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The Puzzling Barberini Greek Version of Habakkuk 3

[Ideally intended for a Septuagint section, but there is none this year for some reason!?]

In the last three centuries before Christ, the books of the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek at various times and in various places. For some books, the original translation (the Old Greek, OG) was also accompanied by later translations or revisions. This is famously the case for Judges, Daniel, Tobit, and a few others. There is a curious case, however, in which only one chapter of a book has dueling translations: Habakkuk chapter 3. In a handful of manuscripts, in addition to the OG, there is an anonymous translation usually called the Barberini version. In three verses (Hab 3:2, 8, 18) the two Greek texts are extremely similar, but in the rest of the chapter they diverge almost as much as two translations of the same Hebrew could. Although the origins of the Barberini version remain obscure, I have argued (Harper, 2015, Responding to a Puzzled Scribe) that it was a separate translation from the OG, and that the similarities between the two texts arose out of conflation in the copying process. This conclusion is supported in part by the even more conflated text (presenting a mixture of OG and Barberini readings) found in Codex Venetus and ms 456. More interesting than the origins of each text, however, is teasing out the approach and goals of each translator, to trace the process by which each has taken the same source text to produce remarkably different translations. The OG translator seems to have been preoccupied with making sense of the Hebrew and remaining as formally close as possible while still producing mostly comprehensible Greek. The translator of Barberini, however, was concerned more with producing stylish and natural Greek than with sticking to his source text; nevertheless, the resulting translation is still remarkably faithful to the Hebrew.

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