Nicholas de Lange, Apocrypha: Jewish Literature of the Hellenistic Age (New York: Viking Press, 1978) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Biblical apocrypha and the in-betweenness of maskilic translation
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2024
In recent years, the role of translation in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) has become the focus of increasing scholarly attention. Often, the maskilic engagement with translation is viewed as an unambiguous route to modernity and to modern Jewish literature. But while the maskilim’s utilization of translation as a means for cultural innovation is now almost a truism among literary historians, their hesitations surrounding the importation of foreign works into the Hebrew literary sphere have been largely overlooked. This article discusses the translation of biblical apocrypha in the early Haskalah. It argues that the tangential position of translation in general, and the translation of biblical apocrypha in particular, posited this literary activity as an especially productive platform for unpacking concerns surrounding the means, forms, and languages of interreligious dialogue. For the maskilim, translation was not merely a device for literary and cultural modernization, so much as it was a way of reflecting on the promise and perils of modernity.
Religious Studies Review, 2014
This is the first large-scale commentary on the most expansive of the Homeric Hymns, a significantly revised version of Vergados's doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Virginia in 2007. A comprehensive commentary on the Hymn to Hermes has been a long time coming, no doubt due in part to the daunting nature of the task: the commentator must deal with a poem riddled with unique language and structural quandaries. Vergados proves a sure guide. An extensive introduction treats inter alia interpretative matters (such as the roles of music, song, and humor in the narrative), the relation of the poem to other poetry (both archaic and later), structural questions, the date and place of composition, and the transmission of the text. In constituting the Greek text, Vergados relies upon the reports of Càssola (1975) rather than fresh collation of the manuscripts, but for a text so well established in previous editions, the effort of further collation would have reaped few benefits. Vergados's text diverges from Càssola's in a number of instances. The commentary makes up the majority of the book. For a poem of this magnitude, there is always more that could be said, or from a different perspective, but the commentary is wide-ranging and extremely useful. Not every textual choice or interpretative argument will gain universal assent but Vergados, even when speculative, is for the most part admirably aware of argumentative pitfalls and provides the reader with different viewpoints. The volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the poem.
One is led to believe that two distinct types of modern translation of the Hebrew Bible exist: scholarly translations included in critical commentaries, and translations prepared for believing communities, Christian and Jewish. In practice, however, the two types of translation are now rather similar in outlook and their features need to be scrutinized. Scholarly translations included in most critical commentaries are eclectic, that is, their point of departure is MT, but they also draw much on all other textual sources and include emendations when the known textual sources do not yield a satisfactory reading. In a way, these translations present critical editions of the Hebrew Bible, since they reflect the critical selection process of the available textual evidence. These translations claim to reflect the Urtext of the biblical books, even if this term is usually not used explicitly in the description of the translation. The only difference between these translations and a critical edition of the texts in the original languages is that they are worded in a modern language and usually lack a critical apparatus defending the text-critical choices. The publication of these eclectic scholarly translations reflects a remarkable development. While there is virtually no existing reconstruction of the Urtext of the complete Bible in Hebrew (although the original text of several individual books and chapters has been reconstructed), 1 such reconstructions do exist in translation. These 1 The following studies (arranged chronologically) present a partial or complete reconstruction of (parts of) biblical books: J. Meinhold, Die Jesajaerzählungen Jesaja 36–39
1 Background Traditionally, text-critical analysis of Hebrew Scripture started with mt and sp, and since 1947 it also covers the Judean Desert texts. The picture must be completed by also consulting the ancient translations, even though the Hebrew texts behind those translations must be reconstructed first, and this procedure often involves an almost impossible enterprise. It is an accepted view that the Hebrew parent text of the lxx needs to be taken into consideration in the textual praxis, but we hear little about the other versions, t s v,1 because v and t almost always agree with mt. They are less significant for textual analysis, but remain important for understanding the biblical exegesis in antiquity. Specialists find more variants in s, but they often state that s, also, differs very little from mt. In this study, we will make some general remarks on these three versions, in an attempt to place them in their right position in the textual praxis. These three versions ought to be recorded in the critical editions of the Hebrew Bible, but in my view their status in the textual descriptions is in need of some refinement.2 We wish to reiterate that v and t, as well as kaige-Th, Aquila, and Symmachus are virtually identical to mt, and to a great extent this also pertains to s. At the beginning of the critical inquiry into Hebrew Scripture and its translations , scholars described the wealth of available evidence for the early text of the Bible as sources for an analysis. However, they did not necessarily have the critical insight to realize the different types of contribution made by these sources to our understanding of the ancient Hebrew text. A good example is the 1 The following abbreviations are used: t = Targum(im), s(yriac) = Peshitta, v = Vulgate. The earliest written evidence for these versions is available for the fragments of the Targumim from Qumran. 2 In this analysis, we exclude the Arabic translation of Saadia (882-942 ce) and the secondary translations made from the lxx: Latin (the Vetus Latina), Syriac (the Syro-Palestinian trans