³³³ It is indeed probable that in this they had been already influenced by the mechanical conception of Scripture of early Rabbinism, but, in regard to form, they certainly came under the sway of the Greek juristic language. Cremer has given a series of examples from older Greek of this use of γράφειν in legislative work,³³⁴ and uses these to explain the frequently-occurring “biblical” γέγραπται. This formula of quotation is, however, not “biblical” only, but is found also in juristic Papyrus documents of the Ptolemaic period and in Inscriptions: Pap. Rind. Petr. xxx. a;³³⁵ further—and this is most instructive for the frequent καθὼςγέγραπται of the biblical authors³³⁶—in the formula καθότιγέγραπται: Pap. Par. 13³³⁷ (probably 157 B.C.); Pap. Lugd. 0³³⁸(89 B.C.); Inscription of Mylasa in Caria, Waddington, iii. 2, No. 416 = CIG. ii., No. 2693 e (beginning of the imperial period);³³⁹ Inscription from the neighbourhood of Mylasa, Waddington, iii. 2, No. 483 (imperial period?): in spite of mutilation the formula is still legible in four passages here;—and in the formula καθὰγέγραπται, Pap. Par. 7 ³⁴⁰ (2nd or 1st cent. B.C.), cf. κατ(τ)τάπερ . . .γέγραπ[τοι] in line 50 f. of the architectural Inscription of Tegea (ca. 3rd cent. B.C.)³⁴¹—in all of which reference is made to a definite obligatory clause of the document quoted.³⁴² Further examples in III. iii. 5 below. That the juristic conception of sacred writings was familiar to the Alexandrian translators is directly shown by Ep. Arist. (ed. M. Schmidt), p. 68^1ff. : when the translation of the Bible into Greek was finished, then, καθὼς ἔθοςαὐτοῖς ἐστινεἴτιςδιασκευάσειπροστιθεὶςἢμεταφέρωντιτὸσύνολοντῶνγεγραμμένωνἢποιούμενοςἀφαίρεσιν,³⁴³ he was threatened with a curse. According to this the Greek Bible was placed under the legal point of view which forbade the altering of a document; this principle is not universal in Greek law,³⁴⁴ but the Apostle Paul gives evidence for it, when, in Galatians 3:15, arguing e concessis, he says that a διαθήκηκεκυρωμένη can neither be made void³⁴⁵ nor have anything added to it. Speaking from the same point of view, the advocate Tertullian—to give another very clear example of the further development of the juristic conception of biblical authority—describes, adv.Mark 4:2 and elsewhere, the individual portions of the New Testament as instruments, i.e., as legally valid documents.³⁴⁶

διάδοχος and διαδεχόμενος.

διάδοχος occurs in the LXX only in 1 Chronicles 18:17, as the equivalent of לְיַד, 2 Chronicles 26:11 as the translation of מִשְׁנֶה, and 2 Chronicles 28:7 as the translation of שַׂר. In none of these three passages is διάδοχος, in its ordinary sense of successor, an accurate rendering of the original. It has therefore been asserted by Schleusner³⁴⁷ that διάδοχος corresponds to the Hebrew words, and thus means something like proximus a rege; he refers to Philo, de Josepho, M. pp. 58 and 64. Similarly Grimm,³⁴⁸ in reference to 2Ma 4:29, has, on account of the context, rejected the meaning successor for that passage and 2Ma 14:26; cf. also 2Ma 4:31ιαδεχόμενος. This supposition is confirmed by Pap. Taur. (1. 15 and 6)³⁴⁹ (2nd cent. B.C.), in which οἱπερὶαὐλὴνδιάδοχοι and οἱδιάδοχοι are higher officials at the court of the Ptolemies;³⁵⁰διάδοχος is thus an Egyptian court-title.³⁵¹ The Alexandrian translators of the Book of Chronicles and the Alexandrian Philo used the word in this technical sense, and the second Book of Maccabees (compiled from Jason of Cyrene) also manifests a knowledge of the usage.

Allied to the technical meaning of διάδοχος is that of the participle διάδοχος,³⁵²2 Chronicles 31:12 and Esther 10:3, as the translation of the מִשְׁנֶה of the original: so 2Ma 4:31.

δίκαιος. The LXX render צַדִּיק or the genitival צֶדֶק by δίκαιος in almost every case, and their translation is accurate even for those passages in which the conception normal³⁵³ (which lies at the basis of the Hebrew words) has been preserved most purely, i.e., where correct measures are described as just.³⁵⁴ That they did not translate mechanically in these cases appears from Proverbs 11:1, where they likewise render the weight there described as שׁלֵםfull, by σταθμίονδίκαιον.³⁵⁵ There can be established also for Greek a usage similar to the Semitic,³⁵⁶ but it will be better in this matter to refer to Egyptian usage than to Xenophon and others,³⁵⁷ who apply the attribute δίκαιος to ἵππος,βοῦς, etc., when these animals correspond to what is expected of them. Thus in the decree of the inhabitants of Busiris,³⁵⁸ drawn up in honour of the emperor Nero, the rise of the Nile is called a δικαίαἀνάβασις ; but more significant—because the reference is to a measure —is the observation of Clemens Alexandrinus, Strom. vi. 4 (p. 758, Potter), that, in Egyptian ceremonies, the πῆχυς τῆςδικαιοσύνης was carried around—i.e., a correct cubit.³⁵⁹ That is the same idiom as the LXX apply in the ζυγὰδίκαιακαὶσταθμίαδίκαιακαὶχοῦςδίκαιος, Leviticus 19:36, in the μέτρον ἀληθινὸνκαὶδίκαιον, Deuteronomy 25:15, and in the χοῖνιξδικαία, Ezekiel 45:10.

διῶρυξ. The LXX translate floodIsaiah 27:12, streamIsaiah 33:21, and river LXX Jer. 38꞉9 [MT Jeremiah 31:9], by διῶρυξcanal. They have thus Egyptianised the original. Such a course was perhaps quite natural in the first passage, where the reference is to the “flood of Egypt”: noticing that stream and river were metaphorically used in the other two passages, they made the metaphors more intelligible to the Alexandrians by giving them a local colouring—just as was shown above in the case of ἄφεσις.

εἰς.

“The prepositional construction came easily to the N.T. writers probably because of the more forcible and more expressive diction of their native tongue, and we therefore find εἰς in places where the Dat. commodi or incommodi would have sufficed for the Greeks, e.g., Acts 24:17 : ἐλεημοσύναςποιήσωνεἰςτὸ ἔθνοςμου . . .” ³⁶⁰ In answer to this it must, to begin with, be remarked that “the” New Testament writers were not the first to find the usage a natural one, for it is already found in the Greek Old Testament. The author is not now examining the use of εἰς in that book, but he can point to the following passages, in which εἰς represents the “dative of advantage”: LXX Bel³⁶¹, ὅσαεἰςαὐτὸν [Bel] δαπανᾶται, Acts 24:22, τὴν δαπάνηντὴνεἰςαὐτόν [Bel], with which is to be compared Acts 24:2, ἀνηλίσκετοαὐτῷ³⁶² [Bel]; Ep. Jeremiah 9:1-26 (ἀργύριον) εἰς ἑαυτοὺςκαταναλοῦσι; Sir 37:7, συμβουλεύωνεἰςἑαυτόν ( = Sir 37:8, ἑαυτῷβουλεύσεται). In all these passages the original is wanting, but it seems certain to the author that what we find here is not one of the LXX’s many³⁶³ Hebraisms in the use of prepositions, but that this employment of eic is an Alexandrian idiom. In Pap. Flind. Petr. xxv. a-i³⁶⁴ (ca. 226 B.C.) and elsewhere, we have a number of receipts, from the standing formulm of which it appears that els was used to specify the various purposes of the items of an account. Thus the receipt α³⁶⁵ runs: ὁμολογεῖΚεφάλωνἡνίοχος ἔχεινπαρὰΧάρμου. . . . εἰς αὐτὸνκαὶἡνιόχους ζʹ . . . ἄρτωνκαθαρῶνβʹχοίνικας . . . . καὶεἰςἱπποκόμουςιγʹἄρτωναὐτοπύρων . . . κςʹ i.e., Kephalon the charioteer certifies that he has received from Charmos for himself and 7 other charioteers, 2 choenices of pure bread, and for 13 grooms, 26 measures of bran bread. Further, εἰς stands before non-personal words in the same way: καὶεἰςἵππονἐνοχλούμενον. εἰςχρῖσινἐλαίουκˋγʹ και . . . εἰςλύχνους κίκεωςκˋβʹ, i.e., and for a, sick horse 3 cotylas of oil for rubbing in, and for the lantern 2 cotylas of Kiki-oil. Still more clear is the passage from the contract Pap. Par.^{5 366} (114 B.C.) καὶτὸνεἰςΤάγηνοἶκονᾠκοδομημένον. Further examples in III. iii. 1, below. The same usage of εἰς, the examples of which may be increased from the Papyri, is found specially clearly in Paul: 1 Corinthians 16:1τῆςλογείαςτῆςεἰςτοὺςἁγίους, similarly 2 Corinthians 8:4, 2 Corinthians 9:1, 2 Corinthians 9:13 , Romans 15:26; cf. Acts 24:17; Mark 8:19 f. should probably be explained in the same way.

ἐκτὸς εἰμὴ. The commonly cited examples, from Lucian, etc., of this jumbled phrase,³⁶⁷ long since recognised as late-Greek, in the Cilician Paul (1 Corinthians 14:5, 1 Corinthians 15:2, cf.1 Timothy 5:19) are not so instructive for its use as is the passage of an Inscription of Mopsuestia in Cilicia, Waddington, iii. 2, No. 1499 (the author cannot fix the date ; certainly the imperial period): ἐκτὸςεἰμὴ [ἐ]ὰνΜάγναμόνηθε[λή]σῃ.

ἐν. The ignoring of the difference between translations of Semitic originals and works which were in Greek from the first—a difference of fundamental importance for the grammar (and the lexicon) of the “biblical” writers—has nowhere such disastrous consequences as in connection with the preposition. The author considers that he has previously shown, by a not unimportant example, what a difference there is between a peculiarity of syntax in the originally-Greek Epistles of Paul and the apparently similar phenomenon in Greek translations. A similar fact may be observed with regard to the question of ἐν with the dativus instrumenti. Winer-Lunemann³⁶⁸ still maintains that ἐν is used “of the instrument and means (chiefly in the Apocalypse)—not only (as in the better Greek prose-writers. . . .) where in (or on) would be proper enough . . . , but also, rrespectiveof this, where in Greek the dative alone, as casus instrumentalis, would be used—as an after-effect of the Hebrew בְּ ”. Similarly A. Buttmann.³⁶⁹ In their enumeration of the examples—in so far as these can come into consideration at all —both writers, in neglecting this difference, commit the error of uncritically placing passages from the Gospels and the Apocalypse, in regard to which one may speak of a Semitic influence, i.e., of a possible Semitic original, alongside of, say, Pauline passages, without, however, giving any indication of how they imagine the “after-effect” of the בְּ to have influenced Paul. Thus Winer-Lunemann quotes Romans 15:6ἐνἑνὶστόματιδοξάζητε, and Buttmann,³⁷⁰1 Corinthians 4:21ἐνῥάβδῳ ἔλθωπρὸς ὑμᾶς, as Pauline examples of ἐν with the instrumental dative. The author believes that both passages are capable of another explanation, and that, as they are the only ones that can be cited with even an appearance of reason, this use of ἐν by Paul cannot be made out. For, to begin with, the passage in Romans is one of those “where in would be proper enough,” i.e., where the reference to its primary sense of location is fully adequate to explain it, and it is thus quite superfluous to make for such instances a new compartment in the dust-covered repository; the Romans are to glorify God in one mouth—because, of course, words are formed in the mouth, just as, according to popular psychology, thoughts dwell in the heart. In 1 Corinthians 4:21, again, the case seems to be more favourable for the view of Buttmann, for the LXX frequently use the very construction ἐντῇῥάβδῳ; what more easy than to maintain that “the” biblical Greek uses this construction instrumentally throughout? But here also we perceive very clearly the difference between the diction of the translators as cramped by their original, and, the un-constrained language of Paul. In all the passages of the LXX Genesis 32:10, Exodus 17:5, Exodus 21:20, LXX 1Ki. 17꞉43 [MT 1 Samuel 17:43], LXX 2 Kings 23:21 [MT 2 Samuel 7:14, 2 Samuel 23:21], 1 Chronicles 11:23, Psalms 2:9 LXX Psa. 88꞉33 [MT Psalms 89:33], Isaiah 10:24, Micah 5:1, Micah 7:14; cf. Ezekiel 39:9, also Hosea 4:12, where ἐνῥάβδοις is conformed to the previous ἐν [= בְּ] συμβόλοις) the ἐν, of the phrase ἐν τῇῥάβδῳ is a mechanical imitation of a בְּ in the original: it cannot therefore be maintained in any way that that construction is peculiar to the indigenous Alexandrian Greek. With Paul, on the contrary, ἐνῥάβδῳ is anticipatively conformed to the following locative ἢἐνἀγάπῃπνεύματίτε πραΰτητος ; it is but a loose formation of the moment, and cannot be deduced from any law of syntax. It is, of course, not impossible that this anticipative conformation came the more easily to the Apostle, who knew his Greek Bible, because one or other of those passages of the LXX may have hovered³⁷¹ before his mind, but it is certainly preposterous to speak of the “after-effect” of a בְּ. Where in Paul’s psychology of language may this powerful particle have had its dwelling-place?

ἐνταφιαστής. The LXX correctly translate רֹפֵא physician by ἰατρός ; only in Genesis 50:2 f. by ἐνταφιαστής. The original speaks in that passage of the Egyptian physicians who embalmed the body of Jacob. The translation is not affected by the verb ἐνταφιάζειν simply, but is explained by the endeavour to introduce a term better suited to Egyptian conditions: it was, of course, an embalming in Egypt. But the professional designation of the person³⁷² entrusted with this work was ἐνταφιαστής, Pap. Par. 7 ³⁷³ (99 B.C.). Those sections of the Old Testament the scene of which was laid in Egypt, or which had regard to Egyptian conditions, naturally gave the translators most occasion to use Egyptianised expressions.

ἐντυγχάνω, ἔντευξις,ἐντυχία. In the New Testament writings ἔντευξις is used only in 1 Timothy 2:1 and 1 Timothy 4:5, having in both passages the sense of petitionary prayer. This usage is commonly explained³⁷⁴ by the employment of the word in the sense of petition which is found in extra-biblical literature from the time of Diodorus and Josephus. The Papyri³⁷⁵ show that in Egypt it had been long familiar in technical language: “ ἔντευξιςest ipsa petitio seu voce significata, seu in scripto libello expressa, quam supplex subditus offert ; . . . vocem Alexandrini potissimum usurpant ad designandas petitiones vel Regi, vel iis, qui regis nomine rempublicam moderantur, exhibitas”.³⁷⁶ This explanation has been fully confirmed by the newly-discovered Papyri of the Ptolemaic period.³⁷⁷ The technical meaning also occurs in Ep. Arist. (ed. M. Schmidt), p. 58³; A. Peyron, who has previously drawn attention to this passage, finds it also in 2Ma 4:8—probably without justification.

ἐντυχία is found in the same sense in Pap. Lond. xliv.^{3 378}(161 B.C.) and 3Ma. 6:40—in both passages in the idiomatic phrase ἐντυχίανποιεῖσθαι. The verb ἐντυγχάνω^379a has the corresponding technical meaning; the correlative term for the king’s giving an answer is χρηματίζειν.^379b Both the verb and the substantive are frequently combined with κατά and ὑπέρ, according to whether the memorial expresses itself against or for some one; cf. the Pauline ὑπερεντυγχάνω, Rom. 8:26.

ἐργοδιώκτης. This word, common in the LXX, but hitherto not authenticated elsewhere, is vouched for by Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. iv. i.³⁸⁰ (255-254 B.C.) as a technical term for overseer of work, foreman. Philo, who uses it later, de Vit. Mos. i. 7 (M., p. 86), can hardly have found it in the LXX first of all, but rather in the current vocabulary of his time. It is in use centuries later in Alexandria: Origen³⁸¹ jestingly calls his friend Ambrosius his ἐργοδιώκτης. Even he would not originally get the expression from the LXX.³⁸² εὐΐλατος.

Occurring only in LXX Psalms 98:8 [MT Psalms 99:8] (representing נֵשֹׁא) and [3]1Es 8:53³⁸³ = very favourable: already exemplified in Pap. Flind. Petr. xiii. 19³⁸⁴ (ca. 255 B.C.); observe that it is the same phrase τυχεῖντινοςεὐϊλάτου which is found here and in the passage in Esd. See la furtherexample, iii. 6, subβιάζομαι, below.

εὐχαριστέω. In regard to the passive,³⁸⁵2 Corinthians 1:11, Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. ii. 4 ³⁸⁶ (260-259 B.C.) is instructive; it is difficult, however, to settle what the εὐχαριστηθείς in this passage refers to, owing to mutilation of the leaf.

τὸθεμέλιον. In deciding the question whether θεμέλιον is to be construed as masculine or neuter in passages where the gender of the word is not clearly determined, attention is usually called to the fact that the neuter form is first found in Pausanius (2nd cent. A.D.). But it occurs previously in Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. xiv. 3 ³⁸⁷ (Ptolemaic period). Cf. also τὸθεμέλιον of an unknown translator of Leviticus 4:18³⁸⁸ From this, the possibility, at least, of taking it as neuter, in the nondecisive passages³⁸⁹Sir 1:15, Romans 15:20, Ephesians 2:20, Luke 6:48 f., Luke 14:29 , 1 Timothy 6:19, Hebrews 6:1, may be inferred.

ἴδιος. The LXX not seldom (Genesis 47:18, Deuteronomy 15:2, Job 2:11, Job 7:10, Job 7:13, Proverbs 6:2, Proverbs 13:8, Proverbs 16:23, Proverbs 27:8, Daniel 1:10) translate the possessive pronoun (as a suffix) by ἴδιος, though the connection does not require the giving of such an emphasis to the particular possessive relation. Such passages as Job 24:12, Proverbs 9:12, Proverbs 22:7, Proverbs 27:15, might be considered stranger still, where the translator adds ἴδιος, though the Hebrew text does not indicate a possessive relation at all, nor the context require the emphasising of any. This special prominence is, however, only apparent, and the translation (or addition) is correct. We have here probably the earliest examples of the late-Greek use of ἴδιος for the genitives ἑαυτοῦ, and ἑαυτῶν employed as possessives, a usage which can be pointed to in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Philo, Josephus and Plutarch,³⁹⁰ and in the Attic Inscriptions³⁹¹ subsequent to 69 B.C. This usage is also confirmed by the Apocryphal books of the O.T., specially by those in Greek from the first, and it influences the New Testament writers,³⁹² and especially Paul, much more strongly than is implied by Winer-Luemann.³⁹³ Exegetes have, in many places, laid a stress upon the ἴδιος which, in the text, does not belong to it at all. In consideration of the very widely-extended use of the exhausted ἴδιος in the post-classical age, it will, in point of fact, be the most proper course in exegesis always to assume it primarily as most probable, and to take ἴδιος in the old sense only when the context absolutely requires it. A specially instructive example is 1 Corinthians 7:2, διὰδὲτὰςπορνείαςἕκαστοςτὴν ἑαυτοῦγυναῖκαἐχέτωκαὶἑκάστητὸνἴδιονἄνδραἐχέτω : ἴδιος is here used only for the sake of variety and is exactly equivalent to the ἑαυτοῦ.

ἱλαστήριος and ἱλαστήριον. Of all the errors to be found in exegetical and lexical literature, that of imagining that ἱλαστήριον in the LXX is identical in meaning with כַּפֹּרֶת, cover (of the ark of the covenant), and that therefore the word with them means propitiatory cover (Luther Gnadenstuhl), is one of the most popular, most pregnant with results, and most baneful. Its source lies in the fact that the LXX’s frequent external verbal equation, viz., ἱλαστήριον = kappōreth, has been inconsiderately taken as an equation of ideas. But the investigation cannot proceed upon the assumption of this identification of ideas. We must rather, as in all cases where the Greek expression is not congruent with the Hebrew original, begin here by establishing the difference, and then proceed with an attempt to explain it. In the present case our position is happily such that we can give the explanation with some certainty, and that the wider philologico-historical conditions can be ascertained quite as clearly. To begin with, it is altogether inaccurate to assert that the LXX translatekappōreth by ἱλαστήριον. They first encountered the word in Exodus 25:16 [17]: and thou shalt make a kappōreth of pure gold. The Greek translator rendered thus: καὶποιήσειςἱλαστήριονἐπίθεμα³⁹⁴χρυσίουκαθαροῦ. His rendering of kappōreth is therefore not ἱλαστήριον, but ἱλαστήριονἐπίθεμα; he understood kappōreth quite well, and translates it properly by cover,³⁹⁵ but he has elucidated the word, used technically in this place, by a theological adjunct which is not incorrect in substance.³⁹⁶ἐπίθεμα is doubtless a translation of kappōreth the word; ἱλαστήριονἐπίθεμα is a rendering of kappōreth the religious concept. How then are we to understand this theological gloss upon the Hebrew word? ἱλαστήριον is not a substantive,³⁹⁷ but, as in 4Ma. 17:22 (if τοῦἱλαστηρίουθανάτου is to be read here with the Alexandrinus), an adjective, and signifies of use for propitiation. The same theological gloss upon the ceremonial kappōreth is observed when, in the Greek translation of the Pentateuch ³⁹⁸ —first in the passages immediately following upon Exodus 25:16 [17]and also later—it is rendered, breviloquently,³⁹⁹ by the simple ἱλαστήριον instead of ἱλαστήριονεπίθεμα. The word is now a substantive and signifies something like propitiatory article. It does not mean cover, nor even propitiatory cover, but for the concept cover it substitutes another, which only expresses the ceremonial purpose of the article. The kappōreth was for the translators a σύμβολοντῆςἵλεωτοῦθεοῦδυνάμεως, as Philo, de vit. Mos. iii. 8 (M., p. 150), speaking from the same theological stand-point, explains it, and therefore they named this symbol ἱλαστήριον. Any other sacred article having some connection with propitiation might in the very same way be brought under the general conception ἱλαστήριον, and have the latter substituted for it, i.e., if what was required was not a translation but a theological paraphrase. And thus it is of the greatest possible significance that the LXX actually do make a generalising gloss⁴⁰⁰ upon another quite different religious conception by ἱλαστήριον, viz., עֲזָרָה, the ledge of the altar, Ezekiel 43:14, Ezekiel 43:17, Ezekiel 43:20; it also, according to Ezekiel 43:20, had to be sprinkled with the blood of the sin-offering, and was therefore a kind of propitiatory article—hence the theologising rendering of the Greek translators. ἱλαστήριον here also means neither ledge nor ledge of propitiation, but propitiatoryarticle. The proof of the fact that the LXX did not identify the conceptἱλαστήριον with kappōreth and ‘azarah can be supplemented by the following observed facts. The two words paraphrased by ἱλαστήριον have other renderings as well. In Exodus 26:34 the original runs, and thou shalt put the kappōreth upon the ark of the testimony in the most holy place; LXX καὶκατακαλύψειςτῷκαταπετάσματιτὴνκιβωτὸν τοῦμαρτυρίουἐντῷἁγίῳτῶνἁγίων. According to Cremer, the LXX have not translated the Hebrew word here at all—let alone by καταπέτασμα. But it is without doubt a more correct conjecture that they read not כַּפֹּרֶת but פָּרֹכֶת curtain, and thus did translate the Hebrew word.⁴⁰¹ This conjecture is, however, in no way absolutely necessary; the author thinks it not at all impossible that the LXX read kappōreth, and translated it by καταπέτασμα, just as they did, at its first occurrence, by ἐπίθεμα. More significant is 1 Chronicles 28:11, where house of the kappōreth is rendered by ὁοἶκοςτοῦἐξιλασμοῦ: this also is a theological gloss, not a verbal translation of the original.⁴⁰² It may be regarded as specially significant that the ceremonial word should thus be glossed in two different ways. Similarly, ’azārah in Ezekiel 45:19 is paraphrased⁴⁰³ by τὸἱερόν, and, in 2 Chronicles 4:9 and 2 Chronicles 6:13, translated by αὐλή.

It thus seems clear to the author that it is not correct to take the LXX’s equation of words as being an equation of ideas. ἱλαστήριον, for the translators, signified propitiatory article, even where they used it for kappōreth. Philo still had a clear conception of the state of the matter. It is not correct to assert⁴⁰⁴ that, following the example of the LXX, he describes kappōreth as ἱλαστήριον: he describes it correctly as ἐπίθεματῆςκιβωτοῦ, and remarks further that it is called ἱλαστήριον in the Bible: De Vit. Mos. iii. 8 (M. p. 150) ἡδὲκιβωτὸς . . . , ἧςἐπίθεμαὡσανεὶπῶματὸ λεγόμεονονἐνἱεραῖςβίβλιοςἱλαστήριον, and, further on in the same work, τὸδὲἀπίθεματὸπροσαγορευόμενονἱλαστήριονDe Profug. 19 (M. p. 561) . . .τὸἀπίθεματῆςκιβωτοῦ,καλεῖ δὲαὐτὸἱλαστήριον. Philo manifestly perceived that the ἱλαστήριον of the Greek Bible was an altogether peculiar designation, and therefore expressly distinguishes it as such: he puts the word, so to speak, in quotation-marks. Thus also, in De Cherub. 8 (M. p. 143), καὶγὰρἀντιπρόσωπάφασιν εἶναινεύονταπρὸςτὸἱλαστήριονἑτέροις is clearly an allusion to LXX Exodus 25:20 [21], and, instead of saying that Philo here describes the kappōreth as ἱλαστήριον,⁴⁰⁵ we should rather say that he, following the LXX, asserts that the cherubim over-shadow the ἱλαστήριον.⁴⁰⁶ How little one is entitled to speak of a “Sprachgebrauch” ⁴⁰⁷ (usage, or, habit of speech), viz., ἱλαστήριον = kappōreth, is shown by the fact that Symmachus in Genesis 6:16 [15] twice renders the Ark of Noah by ἱλαστήριον and that Josephus, Ant. xvi. 7¹, speaks of a monument of white stone as a ἱλαστήριον : περίφοβοςδ’αὐτὸςἐξῄεικαὶτοῦ δέουςἱλαστήριονμνῆμαλευκῆςπέτραςἐπὶτῷστομίῳκατεσκευάσατο, which must certainly be translated: he set up a monument of white stone as aἱλαστήριον.⁴⁰⁸

What, then, is the meaning of ἱλαστήριον in the important “Christological” statement Romans 3:25 ? Paul says there of Jesus Christ, ὃνπορέθετοὁθεὸςἱλαστήριονδιὰπίστεωςἐν τῷαὐτοῦαἵματιεἰς ἔνδειξιντῆςδικαιοσύνηςαὐτοῦ. It has been said that the Roman readers could hardly have known the expression from any other source than the Greek Bible.⁴⁰⁹ But, even if this assumption were correct, it still requires to be proved that they could have learned from the Greek Bible that ἱλαστήριον means the kappōreth; besides, the primary question must be: what did the term signify to Paul himself? The author believes that even the context requires us to reject the opinion that the Apostle is describing the crucified Christ as “a” ⁴¹⁰kappōreth. Had the Cross been so named, then the metaphor might possibly be understood; as used of a person, it is infelicitous and unintelligible; further, Christ, the end of the law, Christ, of whom Paul has just said that He is the revealer of the δικαιοσύνηθεοῦχωρὶςνόμου, would hardly be named by the same Paul, in the same breath, as the cover of the ark of testimony: the metaphor were as unlike Paul as possible. But the whole assumption of the explanation in question is without support: no “Sprachgebrauch,” according to which one had to understand ἱλαστήριον as the kappōreth, ever existed either in the LXX or later. Hence this explanation of the passage in Romans has long encountered opposition. Again, it is a popular interpretation to take ἱλαστήριον as equivalent to propitiatory sacrifice, after the analogy of σωτήριον, χαριστήριον, καθάρσιον, etc., in connection with which θῦμα is to be supplied. However difficult it would be to find examples of the word being used in this sense,⁴¹¹ there is no objection to it linguistically. But it is opposed by the context; it can hardly be said of a sacrifice that God πορέθετο it. The more general explanation therefore, which of late has been advocated again, specially by B. Weiss,⁴¹²viz., means of propitiation, is to be preferred: linguistically it is the most obvious; it is also presupposed in the “usage” of the LXX, and admirably suits the connection—particularly in the more special sense of propitiatory gift which is to be referred to just below. Hitherto the word in this sense had been noted only in Dion Chrysostom (1-2 cent. A.D.), Or. xi. p. 355 (Reinke), καταλείψεινγὰραὐτοὺςἀνάθημακάλλιστονκαὶμέγιστοντῇ Ἀθηνᾷκαὶἐπιγράψειν˙ἱλαστήριονἈχαιοὶτῇἸλιάδι—and in later authors. The word here means a votive gift, which was brought to the deities in order to induce them to be favourable⁴¹³—a propitiatory gift. Even one such example would be sufficient to confirm the view of the passage in Romans advocated above. Its evidential value is not decreased, but rather increased, by the fact that it is taken from a “late” author. It would surely be a mechanical notion of statistical facts to demand that only such concepts in “profane” literature as can be authenticated before, e.g., the time of Paul, should be available for the explanation of the Pauline Epistles. For this would be to uphold the fantastic idea that the first occurrence of a word in the slender remains of the ancient literature must be identical with the earliest use of it in the history of the Greek language, and to overlook the fact that the annoying caprice of statistics may, in most cases, rather tend to delude the pedants who entertain such an idea. In the case before us, however, a means has been found of removing the objection to the “lateness” of the quotation: ἱλαστήριον in the assigned meaning is found also before the time of Paul—occurring as it does in a place at which the Apostle certainly touched in his travels (Acts 21:1): the Inscription of Cos No. 81⁴¹⁴ reads thus:—

ὁδᾶμος ὑπὲρτᾶςἀτοκράτορος

Καίσαρος

θεοῦυἱοῦ^414bΣεβαστοῦσωτηρίας

θεοῖςἱλατήριον. This Inscription is found on a statue or on the base of a statue,⁴¹⁵—at all events on a votive-gift which the “people” of Cos erected to the gods as a ἱλαστήριον for the welfare of the “son of God,” Augustus. That is exactly the same use of the word as we find later in Dion Chrysostom, and the similarity of the respective formulae is evident. The word is used in the same way in the Inscription of Cos No. 347,⁴¹⁶ which the author cannot date exactly, but which certainly falls within the imperial period: it occurs upon the fragment of a pillar:—

[ὁδᾶμοςὁἉλεντίων] . . . . . Σε]βα-

σ[τ]ῷΔιΐΣ[τ]ρατίῳἱλασ- τήριονδαμαρχεῦν- τοςΓαΐουΝωρ- βανοῦΜοσχίω- νο[σφι]λοκαίσα- ρος

Thus much, then, can be derived from these three passages, as also from Josephus, viz., that, early in the imperial period, it was a not uncommon custom to dedicate propitiatory gifts to the Gods, which were called ἱλαστήρια. The author considers it quite impossible that Paul should not have known the word in this sense: if he had not already become familiar with it by living in Cilicia, he had certainly read it here and there in his wanderings through the empire, when he stood before the monuments of paganism and pensively contemplated what the piety of a dying civilisation had to offer to its known or unknown Gods. Similarly, the Christians of the capital, whether one sees in them, as the misleading distinction goes, Jewish Christians or Heathen Christians, would know what a ἱλαστήριον was in their time. To suppose that, in consequence of their “magnificent knowledge of the Old Testament,” ⁴¹⁷ they would immediately think of the kappōreth, is to overlook two facts. First, that the out-of-the-way⁴¹⁸ passages referring to the ἱλαστήριον may very well have remained unknown even to a Christian who was conversant with the LXX: how many Bible readers of to-day, nay, how many theologians of to-day—who, at least, should be Bible readers,—if their readings have been unforced, and not desecrated by sideglances towards “Ritschlianism” or towards possible examination questions, are acquainted with the kappōreth? The second fact overlooked is, that such Christians of the imperial period as were conversant with those passages, naturally understood the ἱλαστήριον in the sense familiar to them, not in the alleged sense of propitiatory cover—just as a Bible reader of to-day, unspoiled by theology, finding the word Gnadenstuhl (mercy-seat) in Luther, would certainly never think of a cover. That the verb προέθετο admirably suits the ἱλαστήριον taken as propitiatory gift, in the sense given to it in the Greek usage of the imperial period, requires no proof. God has publicly set forth the crucified Christ in His blood in view of the Cosmos—to the Jews a stumbling block, to the Gentiles foolishness, to Faith a ἱλαστήριον. The crucified Christ is the votive-gift of the Divine Love for the salvation of men. Elsewhere it is human hands which dedicate to the Deity a dead image of stone in order to gain His favour; here the God of grace Himself erects the consoling image,—for the skill and power of men are not sufficient. In the thought that God Himself has erected the ἱλαστήριον, lies the same wonderful μωρία of apostolic piety which has so inimitably diffused the unction of artless genius over other religious ideas of Paul. God’s favour must be obtained—He Himself fulfils the preliminary conditions; Men can do nothing at all, they cannot so much as believe—God does all in Christ: that is the religion of Paul, and our passage in Romans is but another expression of this same mystery of salvation. A. Ritschl,⁴¹⁹ one of the most energetic upholders of the theory that the ἱλαστήριον of the passage in Romans signifies the kappōreth, has, in his investigation of this question, laid down the following canon of method “. . . for ἱλαστήριον the meaning propitiatory sacrifice is authenticated in heathen usage, as being a gift by which the anger of the gods is appeased, and they themselves induced to be gracious. . . . But . . . the heathen meaning of the disputed word should be tried as a means of explaining the statement in question only when the biblical meaning has proved to be wholly inapplicable to the passage.” It would hardly be possible to find the sacred conception of a “biblical” Greek more plainly upheld by an opponent of the theory of inspiration than is the case in these sentences. What has been already said will show the error, as the author thinks it, of the actual assertions they contain concerning the meaning of ἱλαστήριον in “biblical” ⁴²⁰ and in “heathen” usage; his own reflections about method are contained in the introduction to these investigations. But the case under consideration, on account of its importance, may be tested, once more by an analogy which has already been indicated above. In the hymn O Konig, dessen Majestdt, by Valentin Ernst Loscher († 1749), there occurs the following couplet⁴²¹:— Mein Abba, schaue Jesum an, Den Gnadenthron der Sunder.⁴²²

Whoever undertakes to explain this couplet has, without doubt, a task similar to that of the exegete of Romans 3:25. Just as in the passage from Paul there is applied to Christ a word which occurs in the Bible of Paul, so there is in this hymn a word, similarly used, which stands in the Bible of its author. The Apostle calls Christ a ἱλαστήριον ; ἱλαστήριον is occasionally found in the Greek Bible, where the Hebrew has kappōreth: ergo—Paul describes Christ as the kappōreth! The Saxon Poet calls Christ the Throne of Grace (Gnadenthron); the Mercy-seat (Gnadenstuhl—not indeed Throne of Grace, but an expression equivalent to it) is found in the German Bible, where the Greek has ἱλαστήριον, the Hebrew kappōreth: ergo—the poet describes Christ as ἱλαστήριον, as kappōreth, i.e., as the lid of the Ark of the Covenant! These would be parallel inferences—according to that mechanical method of exegesis. The historical way of looking at the matter, however, gives us the following picture. Kappōreth in the Hebrew Bible signifies the cover (of the Ark); the Greek translators have given a theological paraphrase of this conception, just as they have occasionally done in other similar cases, in so far as they named the sacred article ἱλαστήριονἐπίθεμα, propitiatory cover, according to the purpose of it, and then, quite generally, ἱλαστήριον, propitiatory article; the readers of the Greek Bible understood this ἱλαστήριον in its own proper sense (a sense presupposed also in the LXX) as propitiatory article—the more so as it was otherwise known to them in this sense; the German translator, by reason of his knowledge of the Hebrew text, again specialised the propitiatory article into a vehicle or instrument of propitiation—again imparting to it, however, a theological shading,—in so far as he wrote, not propitiatorycover or cover of mercy, but mercy-seat ;⁴²³ the readers of the German Bible, of course, apprehend this word in its own proper sense, and when we read it in Bible or hymn-book, or hear it in preaching, we figure to ourselves some Throne in Heaven, to which we draw near that we may receive mercy and may find grace to keep us in time of need, and nobody thinks of anything else. The LXX and Luther have supplied the place of the original kappōreth by words which imply a deflection of the idea. The links—kappōreth, ἱλαστήριον, Gnadenstuhl—cannot be connected by the sign of equality, not even, indeed, by a straight line, but at best by a curve.

ἱστός. The Greek usage of this word is also found in the LXX’s correct renderings of the corresponding Hebrew words, viz., mast (of a ship), Isaiah 30:17, Isaiah 33:23, Ezekiel 27:5, and web (through the connecting-link weaver’s-beam), Isa. 59:5, 6 (likewise Isaiah 38:12, but without any corresponding word in our text); cf. Tob 2:12 Cod. א. In reference to this, the author would again call attention to a little-known emendation in the text of the Epistle of Aristeas proposed by Lumbroso.⁴²⁴ M. Schmidt writes, p. 69 16, (ἔπεμψεδὲκαὶτῷ Ἐλεαζάρῳ . . . . . ) βυσσίνωνὀθονίωνεἰς † τοὺςἑκατόν, which is altogether meaningless. We must of course read, in accordance with Joseph. Antt. xii. 2 14 (βυσσίνηςὀθόνης ἱστοὺςἑκατόν), βυσσίνωνὀθονίωνἱστοὺςἑκατόν.

καρπόω, etc. In Leviticus 2:11 we find the command: ye shall not burn incense (תַּקְטִירוּ) of any leaven or honey as an offering made by fire (אִשֶּׁה) to Jahweh. The LXX translate: πᾶσαν γὰρζύμηνκαὶπᾶνμέλιοὐπροσοίσετεἀπ’αὐτοῦ (a mechanical imitation of מִמֶּנּוּ) καρπῶσαικυρίῳ. This looks like an inadequate rendering of the original: in the equation, προσφέρειν καρπῶσαι = burn incense as an offering made with fire, there seems to be retained only the idea of sacrifice; the special nuance of the commandment seems to be lost, and to be supplanted by a different one: for καρποῦν of course means “to make or offer as fruit”. ⁴²⁵ The idea of the Seventy, that that which was leavened, or honey, might be named a fruit-offering, is certainly more striking than the fact that the offering made by fire is here upplanted by the offering of fruit. But the vagary cannot have been peculiar to these venerable ancients, for we meet with the same, strange notion also in passages which are not reckoned as their work in the narrower sense. According to [3] 1Es 4:52 King Darius permits to the returning Jews, among other things, καὶἐπὶτὸθυσιαστήριονὁλοκαυτώματακαρποῦσθαικαθ’ ἡμέραν, and, in the Song of the Three Children 14, Azariaslaments καὶοὐκ ἔστινἐντῷκαιρῷτούτῳἄρχωνκαὶπροφήτης καὶἡγούμενοςοὐδὲὁλοκαύτωσιςοὐδὲθυσίαοὐδὲπροσφορὰοὐδὲ θυμίαμαοὐδὲτόποςτοῦκαρπῶσαιἐναντίονσουκαὶεὑρεῖν ἔλεος. If then a whole burnt-offering could be spoken of as a fruit-offering, wherefore should the same not be done as regards things leavened and honey? But the LXX can be vindicated in a more honourable way. Even their own usage of καρπόω elsewhere might give the hint: it is elsewhere found ⁴²⁶ only in Deuteronomy 26:14, οὐκ ἐκάρπωσαἀπ’αὐτῶνεἰςἀκάθαρτον, which is meant to represent I have put away nothing thereof (i.e., of the tithes), beingunclean. In this the LXX take בְּטָמֵא, to mean for an unclean use, as did also De Wette, while καρπόω for בִּעֵר is apparently intended to signify put away, a meaning of the word which is found nowhere else,⁴²⁷ implying, as it does, almost the opposite of the primary meaning to bring forth fruit. It is not the LXX, however, who have taken καρπόω and put away as equivalent, but rather the unscientific procedure which looks upon verbal equations between translation and original without further ceremony as equations of ideas. The true intention of the Greek ranslators is shown by a comparison of Leviticus 2:11 and Deuteronomy 26:14. In the first passage, one may doubt as to whether καρπόω is meant to represent הִקְטִיר or אִשֶּׁה, but whichever of the two be decided upon does not matter: in either case it represents some idea like to offer a sacrifice made with fire. In the other passage, καρπόω certainly stands for בִּעֵר, and if, indeed, the Greek word cannot mean put away, yet the Hebrew one can mean to burn. It is quite plain that the LXX thought that they found this familiar meaning in this passage also: the two passages, in fact, support one another, and ward off any suspicion of “the LXX’s” having used καρπόω in the sense of put away and bring forth fruit at the same time. However strange the result may appear, the issue of our critical comparison is this: the LXX used καρπόω for to burn both in a ceremonial and in a non-ceremonial sense. This strange usage, however, has received a brilliant confirmation. P. Stengel ⁴²⁸ has shown, from four Inscriptions and from the old lexicographers,⁴²⁹ that καρπόω must have been quite commonly used for to burn in the ceremonial sense.⁴³⁰ Stengel explains as follows how this meaning arose: καρποῦν, properly signifies to cut into pieces; the holocausts of the Greeks were cut into pieces, and thus, in ceremonial language, καρπόω must have come to mean absumere, consumere, ὁλοκαυτεῖν. The ceremonial sense of καρπόω grows more distinct when we notice the compound form ὁλοκαρπόω,⁴³¹Sir 45:14, 4Ma. 18:11, Sibyll. Orac. 3565, as also by the identity in meaning of the substantives ὀλακάρπωμα = ὁλοκαύτωμα, and ὁλοκάρπωσις = ὁλοκαύτωσις, all of which can be fully established in the LXX and the Apocrypha as meaning, in most cases, burnt-offering, just like κάρπωμα = κάρπωσις. These substantives are all to be derived, not from καρπόςfruit, but from the ceremonial καρπόω, to burn.⁴³² κατά.

1. In 3Ma. 5:34 and Romans 12:5 is found ὁκαθ’εἷς⁴³³for εἷςἕκαστος, and in Mark 14:19 and John 8:9⁴³⁴ the formula εἷς καθ’εἷς for unusquisque. In these constructions, unknown in classical Greek, we must, it is said, either treat eh as an indeclinable numeral, or treat the preposition as an adverb.⁴³⁵ Only in the Byzantine writers have such constructions been authenticated. But εἷςκαθ’ἕκαστος⁴³⁶ already stands in LXX Leviticus 25:10 (καὶἀπελεύσεταιεἷςἕκαστοςεἰςτὴνκτῆσιναὐτοῦ), according to Cod. A. This represents אִישׁ, and cannot, therefore, be explained as a mechanical imitation of the original. What we have here (assuming that A has preserved the original reading) will rather be the first example of a special usage of κατά, and thus, since it is ἕκαστος which is now in question, the first, at least, of Buttmann’s proposed explanations would fall to the ground. It is, of course, quite possible that the εἷςκαθ’ἕκαστος should be assigned only to the late writer of Cod. A. But the hypothesis of its being the original derives, as the author thinks, further support from the following facts. The LXX translate the absolute אִישׁ by ἕκαστος in innumerable passages. But in not a single passage except the present (according to the ordinary text), is it rendered by εἷςἕκαστος. This combination, already found in Thucydides,⁴³⁷ frequent also in the “fourth” Book of Maccabees,⁴³⁸ in Paul and in Luke, is used nowhere else in the LXX, a fact which, in consideration of the great frequency of ἕκαστος = אִישׁ is certainly worthy of note. It is in harmony with this that, so far as the author has seen, no example occurs in the contemporary Papyri.⁴³⁹ The phrase seems to be absent from the Alexandrian dialect in the Ptolemaic period.⁴⁴⁰ Hence it is a priori probable that any other reading which is given by a trustworthy source should have the preference. Although indeed our εἷςκαθ’ἕκαστος seems strange and unique, yet this fact speaks not against, but in favour of, its being the original. It can hardly be imagined that the copyist would have formed the harsh εἷςκαθ’ἕκαστος out of the every-day εἷςἕκαστος. But it is quite plain, on the other hand, that the latter reading could arise from the former—nay, even had to be made from it by a fairly “educated” copyist.⁴⁴¹ Our reading is further confirmed not only by the analogies cited, but also by Revelation 21:21, ἀνὰεἷςἕκαστοςτῶνπυλώνωνἦν ἐξἑνὸςμαργαρίτου: here also we have evidently an adverbial use of a preposition,⁴⁴² which should hardly be explained as one of the Hebraisms of Revelation, since in Revelation 4:8 the distributive ἀνα is made, quite correctly, to govern the accusative, and since, further, it would be difficult to say what the original really was which, as it is thought, is thus imitated in Hebraising fashion.

2. “Even more diffuse and more or less Hebraising periphrases of simple prepositions are effected by means of the substantives πρόσωπον,χείρ,στόμα,ὀφθαλμός.”⁴⁴³ The author considers that this general assertion fails to stand the test. One of the phrases used by Buttmann as an example, viz., κατὰπρόσωπόντινος = κατά is already found in Pap. Flind. Petr. i. xxi.,⁴⁴⁴ the will of a Libyan, of the year 237 B.C., in which the text of line 8 can hardly be restored otherwise than τὰμὲ[νκα]τὰπρόσωποντοῦἱεροῦ.

λειτουργέω, λειτουργία, λειτουργικός.

“The LXX took over the word [λειτουργέὠ in order to designate the duties of the Priests and Levites in the sanctuary, for which its usage in profane Greek yielded no direct support, as it is only in late and in very isolated cases [according to p. 562, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch] that even one word of this family, λειτουργός, occurs as applied to priests.”⁴⁴⁵ The Papyri show, however, that λειτουργέω and λειτουργία were commonly used in Egypt in the ceremonial sense. In particular, the services in the Serapeum⁴⁴⁶ were so designated. As examples of the verb there should be noted here: Pap. Par. 23⁴⁴⁷ (165 B.C.), 27⁴⁴⁸ (same date), Pap. Lugd. B⁴⁴⁹ (164 B.C.), E⁴⁵⁰ (same date), Pap. Lond. xxxiii.⁴⁵¹ (161 B.c.), xli.⁴⁵² (161 B.C.), Pap. Par. 29⁴⁵³ (161-160 B.C.); of the substantive, Pap. Lugd. B⁴⁵⁴ (164 B.C.), Pap. Lond. xxii.⁴⁵⁵ (164-163 B.C.), xli.⁴⁵⁶ (161 B.C.), Pap. Dresd. ii.⁴⁵⁷ (162 B.C.), Pap. Par. 33⁴⁵⁸ (ca. 160 B.C.). But also of other ceremonial services elsewhere there were used λειτουργέω, Pap. Par. 5⁴⁵⁹ (113 B.c.) twice; λειτουργία in the Papp. Lugd. G⁴⁶⁰, H⁴⁶¹ and J,⁴⁶² written 99 B.C.⁴⁶³

λειτουργικός is found not “only in biblical and ecclesiastical Greek,”⁴⁶⁴ but occurs in a non-religious sense six times in a taxation-roll of the Ptolemaic Period, Pap. Flind. Petr. xxxix. e.⁴⁶⁵ Its use is confined, so far as “biblical” literature is concerned, to the following Alexandrian compositions: LXX Exodus 31:10, Exodus 39:1⁴⁶⁶Numbers 4:12, Numbers 4:26, Numbers 7:5 , 2 Chronicles 24:14; Hebrews 1:14.

λίψ. In the three passages, 2 Chronicles 32:30, 2 Chronicles 33:14, and Daniel 8:5, the LXX render the direction West by λίψ. Elsewhere they use λίψ, quite accurately for South. But even in the passages cited they have not been guilty of any negligence, but have availed themselves of a special Egyptian usage, which might have been noticed long ago in one of the earliest-known Papyrus documents. In a Papyrus of date 104 B.C., which was elucidated by Boeckh,⁴⁶⁷ there occurs the phrase λιβὸςοἰκίαΤέφιτος. As the South (νότος) has been expressly mentioned just before, this can mean only in the West the house of Tephis. To this Boeckh⁴⁶⁸ observes: “λίψ means South-West in Hellas, Africus, because Libya lies South-West from the Hellenes—whence its name: Libya lies directly West from the Egyptians; hence λίψ is for them the West itself, as we learn here”. The word had been already used in the will of a Libyan, Pap. Flind. Petr. xxi.⁴⁶⁹ (237 B.C.), where similarly the connection yields the meaning West.

λογεία. In 1 Corinthians 16:1 Paul calls the collection for “the saints” (according to the ordinary text) λογία, and in 1 Corinthians 16:2 says that the λογίαι must begin at once. The word is supposed to occur for the first time here,⁴⁷⁰ and to occur elsewhere only in the Fathers. Grimm⁴⁷¹ derives it from λέγω. Both views are wrong.

λογεία can be demonstrated to have been used in Egypt from the 2nd cent. B.C. at the latest: it is found in Papyrus documents belonging to the Χοαχύται or Χολχύται (the orthography and etymology of the word are uncertain), a society which had to perform a part of the ceremonies required in the embalming of bodies: they are named in one place ἀδελφοὶοἱτὰςλειτουργίαςἐνταῖςνεκρίαιςπαρεχόμενοι.⁴⁷² They had the right, as members of the guild, to institute collections, and they could sell this right. Such a collection is called λογεία: Pap. Lond. iii.⁴⁷³ (ca. 140 B.C.), Pap. Par. 5⁴⁷⁴ (114 B.C.) twice; Pap. Lugd. M⁴⁷⁵ (114 B.C.). We find the word, further, in the taxation-roll Pap. Kind. Petr. xxxix. c.⁴⁷⁶ of the Ptolemaic period,⁴⁷⁷ in which it is used six times—probably in the sense of tax. The derivation of the word from λέγω is impossible; λογεία belongs to the class⁴⁷⁸ of substantives in –εία formed from verbs in –εύω. Now the verb λογεύωto collect, which has not been noticed in literary compositions, is found in the following Papyri and Inscriptions: Pap. Lond. xxiv.⁴⁷⁹ (163 B. C.), iii.⁴⁸⁰ (ca. 140 B.c.), a Papyrus of date 134 B.C.,⁴⁸¹Pap. Taur. 8⁴⁸²(end of 2nd cent. B.C.), an Egyptian Inscription, CIG. iii., No. 495637 (49 A.D.); cf. also the Papyrus-fragment which proves the presence of Jews in the Fayyûm.⁴⁸³ The Papyri yield also the pair παραλογεύω, Pap. Flind. Petr. xxxviii. b⁴⁸⁴ (242 B.C.) and παραλογεία, Pap. Par. 61⁴⁸⁵ (145 B.C.). In regard to the orthography of the word, it is to be observed that the spelling λογεία corresponds to the laws of word-formation. Its consistent employment in the relatively well-written pre-Christian Papyri urges us to assume that it would also be used by Paul: the Vaticanus still has it, in 1 Corinthians 16:2⁴⁸⁶ at least. In speaking of the collection for⁴⁸⁷ the poor in Jerusalem, Paul has other synonyms besides λογεία, among them λειτουργία, 2 Corinthians 9:12. This more general term is similarly associated with λογεία in Pap. Lond. iii. 9.⁴⁸⁸ In 1 Corinthians 16:1 Donnaeus and H. Grotius proposed to alter “λογία” to εὐλογία,⁴⁸⁹ as the collection is named in 2 Corinthians 9:5. This is of course unnecessary: but it does not seem to the author to be quite impossible that, conversely, the first εὐλογίαν in the latter passage should be altered to λογείαν. If λογείαν were the original, the sentence would be much more forcible; the temptation to substitute the known word for the strange one could come as easily to a copyist as to the scholars of a later period.

μειζότερος. With this double comparative in 3 John 1:4⁴⁹⁰ cf. the double superlative μεγιστότατος, Pap. Lond. cxxx.⁴⁹¹ (1st or 2nd cent. A.D.).

ὁμικρός. In Mark 15:40 there is mentioned a Ἰάκωβοςὁμικρός. It is a question whether the attribute refers to his age or his stature,⁴⁹² and the deciding between these alternatives is not without importance for the identification of this James and of Mary his mother. In reference to this the author would call attention to the following passages. In Pap. Lugd. N⁴⁹³ (103 B.C.) a Νεχούτηςμικρός is named twice. Upon this Leemans⁴⁹⁴ observes: “quominus vocemμικρόςde corporis altitudine intelligamus prohibent tum ipse verborum ordo quo ante patris nomen et hic et infra in Trapezitae subscriptione vs. 4 ponitur; tum quae sequitur voxμέσος, qua staturae certe non parvae plisse Nechyten docemur. Itaque ad aetatem referendum videtur, et additum fortasse ut distingueretur ab altero Nechyte, frater majore;” it is, in point of fact, shown by Pap. Taur. i. that this Nechytes had a brother of the same name. In a similar manner a Μάνρηςμέγας is named in Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. xxv. i⁴⁹⁵ (Ptolemaic period). Mahaffy,⁴⁹⁶ it is true, prefers to interpret the attribute here as applying to the stature. The LXX also are acquainted with (not to speak of the idiom ἀπὸμικροῦἕωςμεγάλου) a usage of μικρός to signify age, e.g., 2 Chronicles 22:1.

νομός.

L. van Ess’s edition of the LXX (1887)⁴⁹⁷ still reads Isaiah 19:2 thus: καὶἐπεγερθήσονταιΑἰγύπτιοιἐπ’Αἰγυπτίουςκαὶ πολεμήσειἄνθρωποςτὸνἀδελφὸναὐτοῦκαὶἄνθρωποςτὸν πλησίοναὐτοῦ,πόλιςἐπὶπόλινκαὶνόμοςἐπὶνόμον. In the original the concluding words of the verse are kingdom against kingdom. The Concordance of Tromm therefore says νομόςlex stands for מַמְלָכָהregnum, and the editor of Van Ess’s LXX appears to be of the same opinion. The correct view has long been known;⁴⁹⁸ the phrase should be accented thus: νομόςἐπὶνομόν.⁴⁹⁹

νομός is a terminus technicus for a political department of the country, and was used as such in Egypt especially, as was already known from Herodotus and Strabo. The Papyri throw fresh light upon this division into departments, though indeed the great majority of these Papyri come from the “Archives” of the Nomos of Arsinoe. This small matter is noted here because the translation of Isaiah 19:1-25, the “ὅρασιςΑἰγύπτου,” has, as a whole, been furnished by the LXX, for reasons easily perceived, with very many instances of specifically Egyptian—in comparison with the original, we might indeed say modern-Egyptian-local-colouring. This may also be observed in other passages of the O.T. which refer to Egyptian conditions.

ὄνομα. In connection with the characteristic “biblical” construction εἰςτὸὄνομάτινος,⁵⁰⁰ and, indeed, with the general usage of ὄνομα, in the LXX, etc., the expression ἔντευξιςεἰς τὸτοῦβασιλέωςὄνομα, which occurs several times in the Papyri, deserves very great attention: Pap. Flind. Petr, ii. ii. 1⁵⁰¹ (260-259 B.C.), Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. xx. ee⁵⁰² (241 B.C.);cf., possibly, Pap. Flind. Petr. xlvii.⁵⁰³ (191 B.C.)! Mahaffy⁵⁰⁴ speaks of the phrase as a hitherto unknown “formula”. Its repeated occurrence in indictments certainly suggests the conjecture that it must have had a technical meaning. This is, doubtless, true of ἔντευξις.⁵⁰⁵ An ἔντευξιςεἰςτὸτοῦβασιλέωςὄνομα would be a direct petition —a memorial to the King’s Majesty;⁵⁰⁶ the name of the King is the essence of what he is as ruler. We see how nearly this idea of the ὄνομα approaches to that of the Old Testament שֵׁם, and how convenient it was for the Egyptian translators to be able to render quite literally the expressive word of the sacred text. The special colouring which ὄνομα often has in early Christian writings was doubtless strongly influenced by the LXX, but the latter did not borrow that colouring first from the Hebrew; it was rather a portion of what they took from the adulatory official vocabulary of their environment. But current usage in Asia Minor also provided a connecting link for the solemn formula of the early Christians, viz. εἰςτὸὄνομα with genitive of God, of Christ, etc., after it. In the Inscription of Mylasa in Caria, addington, iii. 2, No. 416 CIG ii. No. 2693 e, belonging to the beginning of the imperial period,⁵⁰⁷ we find γενομένηςδὲτῆςὠνῆςτῶνπρογεγραμμένωντοῖςκτηματώναιςεἰςτὸτοῦθεοῦὄνομα.⁵⁰⁸ This means: “after the sale of the afore-mentioned objects had been concluded with theκτηματῶναιεἰςτὸτοῦθεοῦ [Zeus] ὄνομα”. In reference to the κτηματώνης, which is to be found in Inscriptions only, Waddington⁵⁰⁹ observes that the word means the purchaser of an article, but the person in question, in this connection, is only the nominal purchaser, who represents the real purchaser, i.e., the Deity; the κτηματώνηςεἰςτὸτοῦ θεοῦὄνομα is the fideicommissaire du domaine sacre. The passage appears to the author to be the more important in that it presupposes exactly the same conception of the word ὄνομα as we find in the solemn forms of expression used in religion. Just as, in the Inscription, to buy into the name of God means to buy so that the article bought belongs to God, so also the idea underlying, e.g., the expressions to baptise into the name of the Lord, or to believe into the name of the Son of God, is that baptism or faith constitutes the belonging to God or to the Son of God. The author would therefore take exception to the statement that the non-occurrence of the expression ποιεῖντιἐνὀνόματίτινος in profane Greek is due to the absence of this usage of the Name.⁵¹⁰ What we have to deal with here is most likely but a matter of chance; since the use of ὄνομα has been established for the impressive language of the court and of worship, it is quite possible that the phrase ἐντῷὀνόματι τοῦβασιλέως or τοῦθεοῦ may also come to light some day in Egypt or Asia Minor. The present example throws much light upon the development of the meaning of the religious terms of primitive Christianity. It shows us that, when we find, e.g., a Christian of Asia Minor employing peculiar expressions, which occur also in his Bible, we must be very strictly on our guard against summarily asserting a “dependence” upon the Greek Old Testament, or, in fact, the presence of any Semitic influence whatever.—Further in III. iii. 1 below [¯], and Theol. Literaturzeitung, xxv. (1900), p. 735.

ὀψώνιον. The first occurrence of τὰὀψώνια is not in Polybius;⁵¹¹ it is previously found in Pap. Flind. Petr. xiii. 7⁵¹² and 17⁵¹³ (258-253 B.C.); τὰὀψώνια is found in Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. xxxiii. a⁵¹⁴ (Ptolemaic period). In all three places, not pay of soldiers, but quite generally wages; similarly Pap. Lond. xlv.⁵¹⁵ (160-159 B.C.), xv.⁵¹⁶ (131-130 B.Cc.), Pap. Par. 62⁵¹⁷ (Ptolemaic period). The word is to be found in Inscriptions onwards from 278 B.C.⁵¹⁸ Further remarks below, III. iii. 6.

παράδεισος. This word resembles ἀγγαρεύω in its having been divested of its original technical meaning, and in its having become current in a more general sense. It stands for garden in general already in Pap. Flind. Petr. xlvi. b⁵¹⁹ (200 B.C.), cf. xxii.,⁵²⁰ xxx. c,⁵²¹ xxxix. i⁵²² (all of the Ptolemaic period);⁵²³ similarly in the Inscription of Pergamus, Waddington, iii. 2, No. 1720 b (undated). It is frequent in the LXX, always for garden (in three of the passages, viz., Nehemiah 2:8, Ecclesiastes 2:15, Song of Solomon 4:13, as representing פַּרְדֵּס⁵²⁴ ); So in Sir., Sus., Josephus, etc., frequently. Of course, παράδεισος in LXX Genesis 2:8 ff. is also garden, not Paradise. “he first witness to this new technical meaning⁵²⁵ is, doubtless, Paul, 2 Corinthians 12:4, then Luke 23:43 and Revelation 2:7; 4 Esd. 7:53, 8:52.

παρεπίδημος. In LXX Genesis 23:4 and LXX Psalms 38:13 [MT Psalms 39:13], this is the translation of תּוֹשָׁב used, most probably in consequence thereof in 1 Peter 1:1, 1 Peter 2:11, Hebrews 11:13; authenticated only⁵²⁶ in Polybius and Athenaeus. But it had been already used in the will of a certain Aphrodisios of Heraklea, Pap. Flind. Petr. i. xix.⁵²⁷ (225 B.C.), who calls himself, with other designations, a παρεπίδημος. Mahaffy⁵²⁸ remarks upon this: “in the description of the testator we find another new class, παρεπίδημος, a sojourner, so that even such persons had a right to bequeath their property”. Of still greater interest is the passage of a will of date 238-237 B.C.⁵²⁹ which gives the name of a Jewish παρεπίδημος in the Fayyûm:⁵³⁰Ἀπολλώνιον παρεπ]ιδημονὃςκαὶσυριστὶἸωνάθας⁵³¹ [καλεῖται]. The verb παρεπιδημέω, e.g., Pap. Flind. Petr. xiii. 19⁵³²(258-253 B. C.).

παστοφόριον. The LXX use this word in almost all the relatively numerous passages where it occurs, the Apocrypha and Josephus⁵³³ in every case, for the chambers of the Temple. Sturz⁵³⁴ had assigned it to the Egyptian dialect. His conjecture is confirmed by the Papyri. In the numerous documents relating to the Serapeum⁵³⁵ at Memphis, παστοφόριον is used, in a technical sense, of the Serapeum itself, or of cells in the Serapeum:⁵³⁶Pap. Par. 11⁵³⁷ (157 B.C.), 40⁵³⁸ (156 B.C.); similarly in the contemporary documents Pap. Par. 41⁵³⁹ and 37⁵⁴⁰—in the last passage used of the Ἀσταρτιεῖον which is described as being contained ἐντῷμεγάλῳααρπιείῳ.⁵⁴¹ The LXX have thus very happily rendered the general term לִשְׁכָּה, wherever it denotes a chamber of the Temple, by a technical name with which they were familiar. παστοφόριον is also retained by several Codices in 1 Chronicles 9:33, and 2Es 8:29 [Hebr. Ezra 8:29].⁵⁴² περιδέξιον. In LXX Numbers 31:50, Exodus 35:22 and Isaiah 3:20 (in the two latter passages without any corresponding original) for bracelet. To be found in Pap. Flind. Petr. i. xii.⁵⁴³ (238-237 B.C.). The enumeration given there of articles of finery resembles Exodus 35:22, and particularly Isaiah 3:20; in the latter passage the ἐνώτια⁵⁴⁴ (mentioned also in the former) come immediately after the περιδέξια—so in the Papyrus. As the original has no corresponding word in either of the LXX passages, we may perhaps attribute the addition to the fact that the two ornaments were usually named together.

περίστασις. In 2Ma 4:16, Symmachus LXX Psalms 33:5 [MT Psalms 34:5]⁵⁴⁵ (here the LXX has θλῖψις, or παροικία), in the evil sense, for distress; it is not found first of all in Polybius, but already in Pap. Lond. xlii.⁵⁴⁶ (172 B.C.); cf. the Inscription of Pergamus No. 245 A⁵⁴⁷ (before 133 B.C.) and the Inscription of Sestos (ca. 120 B.C.), line 25.⁵⁴⁸ περιτέμνω. The LXX use περιτέμνω always in the technical sense of the ceremonial act of circumcision; this technical meaning also underlies the passages in which circumcision is metaphorically spoken of, e.g., Deuteronomy 10:16 and Jeremiah 4:4. The word is never employed by the LXX in any other sense. The usual Hebrew word מוּל occurs frequently, it is true, in a non-technical signification, but in such cases the translators always choose another word: LXX Psalms 57:8[MT Psalms 58:8] ἀσθενέω for to be cut off,⁵⁴⁹ LXX Psalms 17:10-12 [MT Psalms 118:10-12], ἀμύνομαι, for the cutting in pieces (?) of enemies, LXX Psalms 89:6 [MT Psalms 90:6] ἀποπίπτω (of grass) for to be cut down.⁵⁵⁰ Even in a passage, Deuteronomy 30:6, where מוּל, circumcise, is used metaphorically, they reject περιτέμνω and translate by περικαθαρίζω.⁵⁵¹ The textual history of Ezekiel 16:4 affords a specially good illustration of their severely restrained use of language. To the original (according to our Hebrew text) thy navel-string was not cut, corresponds, in the LXX (according to the current text), οὐκ ἔδησαςτοὺς μαστούςσου, “quite an absurd translation, which, however, just because of its absolute meaninglessness, is, without doubt, ancient tradition”.⁵⁵² But the “translation” is not so absurd after all, if we read ἔδησαν⁵⁵³ with the Alexandrinus and the Marchalianus,⁵⁵⁴ a reading which is supported by the remark of Origen:⁵⁵⁵ the LXX had translated non alligaverunt ubera tua, “sensum magis eloquii exponentes quam verbum de verbo exprirnentes”. That is to say, among the services mentioned here as requiring to be rendered to the helpless new-born girl, the Greek translators set down something different from the procedure described by the Hebrew author; what they did set down corresponds in some degree with the ἐνσπαργάνοιςσπαργανωθῆναι, which comes later.⁵⁵⁶But perhaps they had a different text before them. In any case the translation given by some Codices,⁵⁵⁷viz., οὐκἐτμήθηὁὀμφαλόςσου, is a late correction of the LXX text by our present Hebrew text; other Codices read οὐκ ἔδησαντοὺςμαστούςσου, and add the emendation οὐκἐτμήθηὁὀμφαλός σου; others do the same, but substitute περιετμήθη, a form utterly at variance with LXX usage (and one against which Jerome’s non ligaverunt mamillas teas et umbilicus tuus non est praecisus⁵⁵⁸ still guards), for the ἐτμήθη. It is this late emendation which has occasioned the idea⁵⁵⁹ that the LXX in one case also used τὸνὀμφαλόν as the object of περιτέμνειν. This is not correct. One may truly speak here, for once, about a “usage” of the LXX: περιτέμνω, with them, has always a ceremonial meaning.⁵⁶⁰ In comparison with the verbs הֵסִיר, כָּרַת and מוּל, which are rendered by περιτέμνω, the Greek word undoubtedly introduces an additional nuance to the meaning; not one of the three words contains what the περί, implies. The choice of this particular compound is explained by the fact that it was familiar to the LXX, being in common use as a technical term for an Egyptian custom similar to the Old Testament circumcision. “The Egyptians certainly practised circumcision in the 16th century B.C., probably much earlier.” ⁵⁶¹ Now even if it cannot be made out with certainty that the Israelites copied the practice from the Egyptians, yet it is in the highest degree probable that the Greek Jews are indebted to the Egyptians⁵⁶² for the word. Herodotus already verifies its use in ii. 36 and 104: he reports that the Egyptians περιτάμνονταιτὰαἰδοῖα. But the expression is also authenticated by direct Egyptian testimony: Pap. Lond. xxiv.⁵⁶³ (163 B.C.), ὡς ἔθοςἐστὶτοῖΑἰγυπτίοιςπεριτέμνεσθαι and Pap. Berol. 7820⁵⁶⁴ (14th January, 171 A.D., Fayyûm) still speaks several times of the περιτμηθῆναι of a boy κατὰτὸ ἔθος. If περιτέμνω is thus one of the words which were taken over by the LXX, yet the supposition⁵⁶⁵ that their frequent ἀπερίτμητοςuncircumcised = עָרֵל was first coined by the Jews of Alexandria may have some degree of probability. In the last-cited Berlin Papyrus, at least, the as yet uncircumcised boy is twice described as ἄσημος.⁵⁶⁶ The document appears to be employing fixed expressions. ἄσημος was perhaps the technical term for uncircumcised among the Greek Egyptians;⁵⁶⁷ the more definite and, at the same time, harsher ἀπερίτμητος corresponded to the contempt with which the Greek Jews thought of the uncircumcised.

πῆχυς.

We need have no doubt at all about the contracted genitive πηχῶν,⁵⁶⁸ LXX 1 Kings 7:38-39 (Cod. A) [MT 1 Samuel 7:2; 1 Samuel 7:6], Esther 5:14, Esther 7:9, Ezekiel 40:7, Ezekiel 41:22; John 21:8, Revelation 21:17. It is already found in Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. xli.⁵⁶⁹ (Ptolemaic period) twice; Josephus agrees with the LXX in using πήχεων and πηχῶν promiscuously.⁵⁷⁰ ποτισμός. In Aquila Proverbs 3:8 [MT Pro. 3:8]⁵⁷¹watering, irrigation; to be found in Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. ix. 4⁵⁷² (240 B.C.) .

πράκτωρ. In LXX Isaiah 3:12 for נֹגֵשׁ despot. In the Papyri frequently as the designation of an official; the πράκτωρ⁵⁷³ seems to have been the public accountant:⁵⁷⁴Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. xiii. 17⁵⁷⁵ (258-253 B.C.), and several other undated Papyri of the Ptolemaic period given in Mahaffy, ii.⁵⁷⁶ In Luke 12:58 also the word has most probably a technical meaning; it does not however denote a finance-official, but a lower officer of the court. Symmachus Psalms 108:11 [MT Psalms 109:11]⁵⁷⁷ uses it for נשֶׁהcreditor.

πρεσβύτερος. The LXX translate זָקֵןold man by both πρεσβύτης and πρεσβύτερος. The most natural rendering was πρεσβύτης,and the employment of the comparative πρεσβύτερος must have had some special reason. We usually find πρεσβύτερος in places where the translators appear to have taken the זָקֵן of the original as implying an official position. That they in such cases speak of the elders and not of the old men is explained by the fact that they found πρεσβύτερος already used technically in Egypt for the holder of a communal office. Thus, in Pap. Lugd. A 35 f.⁵⁷⁸ (Ptolemaic period), mention is made of ὁπρεσβύτεροςτῆςκώμης—without doubt an official designation,—although, indeed, owing to the mutilation of another passage in the same Papyrus (lines 17-23), no further particulars as to the nature of this office can be ascertained from it.⁵⁷⁹ The author thinks that οἱπρεσβύτεροι in Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. iv. 6^{13 580} (255-254 B.C.) is also an official designation; cf. also Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. xxxix. a, 3 and 14.⁵⁸¹ Similarly, in the decree of the priests at Diospolis in honour of Callimachus,⁵⁸² (ca. 40 B.C.), the πρεσβύτεροι are still mentioned along with the ἱερεῖςτοῦμεγίστουθεοῦ Ἀμονρασωνθήρ. We have a periphrasis of the title πρεσβύτερος in Pap. Taur. 8^{60f. 583} (end of the 2nd cent B.C.), in which the attribute τὸπρεσβεῖον ἔχωνπαρὰτοὺςἄλλους τοὺςἐντῇκώμῃκατοικοῦντας is applied to a certain Erieus. We still find οἱπρεσβύτεροι in the 2nd century A.D. as Egyptian village-magistrates, of whom a certain council of three men, οἱτρεῖς, appears to have occupied a special position.⁵⁸⁴ Here also then the Alexandrian translators have appropriated a technical expression which was current in the land. Hence we must not summarily attribute the “New Testament,” i.e., the early Christian, passages, in which πρεσβύτεροι occurs as an official designation, to the “Septuagint idiom,” since this is in reality an Alexandrian one. In those cases, indeed, where the expression is used to designate Jewish municipal authorities⁵⁸⁵ and the Sanhedrin,⁵⁸⁶ it is allowable to suppose that it had been adopted by the Greek Jews from the Greek Bible,⁵⁸⁷ and that the Christians who had to translate the term the old men found it convenient to render it by the familiar expression οἱπρεσβύτεροι. But that is no reason for deeming this technical term a peculiarity of the Jewish idiom. Just as the Jewish usage is traceable to Egypt, so is it possible that also the Christian communities of Asia Minor, which named their superintendents πρεσβύτεροι, may have borrowed the word from their surroundings, and may not have received it through the medium of Judaism at all.⁵⁸⁸ The Inscriptions of Asia Minor prove beyond doubt that πρεσβύτεροι was the technical term, in the most diverse localities, for the members of a corporation: ⁵⁸⁹ in Chios, CIG. ii. Nos. 2220 and 2221 (1st cent. B.C.⁵⁹⁰), —in both passages the council of the πρεσβύτεροι is also named τὸπρεσβύτεροι; in Cos, CIG. ii. No. 2508 = Paton and Hicks, No. 119 (imperial period⁵⁹¹); in Philadelphia in Lydia, CIG. ii. No. 3417 (imperial period), in which the συνέδριοντῶνπρεσβυτέρων,⁵⁹² mentioned here, is previously named γερουσία. “It can be demonstrated that in some islands and in many towns of Asia Minor there was, besides the Boule, also a Gerousia, which possessed the privileges of corporation, and, as it appears, usually consisted of Boueutes who were delegated to it. Its members were called γέροντες, γερουσιασταὶ, πρεσβύτεροι, γεραιοί. They had a president (ἄρχων, προστάτης, προηγούμενος), a secretary, a special treasury, a special place of assembly (γεροντικὸν, γερουσία), and a palaestra.”⁵⁹³—See also III. iii. 4, below [¯].

πρόθεσις. The LXX translate the technical expression bread of the countenance (also called row-bread [Schichtbrot ] and continualbread), which Luther rendered Schaubrot (show-bread), in 1 Samuel 21:6 and Nehemiah 10:33 by of οἱἄρτοιτοῦπροσώπου, and in Exodus 25:30 by οἱἄρτοιοἱἐνώπιοι, but their usual rendering is οἱἄρτοιτῆςπροθέσεως. The usual explanation of this πρόθεσις is setting forth, i.e., of the bread before God. The author leaves it undecided whether this explanation is correct; but, in any case, it is to be asked how the LXX came to use this free translation, while they rendered the original verbally in the other three passages. The author thinks it not unlikely that they were influenced by the reminiscence of a ceremonial custom of their time: “Au culte se rattachaient des institutions philantropiques telle que la suivante: Le medecin Diodes cite par Athenle (3, 110), nous apprend qu’il y avait uneπρόθησις^sicde pains periodique a Alexandrie, dans le temple de Saturne (ἈλεξανδρεῖςτῷΚρόνῳἀφιεροῦντεςπροτιθέασινἐστίειντῷβουλομένῳἐντῷτοῦΚρόνουἱερῷ) Cetteπρόθεσιςτῶνἄρτωνse retrouve dans un papyrus du Louvre (60 bis).”⁵⁹⁴ The expression πρόθεσιςἄρτων is also found in LXX 2 Chronicles 13:11; cf. 2Ma 10:3.

πυρράκης.

Hitherto known only from LXX Genesis 25:25 [MT Genesis 25:25], LXX 1 Kings 16:12,17:42 [MT 1 Samuel 16:12, 1 Samuel 17:42], for ruddy. To be found in Pap. Flind. Petr. i. xvi. 1 ⁵⁹⁵ (237 B.C.), xxi.⁵⁹⁶ (237 B.C.), possibly also in xiv.⁵⁹⁷ (237 B.C.).

σιτομέτριον. In Luke 12:42 for portio frumenti; referred to in this passage only: to be verified by Pap. Flind. Petr. xxxiii. a⁵⁹⁸ (Ptolemaic period). Cf. σιτομετρέω in Genesis 47:12 (said of Joseph in Egypt).

σκευοφύλαξ.

Earliest occurrence in the Recension of Lucianus,⁵⁹⁹1 Samuel 17:22, as the literal translation of שׁוֹמֵרהכֵּלִיםkeeper of the baggage.⁶⁰⁰ The supposition that the word was not first applied as a mere momentary creation of the recensionist, but came to him on good authority, is supported by its occurrence in Pap. Flind. Petr. xiii. 10⁶⁰¹ (258-253 B.C.): σκεοφυλακα there is to be read σκευοφύλακα, in accordancewith σκευοφυλάκιον in Pap. Flind. Petr. ii v. a⁶⁰² (before 250 B.C.).

σπυρίς, σφυρίς. With the σφυρίς (vernacular aspiration⁶⁰³) handed down on good authority in Mark 8:8, Mark 8:20, Matthew 15:37, Matthew 16:10, Acts 9:25, cf. σφυφίδα in Pap. Flind. Petr. xviii. 2 a⁶⁰⁴ (246 B.C.), though we should observe the reading σπυριδίου in Pap. Flind. Petr. Z d⁶⁰⁵ (Ptolemaic period). Further remarks in III. i. 2, below [¯].

στάσις.

Among other words, the translation of which by στάσις is more or less intelligible, מָעוֹזstrongholdNahum 3:11, and הֲדֹםfootstool1 Chronicles 28:2, are rendered in the same way by the LXX, and Symmachus⁶⁰⁶ uses στάσις in Isaiah 6:13 for מַצֶבֶּתroot-stock (truncus) or young tree, cutting;⁶⁰⁷ certainly a very remarkable use of the word, and one hardly explained by the extraordinary note which Schleusner⁶⁰⁸ makes to the passage in Nahum: “στάσιςest firmitas, consistentia, modus et via subsistendi ac resistendi ”. What is common to the above three words translated by στάσις is the idea of secure elevation above the ground, of upright position, and this fact seems to warrant the conjecture that the translators were acquainted with a quite general usage of στάσις for any upright object.⁶⁰⁹ This conjecture is confirmed by Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. xiv. 3⁶¹⁰ (Ptolemaic period ?), i.e., if the στάσεις which is found in this certainly very difficult passage be rightly interpreted as erections, buildings.⁶¹¹ This use of the word seems to the author to be more certain in an Inscription from Mylasa in Caria, CIG. ii. No. 2694 a (imperial period), in which Boeckh interprets the word στάσεις (so restored by him) as stabula.

συγγενής. In the Old Testament Apocryphal books there is found not infrequently the expression kinsman of a king. Like friend,⁶¹² etc., it is a court-title, which was transferred from the Persian usage to the language of Alexander the Great’s court, and thence became very common among the Diadochi. Compare, in regard to Egypt, the exhaustive references in Lumbroso;⁶¹³ in regard to Pergamus, the Inscription No. 248, line 28f. (135-134 B.C.).⁶¹⁴ συνέχω.

Used in Luke 22:63 of the officers who held Jesus in charge; in the same sense Pap. Flind. Petr. ii. xx.⁶¹⁵ (252 B.C.).

σῶμα. In Revelation 18:13σώματα stands for slaves. σῶμα was used for person in very early times, and already in classical Greek the slaves were called σώματαοἰκετικά or δοῦλα.⁶¹⁶σῶμα alone—without any such addition—is not found used for slave earlier than in LXX Genesis 34:29 [MT Genesis 36:6],⁶¹⁷Tob 10:10, Daniel 14:32, 2Ma 8:11, Ep. Arist. (ed. M. Schmidt), p. 1629, in Polybius and later writers. The Greek translators of the O.T. found the usage in Egypt: the Papyri of the Ptolemaic period yield a large number of examples, cf. especially Pap. Flind. Petr. xxxix.⁶¹⁸ ὑποζύγιον. The LXX translate חֲמוֹרass in very many places by ὑποζύγιον (cf. also Theodotion Judges 5:10⁶¹⁹Judges 19:10⁶²⁰ also the Alexandrinus and the recension of Lucianus read ὑποζυγίων in both passages], Symmachus Genesis 36:24⁶²¹). Similarly, ὑποζύγιον stands for ass in Matthew 21:5 (cf. Zechariah 9:9) and 2 Peter 2:16.⁶²² This specialising of the original general term draughtanimal, beast of burden, is described by Grimm⁶²³ as a usage peculiar to Holy Scripture, which is explained by the importance of the ass as the beast of burden κατ’ἐξοχήν in the East. A statistical examination of the word, however, might teach us that what we have to deal with here is no “biblical” peculiarity, but, at most, a special usage of the LXX which may possibly have influenced other writings. But even the LXX do not occupy an isolated position in regard to it; the truth is rather that they avail themselves of an already-current Egyptian idiom. It seems to the author, at least, that the “biblical” usage of ὑποζύγιον is already shown in the following passages: Pap. Flind. Petr. xxii.⁶²⁴ (Ptolemaic period), where βοῦς⁶²⁵ἢ ὑποζύγιονἢπρόβατον are mentioned after one another; Pap. Flind. Petr. xxv. d⁶²⁶ (2nd half of 3rd cent. B.C.), where the donkey-driver Horos gives a receipt for money due to him by a certain Charmos in respect of ὑποζύγια: ὁμολογεῖὯροςὀνηλάτης ἔχεινπαρὰΧάρμουδέονταὑποζυγίωνκατὰσύμβολον ; similarly in the same Papyrus i.⁶²⁷ Grimm’s remark may, of course, be turned to account in the explanation of this idiom.

υἱός (τέκνον).

Those circumlocutions by which certain adjectival conceptions are represented by υἱός or τέκνον followed by a genitive, and which are very frequent in the early Christian writings, are traced back by A. Buttmann⁶²⁸ to an “influence of the oriental spirit of language”; they are explained by Winer-Lunemann⁶²⁹ as “Hebrew-like circumlocution,” which however is no mere idle circumlocution, but is due to the more vivid imagination of the oriental, who looked upon any very intimate relationship—whether of connection, origin or dependence—as a relation of sonship, even in the spiritual sphere. According to Grimm,⁶³⁰ these periphrases spring “ex ingenio linguae hebraeae,” and Cremer⁶³¹ describes them as “Hebrew-like turns of expression in which υἱός . . . is used analogously to the Hebr. בֵּן ”. In order to understand this “New Testament” idiom, it is also necessary to distinguish here between the cases in which this “periphrastic” υἱός or τέκνον⁶³² occurs in translations of Semitic originals, and the instances found in texts which were in Greek from the first. This distinction gives us at once the statistical result that the circumlocution is more frequent in the former class than in the latter. One should not, therefore, uniformly trace the “New Testament” passages back to the influence of an un-Greek “spirit of language,” but, in the majority of cases, should rather speak merely of a translation from the Semitic. What occasioned the frequent υἱός or τέκνον was no “spirit of language” which the translators may have brought to their task, but rather the hermeneutic method into which they were unconsciously drawn by the original. First as regards υἱός: such translations occur in the following passages,—Mark 2:19 = Matthew 9:15 = Luke 5:34, οἱυἱοὶ τοῦνυμφῶνος, a saying of Jesus.—Mark 3:17, υἱοὶβροντῆς, where the original, βοανεργες or βοανηργες, is also given, and the equation βοανε or βοανη = בְּנֵי is certainly evident. —Matthew 8:12 = Matthew 13:38, of οἱυἱοὶτῆςβασιλείας, sayings of Jesus. —Matthew 13:38, οἱυἱοὶτῆςβασιλείας, a saying of Jesus. —Matthew 23:15, υἱὸνγεέννης, a saying of Jesus.—Matthew 21:5, υἱὸνὑποζυγίου, translation⁶³³ of the Hebrew בֶּן־אֲתֹנוֹת, Zechariah 9:9. —Luke 10:6, υἱὸςεἰρήνης, a saying of Jesus.—Luke 16:3 and Luke 2:34, οἱυἱοὶτοῦαἰῶνοςτούτου, sayings of Jesus.—Luke 16:8, τοὺςυἱοὺςτοῦφωτός, a saying of Jesus.—Luke 20:36, τῆς ἀναστάσεωςυἱοί, a saying of Jesus.—Acts 4:36, υἱὸςπαρακλήσεως, where the ostensible original, Βαρναβας,⁶³⁴ is also given.—The υἱὲδιαβόλου, Acts 13:10, should also be mentioned here, as the expression clearly forms a sarcastic antithesis to Βαριησοῦ, son of Jesus (Acts 13:6). As regards τέκνον, we have the same phenomenon in (Matthew 11:19 =) Luke 7:35, τῶντένωναὐτῇς [σοφίας], a saying of Jesus. Similarly quotations and manifest analogical formations should not be taken into consideration in a critical examination of the original idiom; e.g., υἱοὶφωτός in 1 Thessalonians 5:5 (here also the analogical formation υἱοίἡμέρας and John 12:36 (cf. τέκναφωτός, Ephesians 5:8) should probably be taken as a quotation from Luke 16:8, or of the saying of Jesus preserved there, but in any case as an already familiar phrase; οἱυἱοὶτῶνπροφητῶν, Acts 3:25, is a quotation of a combination which had become familiar from LXX 1 Kings 20:35,2 Kings 2:3,2 Kings 2:5,2 Kings 2:7 [MT 1 Samuel 20:35, 2 Samuel 2:3, 2 Samuel 2:5, 2 Samuel 2:7]—the following καὶ [υἱοὶ] τῆςδιαθήκης is an analogical formation; ὁυἱὸςτῆςἀπωλείας, 2 Thessalonians 2:3 and John 17:12 is an echo of LXX Isaiah 57:4τέκναἀπωλειας ; τὰ τένατοῦδιαβόλου1 John 3:10 is perhaps an analogical formation from οἱυἱοὶτοῦπονηροῦ, Matthew 13:38. There remain, then, the combination υἱοὶτῆςἀπειθείας (Colossians 3:6), Ephesians 2:2, Ephesians 5:6, and its antithesis τέκνα ὑπακοῆς, 1 Peter 1:14; τὰτέκνατῆςἐπαγγελίας, Galatians 4:28, Romans 9:8, and its antitheses κατάρας, 2 Peter 2:14, τέκναὀργῆς, Ephesians 2:3. But it is not at all necessary, even for the explanation of these expressions, to go back to the Hebrew spirit or to the oriental genius of language. The system followed by the Alexandrian translators of the Old Testament may furnish us here with an instructive hint. In innumerable cases their task was to render into Greek an exceedingly large number of those characteristic Semitic turns of expression formed with בֵּן. True, they rendered not a few of those cases by the corresponding constructions with υἱός; but very frequently, too, translating freely (as we might say), they found substitutes for them in Greek expressions of a different character. But such a procedure, in view of the comparative scrupulosity with which in general they follow the original, must surely surprise us, if we are to pre-suppose in them, as in the early Christian writers, a certain Semitic “genius of language” lying in reserve, as it were, and behind their “feeling” for the Greek tongue. Had they always imitated that characteristic בֵּן by using υἱοί, then it might have been maintained with some plausibility that they had seized the welcome opportunity of translating literally and, at the same time, of giving scope to the non-Hellenic tendencies of their nature in the matter of language; as they, however, did not do this, we may be permitted to say that they had no such tendency at all. We give the following cases,⁶³⁵ from which this fact may be deduced with certainty: “Son”of Man, Isaiah 56:2, Proverbs 15:11 = ἄνθρωπος; son of the uncle, Numbers 36:11 = ἀνεψίος; son of the she-asses,Zechariah 9:9 = πῶλοςνέος ;⁶³⁶ “son”of the month, often, = μηνιαῖος; “son”of the dawn, Isaiah 14:12 = πρωΐἀνατέλλων; “son” of strangers, often, = ἀλλογενής or ἀλλόφυλος; “son”of the people,Genesis 23:11 = πολίτης; “son”of the quiver, Lamentations 3:13 = ἰοὶ⁶³⁷φαρέτρας; “son”of strength, 2 Chronicles 28:6 = δυνατὸςἰσχύϊ ; “son”of misery, Proverbs 31:5 = ἀσθενής ; “son”of strokes, Deuteronomy 25:2 = ἄξιοςπληγῶν. And if, on the other hand, cases can be pointed out in which the LXX imitate⁶³⁸ the characteristic בֵּן, then the υἱός of the Greek text is not to be forthwith explained as caused by the translators’ oriental way of thinking, but rather as due to the original. At the very most we might speak of a “Hebraism of translation,” but not of a Hebraism simply.⁶³⁹ But we are of opinion that it is not at all necessary, in this matter, to have recourse to a Hebraism in every case; we cannot, at least, perceive why such constructions⁶⁴⁰ as LXX Judges 19:22υἱοὶπαρανόμων, 1 Samuel 20:31υἱὸςθανάτου,⁶⁴¹2 Samuel 13:28υἱοὶδυνάμεως, 2Es 4:1, 2Es 10:7, 2Es 10:16 [MT Ezra 4:1, Ezra 10:7, Ezra 10:16 - not Ezra 6:19] υἱοὶ ἀποικίας, Hosea 2:4 [not Eze.] τέκναπορνείας, Isaiah 57:4τέκνα ἀπωλείας, should be looked upon as un-Greek.⁶⁴² It is true, of course, that a Corinthian baggage-carrier or an Alexandrian donkey-driver would not so speak—the expressions are meant to be in elevated style and to have an impressive sound; but for that very reason they might have been used by a Greek poet. Plato uses the word ἔκγονος⁶⁴³ in exactly the same way: Phaedr., p. 275 D, ἔκγονατῆςζωγραφίας and Rep., pp. 506 E and 507 A, ἔκγονοςτοῦἀγαθοῦ (genitive of τὸἀγαθόν). In the impressive style of speech on inscriptions and coins we find υἱός in a number of formal titles of honour⁶⁴⁴ such as υἱὸςτῆςγερουσίας,υἱὸςτῆςπόλεως,υἱὸςτοῦδήμου,⁶⁴⁵υἱὸςἈφροδισιέων, etc. And thus, though the υἱός of the biblical passages above may have been occasioned, in the first instance, by the original, yet no one can call it un-Greek. —W. Schulze has also directed the author’s attention to the υἱὸςτύχης in the Tragedians, and filius fortunae in Horace. Our judgment, then, in regard to the philological history of the above-cited expressions (Greek from the first) in Paul and the Epistles of Peter, may be formulated somewhat in this way. In no case whatever are they un-Greek; they might quite well have been coined by a Greek who wished to use impressive language. Since, however, similar turns of expression are found in the Greek Bible, and are in part cited by Paul and others, the theory of analogical formations will be found a sufficient explanation.

ὁυἱὸςτοῦθεοῦ.

It is very highly probable that the “New Testament” designation of Christ as the Son of God goes back to an “Old Testament” form of expression. But when the question is raised as to the manner in which the “Heathen-Christians” of Asia Minor, of Rome, or of Alexandria, understood this designation, it seems equally probable that such “Old Testament presuppositions” were not extant among them. We are therefore brought face to face with the problem whether they could in any way understand the Saviour’s title of dignity in the light of the ideas of their locality. If this solemn form of expression was already current among them in any sense whatever, that would be the very sense in which they understood it when they heard it in the discourses of the missionary strangers: how much more so, then, seeing that among the “heathen” the expression Son of God was a technical term, and one which therefore stamped itself all the more firmly upon the mind. When the author came upon the expression for the first time in a non-Christian document (Pap. Berol. 7006⁶⁴⁶ (Fayyûm, 22nd August, 7 A.D.): ἔτους ἔ[κ]τουκαὶτριακοστοῦ [τῆς] Καίσαροςκρατήσεωςθεοῦυἱοῦ, where without doubt the Emperor Augustus is described as θεοῦυἱός), he had no idea how very frequently the title is used for Augustus in the Inscriptions. Since that time he has become convinced that the matter stands thus: υἱὸςθεοῦ is a translation of the divi filius which is equally frequent in Latin Inscriptions. Since, then, it is established that the expression υἱόςθεοῦ was a familiar one in the Graeco-Roman world from the beginning of the first century,⁶⁴⁷ we can no longer ignore the fact; it is indirectly of great importance for the history of the early-Christian title of Christ. The fact does not of course explain its origin or its primary signification, but it yields a contribution to the question as to how it might be understood in the empire.⁶⁴⁸ It must be placed in due connection with what is said by Harnack⁶⁴⁹ about the term θεός as used in the imperial period.

φίλος.

Friend was the title of honour given at the court of the Ptolemies to the highest royal officials. “Greek writers, it is true, already used this name for the officials of the Persian king; from the Persian kings the practice was adopted by Alexander, and from him again by all the Diadochi; but we meet it particularly often as an Egyptian title.”⁶⁵⁰ The LXX were, herefore, quite correct (from their standpoint) in translating שַׂרprince by φίλος, Esther 1:3, Esther 2:18, Esther 6:9,—a fact not taken into consideration in the Concordance of Hatch and Redpath—and the same usage is exceedingly frequent in the Books of Maccabees.⁶⁵¹ We think it probable that the Alexandrian writer of the Book of Wisdom was following this idiom when he spoke of the pious as φίλουςθεοῦ (Wis 7:27, cf. Wis 7:14); similarly the Alexandrian Philo, Fragm. (M.) ii., p. 652, πᾶςσοφὸςθεοῦφίλος, and De Sobr. (M.) i., p. 401, where he quotes the saying in LXX Gen. 18:17 (in our text οὐμὴκρύψωἐγὼἀπὸἈβραὰμτοῦπαιδόςμου) thus: μὴ ἐπικαλύψωἐγὼἀπὸἈβραὰμτοῦφίλου⁶⁵²μου. In explaining this, reference is usually made to Plato Legg. iv., p. 716, 8 μὲνσώφρωνθεῷφίλος,ὅμοιοςγάρ ; but, although it is not to be denied that this passage may perhaps have exercised an influence in regard to the choice of the expression, yet the Alexandrians would, in the first instance, understand it⁶⁵³ in the sense to which they had been predisposed by the above-mentioned familiar technical usage of φίλος : φίλοςθεοῦ denotes high honour in the sight of God⁶⁵⁴—nothing more nor less. The question whether friend of God is to be interpreted as one who loved God or as one whom God loved, is not only insoluble⁶⁵⁵ but superfluous. Philo and the others would hardly be thinking of a “relation of the will . . . . , such, however, that the benevolence and love of God towards men are to be emphasised as its main element”.⁶⁵⁶ In John 15:15οὐκέτιλέγω ὑμᾶςδούλους . . . ὑμᾶςδὲ εἴρηκαφίλους, as can be seen by the contrast, φίλος has, of course, its simple sense of friend. In Corinth the Gospel was understood otherwise than in Jerusalem, in Egypt otherwise than in Ephesus. The history of our Religion, in its further course, manifestly shows distinct phases of Christianity: we see, in succession or side by side, a Jewish Christianity and an International—a Roman, a Greek, a German and a Modern. The historical conditions of this vigorous development are to be found to a large extent in the profusion of the individual forms which were available for the ideas of the Evangelists and the Apostles. The variation in the meaning of religious terms has not always been to the disadvantage of religion itself: the Kingdom of God is not in words.