«Origen maintained that, before the Christian era, when the LXX was a purely Jewish document, the divine name was rendered not by the Greek kurios (Lord) but rather by the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. This claim seems to make perfect sense, given the sanctity of the explicit Name and given that Aquila's translation, which was endorsed by the Rabbis, used the tetragram. Origen's view, however, was seriously challenged in 1929 with the publication of W. W. Graf von Baudissin's treatise "Kyrios als Gottesname im Judentum". According to Baudissin the LXX had rendered the divine name as kurios right from the beginning. Today, however, Baudissin's view is generally discarded, mainly because of the discovery of two crucial LXX fragments dating to pre-Christian times. The first is the so-called Fouad papyrus 266, made partially known in 1944. This papyrus dates back to the early first century BCE at the latest, and contains several chapters of Deuteronomy in Greek. The importance of this document is that every occurrence of the divine name is written with the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. In the older Rylands Papyrus 458 the divine name is not preserved. But Kahle concludes: "there can be no doubt that here in line 27 the divine name was written as Tetragrammaton with Hebrew letters and in this way completed the [damaged] line". The Judaean Desert findings brought a second new piece of evidence. In 1953, P. Barthélemy published an important paper in which a fragment of Habbakuk is reproduced from a Greek leather scroll. Although Barthélemy is interested in other aspects of what he calls "the missing link", one can quite clearly discern, after careful comparison with a modem LXX, that the penultimate line of the right-hand column contains 'Tetragrammaton ΩC". This is very fortunate, since the divine name does not appear very often in Habbakuk and the rest of the line is missing. In modern editions of the LXX this line is a part of verse 2:14, in which the name is given in the genitive case: "... kuriou hōs ...". Barthélemy himself adds in a footnote: "On notera ... I'ecriture du tétragramme en lettres 'phéniciennes'".
Although this evidence seems to destroy the very foundation on which Baudissin's theory might have relied, an incisive paper by Albert Pietersma is able to at least present a possible scenario whereby the fragments, being Palestinian rather than Egyptian recensions, represent an "archaizing tendency" in whose framework a "revisionary activity" took place at the time of the production of the oldest extant manuscripts of the LXX. Although Pietersma's argument is too lengthy to be reproduced here in full, one of its main thrusts relies on the use of oblique cases and articulation. To make this clear one must realize that, as a foreign linguistic element, the Tetragrammaton is indeclinable and thus, whenever the dative case was required, it would have had to be preceded by the dative article tō. Otherwise, the meaning of the text would have been ambiguous. Now, reasons Pietersma, if those dative occurrences of the Tetragrammaton had been systematically replaced later with kuriō (i.e., kurios in the dative case), the article would have stayed in most cases, so that the correspondence Lh = tō kuriō would have prevailed over Lh = kuriō, both grammatically correct. The fact is, however, that the opposite is true, namely, there is a much higher degree of occurrence for the second form than for the first. "Now, if we posit that the original LXX did not have kyrios but the indeclinable tetragram instead, we would have to believe that the kyrios surrogator ... hit on such a remarkable degree of correspondence." Concludes Pietersma in Holmesian style: "Impossible it is not, but certainly improbable."
If I understand Pietersma's argument correctly (it is more convoluted than my simplified explanation), I fail to be led to his conclusion. Why would it be improbable that the revisor would have decided in each case, according to context or personal taste, whether to leave out or to retain the article? The concept of probability is meaningless unless the rules of the game have been at least tentatively established. For all its brilliancy and excellent documentation, Pietersma's article is not convincing and the fact remains that, in his own words, "we have early, even pre-Christian, MS evidence for the tetragram and no such MS evidence to the contrary." Not all pre-Christian manuscripts use the Tetragrammaton. One of the Greek Leviticus fragments found in Qumran offers a phonetic transcription (iota, alpha, omega), thus raising the intriguing question as to the origin and pronunciation of the divine name, a topic beyond the limited scope of this work.»
«On the "original" Septuagint»
[«Σχετικά με την «αυθεντική» Εβδομήκοντα»],
The Bible translator, United Bible Societies,
July/Ιούλιος 1994 - Vol/Τόμ. 45, No/Αρ. 3,
pp./σσ. 327-329.
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