Aquila's version was painfully literal,
>> staying faithful to the Hebrew idiom at the expense of any attempt at good
>> Greek grammar.
>
>The Christian traditions, clearly unsympathetic to Aquila, give such
>reports. Whether we should transmit them as reliable history is quite
>another matter!
You have the advantage of me, in that I must rely on secondary material.
But my remarks here are based on Alfred Rahlfs' introduction to his edition
of the Septuagint. He begins (p. LVIII):
'As a result, the Judaism of this period fashioned an entirely new Greek
translation of the Old Testament. Aquila, a Greek proselyte and a disciple
of Akiba, rendered every detail of the sacred Test as precisely as possible
into Greek, and he did not shrink from perpetrating the most appalling
outrages to the whole essence of the Greek language.'
I cannot reproduce his detailed argument here because it involves comparison
between a number of Hebrew and Greek forms, and I do not know how to
transmit either alphabet by e-mail. However it looks pretty odd Greek to
me. Rahlfs concludes:
'Aquila's translation of the Bible must on occasions have proved altogether
incomprehensible to Non-Jews, and it is not to be wondered at that Jerome
made fun of peculiarities such as 'syn ton ouranon kai syn ten gen'. The
Jews, however, held this translation in the highest esteem, and they came to
use it for centuries, employing it even in their religious services.'
Bill.
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