Hexapla

Last month, the papers from the Text & Canon Institute’s first academic colloquium were published as The Forerunners and Heirs of Origen’s Hexapla. Thanks to our supporters, the book is available open access. This article is written to introduce Origen’s work and to celebrate this milestone.

Sound Bible study often requires careful comparison of different translations. After strewing different translations over a desk and reading each one individually, one wishes for a more organized tool to ease comparison.

One could consult a volume like the NIV, KJV, NASB, Amplified, Parallel Bible for such a purpose. With each version in its own column to be read from top to bottom and the verses arranged in parallel fashion, one can simply compare the different translations. The bible software user can create their own parallel bible by opening and arranging windows however preferred. With so many translations, a vast amount of knowledge must be collected and organized so that it works for the user.

The history of parallel bibles shows a human impulse for ordering textual knowledge. The late Renaissance Polyglots (multi-language Bibles) were products of this tendency. Biblical scholars produced monumental editions in international cooperation in Alcalá, Spain (Complutensian Polyglot; 1522); Antwerp, Belgium (The Antwerp Polyglot; 1572); Paris, France (The Paris Polyglot; 1645); and London, England (The London Polyglot; 1658). The culmination of these great Polyglots, Brian Walton’s London Polyglot, contained biblical texts in nine languages assembled in parallel: Hebrew, Samaritan, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian. But where did this idea to produce such Bibles come from?¹For this history, see Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658),” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 3: From 1450 to 1750, ed. Euan Cameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138–156.

There were Medieval precursors to these massive tomes, but even these appear to owe their inspiration to the work of a classically Greek trained catechetical instructor from Alexandria, Egypt named Origen.

Who is Origen?

Origen is best known today as a philosopher or theologian. But both his followers and detractors note that he was trained thoroughly in grammar or philology and devoted himself to this discipline. Origen did not just know his parts of speech. Rather, training in philology meant that he was a diorthōtēs (διορθωτής) or a corrector of copies of ancient books as well as an exegete of those same texts. Thus, he collected many copies of the scriptures and even evaluated whether they belonged to the accurate, old, or majority copies. Likewise, he collected the various translations of the Scriptures and evaluated their “expressiveness” and clarity or whether a version was enslaved to the Hebrew idiom.

As Origen studied the copies of the books of the Old Testament, he described his work in terms of classical Greek philology:

I found that the discord (between the copies) could be healed, if God grants, by using the rest of the editions as a criterion. For by making a judgment, based on the rest of the editions, concerning ambiguous texts in the Seventy [= the Septuagint] due to the discord between the copies, I kept the accord among them. I marked with an obelos some passages not in the Hebrew because I was not reckless to remove any of them. And I added some passages with asteriskoi in order that it might be clear that I added passages not in the Seventy from the rest of the editions agreeing with the Hebrew. (Origen, Commentary on Matthew 15.14)

Elsewhere, Origen says the Greeks called the critical signs asterisk (※) and obelus (—) referring to the tradition of the Alexandrian grammarians who had accomplished similar textual work on the copies of Homer’s Iliad (Origen, Epistle to Africanus 7). Thus, Origen as a philologist created scholarly editions of the biblical books. Furthermore, just as the Alexandrian grammarians produced commentaries on their texts, in various places in his sermons and commentaries Origen also recorded variants or differences between copies and translations and offered his readers solutions. Perhaps Origen, but more probably his followers, began to use the margins of manuscripts to record valuable comments known as scholia on the texts.

Thus, although Origen is most known for his theological and philosophical work, he was first and foremost a philologist and textual critic. He, therefore, left copies of his critical editions for his followers to consult and use in the library at Caesarea. Eusebius, the fourth-century Church historian, informs his readers that Origen left behind copies of his Hexapla (HECK-suh-pluh) “six-fold” or “six-column” Bible and another edition which was later called the Tetrapla (te-TRUH-pluh) or “four-fold” edition.

What was the Hexapla?

Since a few church fathers described the Hexapla in some detail (Eusebius, Epiphanius, Jerome, Rufinus), Origen must have compiled (not authored) such a magnificent and complex text requiring his followers to explain and interpret it. The six-column work in Hebrew and Greek probably had no exact precedent, even though other bilingual (Greek and Latin), literary, multi-column texts probably existed around Origen’s time.

Interestingly, Origen nowhere calls his massive textual construct “the Hexapla.” The term comes from Eusebius. In the first mention of this text, Eusebius says, “Having collected all of these (editions), he divided them into sections, and placed them opposite each other, with the Hebrew text itself. He thus left us the copies of the so-called Hexapla.” Other church fathers describe the work similarly, and there are a few fragmentary manuscript remains of the Hexapla, mostly Psalms, which do afford some evidence to aid the reconstruction of the columnar layout of the Hexapla: (1) Hebrew, (2) Hebrew in Greek transcription, (3) Aquila, (4) Symmachus, (5) Septuagint, (6) Theodotion.

This six-column text of the Old Testament would have granted Origen and his followers access to the Hebrew and to the most significant Greek translations of the day. A user of this text could read vertically any one version from top to bottom or all six versions from left to right across the entire spread of a folio in the codex.

The Hexapla was a textual tour de force giving its reader immediate access to the similarities and differences between the Greek and the Hebrew. If one of those texts was shorter or longer (like in the case of the Book of Job), a reader of the Hexapla would be able to observe the additions and omissions plainly. Furthermore, at disputed places like Isaiah 7:14, the reader of the Hexapla would immediately grasp two different translations of the Hebrew: (1) the Septuagint’s “behold the virgin (parthenos)” and (2) the Jewish Revisers’  “behold the young woman (neanis),” a difference still reflected in Bible translations today.

Origen’s textual scholarship gave the church a real advance in knowledge of the biblical text in its several versions so that the reader of the Hexapla would know the similarities and differences between the church’s version and the Jewish versions used in the synagogue. But he probably had other reasons for producing this synopsis.

Related

• 
  Illustration by Jordan Daniel Singer
  The Legacy of the First Revised Bible Translations

  The modern impulse to get the Bible right in translation has its roots in the Jews who revised the Septuagint.

  John D. Meade

What was the Hexapla for?

Origen probably had many reasons for compiling the Hexapla. These include apologetics, textual criticism, exegesis, or perhaps even to learn the Hebrew language. A massive text like this cannot be reduced to any one purpose. But one significant reason for the Hexapla seems clear: it was a preliminary tool for a corrected text or diorthōsis. Origen used it to prepare a later, more accessible and economic critical text of the Old Testament with signs. This text was later called the Tetrapla, and it is probably the text that Origen described in his Matthew Commentary quoted above. This text contained only one column of text, but it would still give readers immediate access to the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek versions. A manuscript dated to soon after Origen’s death (P. Grenf. 1.5; 250–350 AD) containing a fragmentary text of Ezekiel 5:12–6:3 with asterisks furnishes the earliest material evidence for Origen’s second edition. This edition, or one based on it, must have circulated quite early, and it was still available to the Syriac Bishop, Paul of Tella, who translated it into Syriac in 616 AD (a text known as the “Syro-Hexapla”).

If Origen’s Septuagint version lacked text that was contained in the Hebrew, he would add Greek text from one of the Three Jewish revisers (normally Theodotion) to bring the Septuagint into alignment with the Hebrew. These additional words or lines were marked with an asterisk (※). The ending of Job 42:16–17 illustrates the point. The original Greek translation of Job did not contain the text about Job’s death (“and Job saw his sons … and Job died old and full of days.”) found in the Hebrew. As the later manuscript below shows, Origen added those three lines from the Greek revision of Theodotion and marked them with asterisks so the reader would know the Hebrew was longer and the Greek had been augmented.

Similarly, if the Hebrew lacked a word or verse that the Septuagint contained, Origen would not remove the Greek text, but would mark it with an obelus or a lance (— or ÷) to make the Hebrew omission known to Christian readers. Thus, the quantitative differences that would have been visually obvious in the columnar Hexapla would now be observed in a text that contained the critical signs. In this way, no text from either language was lost for the careful reader.

Furthermore, this Tetrapla or “four-fold” version contained exegetically and textually significant readings or scholia from the three Jewish revisers: Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. This was important for the scholar who did not have access to these works independently, but now could access the more significant and interesting readings through the margins of Origen’s critical text. In this way, Origen and his followers could diffuse textual knowledge not only about the Hebrew text vis-à-vis the Greek but now also information about how contemporary Jews interpreted the Hebrew text in Greek, exegetical information that Christian interpreters also used and incorporated into their own commentaries.

The Hexapla, therefore, functioned as a necessary and preliminary tool for Origen’s later critical edition. Origen’s followers innovated and enhanced his critical edition, and they promulgated it in the early part of the fourth century.

The continuing importance of the Hexapla

Origen’s philological work remains a reminder that early Christians adopted and innovated scholarly methods of their day for serious study of the biblical text. Part of the early Christian DNA, so to speak, was serious study of the manuscript copies of the Scriptures. This fact in itself justifies researching Origen’s textual work today and is a reminder that Christians should continue in this tradition of serious study of the biblical text.

Besides this, Origen’s Hexapla and later Tetrapla are important witnesses to the text of the Old Testament, giving us valuable knowledge of the state of the Hebrew text in Caesarea in the second and third centuries AD. There are precious few remains of Hebrew manuscripts from this period, but the remains of Origen’s textual work, even in Greek dress, provide us access to what form the Hebrew text had from this period. The Hexapla’s value on this point cannot be overstated.

Finally, the independent versions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are entirely lost to history. Almost all access to these works depends on the marginal readings that come from the Tetrapla or similar texts that were ultimately excerpted and quoted from the Hexapla. As such, retrieving and reconstructing Origen’s textual work gives us access to Jewish Greek exegesis of the Hebrew text from the 1st–2nd centuries AD. The readings of the Three give us significant textual information for reconstructing the text histories of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Greek translations.

The first parallel Bible in history witnesses to our desire to order textual knowledge. Although the methods for such organization change over time, the desire to know the Scriptures through intense study of their copies continues. Origen and his followers stand at the headwaters of this stream in which Christians still work today. As then, the goal today is to heal the discord between copies.

Notes

• 1
  For this history, see Alastair Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658),” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 3: From 1450 to 1750, ed. Euan Cameron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138–156.

Many Christians today read the Bible through revisions of original translations. We read the Revised Standard Version (RSV), a revision of another revision of the King James Version; English Standard Version, a revision of the RSV; the New King James Version, another revision of the King James and on and on. Translation committees simply find it easier to revise already existing translations by conforming them to a more contemporary understanding of the Hebrew and Greek texts and updating English diction as needed. Instead of de novo translations, they produce thorough revisions of older translations and in many cases improve the accuracy and readability of the older translation. Nothing is new under the sun.

Ancient Jewish communities who read the Scriptures in Greek translation were the first to revise older Greek translations. These older Greek translations are popularly known as the Septuagint (an abbreviated Latin term meaning “Seventy”) and probably are to be dated between 280–100 BC. But even before the Jews finished translating each Hebrew book into Greek, some Jewish communities had already begun to revise the older ones. What are these Jewish Greek revisions? Why were they undertaken? Where do we find them? What do they tell us about the Bible’s history and our own translation proclivities? Learning more about the ancient Jewish revisions and why they were undertaken not only tells us more about the Bible’s history, but it also explains our modern-day practice too.

The impulse to revise Bible translation

Ancient translators and revisers do not tell us explicitly why they did what they did. But the historical background and the texts themselves suggest why Jews revised their texts. In the third to second century BC, in the library at Alexandria, Egypt, grammarians like Aristarchus of Samothrace were carefully correcting the copies and texts of Homer’s Iliad.¹Francesca Schironi, The Best of the Grammarians: Aristarchus of Samothrace on the Iliad (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). Perhaps, the Jewish revisers simply followed their lead in wanting more accurate texts of their scriptures in Greek. To do that, they revised or corrected the earlier translations by conforming them more closely to the standard Hebrew text.

The translations themselves suggest two other motives for revisions: (1) bringing the older translation into greater alignment with the standard Hebrew text and (2) ensuring their Greek translations reflected current interpretation of the text. Regarding the first reason, the old Greek translator of Job worked as a paraphrast or epitomizer, abbreviating the original, longer Hebrew text by about one-sixth in length. But the Jewish revisers wanted to restore or correct the older translation by supplying an equivalent Greek line for every Hebrew line of the poetic speeches.

Regarding the second reason, the most famous example of interpretive revision probably comes from Isaiah 7:14. The Septuagint contains “Behold the virgin (parthenos) will conceive…,” while the revisers have “Behold the young woman (neanis)….” Hebrew ‘almah could mean “virgin” or “young woman,” and Jewish interpretation of this passage could have shifted between the older and newer translations. Though debate persists over whether the Jewish interpretation of this passage evolved from “virgin” to “young woman,” what is clear is that, as parthenos came to mean only “chaste woman” in Greek, the revisers adjusted their translations to neanis “young woman” to reflect the current Jewish interpretation of this word to mean “maiden of marriageable age.”

What’s significant is that both of these reasons—textual accuracy and correct meaning—are still major reasons we revise Bible translations today.

Understanding the ancient Jewish revisions

Several ancient Jewish revisions of the Septuagint have names associated with them. Most famous among them are “the Three”: Theodotion (post 30 AD), Aquila (ca. 130 AD), and Symmachus (ca. 200 AD). We will return to them. Most other revisions were anonymous. The church father Origen of Alexandria discovered two other versions which he called “the Fifth” and “the Sixth,” since the texts did not have names attached to them. But before these famous revisions existed, we now know that Jewish communities had long been revising their older Greek translations.

The dividing line between an original translation and its revision is not easy to establish. Thus, for the earliest manuscripts of the Greek translations, some debate exists among scholars for what constitutes an early witness to the original translation and what is evidence for its earliest revision. That said, scholars do agree that some Jewish communities were revising older Greek translations since we have manuscript evidence from as early as 2nd–1st centuries BC showing revisions of Numbers (4QLXXNum) and Deuteronomy (Papyrus Fouad Inv. 266b-c). That is, these texts show a revision of the older Greek translation towards the standard Hebrew text.

A brief example comes from Numbers 4:7 where the old Greek translation has, “And over the presentation table they shall throw over it a wholly purple cloth, and the bowls…” But 4QLXXNum has “And over the presentation table they shall throw over it a wholly purple cloth, and they shall set on it the bowls…,” which agrees with the standard Hebrew text. If the original translation of Numbers occurred around 280 BC, this revision could have been carried out about hundred years later.

Probably in the first century BC, a Jewish community engaged in a major project of revising older translations and producing new translations for books like Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. We call this tradition the “kaige tradition,” since it employed a distinctive Greek translation kaige (καίγε) “and even” for Hebrew gam/wegam (גם/וגם) “and even.” This tradition produced a literal or formal equivalence translation of the standard Hebrew text, not unlike our own English translations that follow in the tradition of the NASB.

Here we can locate the famous Three revisers within the overall tendency to revise the older Greek translations. Although the kaige tradition included mostly anonymous revisions and translations, the kaige did include the more well-known reviser, Theodotion, and probably peaked and was perfected in the work of Aquila. Both of these revisions represent very literal translations and even stereotypical equivalents (each Hebrew word rendered by the same Greek word) in the case of Aquila. Later, Symmachus rendered the Hebrew more functionally (think closer to the NIV) and generally avoided the approaches introduced by kaige.

For example, Theodotion would usually render Hebrew ’el “God” with Greek ho ischyros “the powerful one” and Aquila would render the same word with ischyros “Powerful One” (as a proper noun). Symmachus came later and used the more typical Greek rendering theos “God” instead of continuing the idiosyncratic rendering of the kaige tradition. When later Jewish and Christian debates over the interpretation of the Scriptures arose, usually the debates centered on the texts of the Three and the Septuagint. But scholars now see that early Christian exegetes sometimes used the revisions of the Three for their interpretations more than has been recognized in the past.

When the Apostle Paul quoted Isaiah 25:8 in 1 Corinthians 15:54 he quoted the text of Theodotion (“Death is swallowed up in victory”) and not the text of the Septuagint (“Death, having prevailed, swallowed them [nations] up”) or the later reading of the Masoretic Text (“He will swallow up death forever”). A variant Hebrew text does not explain the differences. Rather, the translators and revisers read the same Hebrew consonants differently, and in this case, Paul must have agreed with how Theodotion’s version conveyed the Hebrew with its emphasis on God’s “victory” over death.

Where we find the revisions

We observe the earliest revisions from the manuscripts themselves. For example, we can observe the kaige tradition directly in the fragments of the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever. This scroll was discovered in 1952 and 1961, and, amazingly, another part of this same scroll was found as recently as 2021. A very interesting feature of this Greek scroll is its exhibition of the divine Name or the Tetragrammaton in proto-Hebrew letters.

How about the remains of the Three? Unfortunately, the Three only survive fragmentarily. Some of Aquila’s translation for 1 Kings 21:7–17 and 2 Kings 23:12–27 survives, but most of the remains of the Three come from Origen of Alexandria’s Hexapla, where these revisions were included. But the Hexapla does not survive in full. Rather, we find most remains of the Hexapla in the margins of Greek manuscripts, citations in patristic commentaries, and ancient translations like Syriac. The last edition of the hexaplaric fragments was published in 1875 by Frederick Field. The Hexapla Institute, which is now hosted by the Text & Canon Institute, seeks to publish new critical editions because more evidence of the Three has since come to light. Newer editions will further our knowledge of the Three’s language and approach to the revisionary task.

What these revisions tell us

Although most of us don’t read the remains of the Jewish revisers directly, we do encounter Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion in the footnotes of our English Bibles (see, e.g., Job 5:5). Interestingly, the early English Bible prefaces appeal to the Three by name, ensuring they play a part in the English Bible’s history. Describing the benefit of various Bible translations throughout history, Myles Coverdale (1535) says,

Whereas some men think now that many translations make division in the faith and in the people of God, that is not so: for it was never better with the congregation of God, than when every church almost had the Bible of a sundry translation … Beside the seventy interpreters, is there not the translation of Aquila, of Theodotion, of Symmachus, and of sundry other?²Spelling updated.

Even the venerable Preface to the KJV 1611 mentions Aquila, Theodotion, Symmachus, and the anonymous Fifth and Sixth translations as responses to the perceived problems in the Septuagint translations. In this way, the work of the ancient Jewish revisers was seen as a powerful precedent for revisions made more than 1,000 years later.

Overall, the Jewish revisions attest the conservatively copied Hebrew text.³But even here these fascinating revisions tell different tales. For example, the ending of Job in the older Greek translation came to have a longer ending beyond the Hebrew text which ended with “And Job died an old man and full of days.” The earlier reviser, Theodotion, continued to revise the longer ending of Job, while the slightly later revisers of Aquila and Symmachus ended their revisions precisely where the Hebrew ended. Their literal translation approach reveals the antiquity of the standard Hebrew text. Thus, where we can consult these readings, we can usually see that Hebrew text as the base text. Sometimes, these translations show a different Hebrew reading than the Masoretic Text and as such become very valuable witnesses to the textual history of the Hebrew Bible.

Conclusion

The Bible’s history has many chapters. The Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Septuagint constitute major developments in the plot. As such, the revisions and later corrected texts like those produced by Origen often are overlooked. But these textual endeavors show a great interest in possessing the correct text and as such tell us much about the texts’ creators, curators, and users. Today, when we read or attempt revisions of our older translations, we can rest assured that we’re participating in a long-standing tradition, one that has roots in the impulse to get the text right. That tradition and its history are worth exploring more deeply so that we can also understand our own impulses and desires.

Notes

• 1
  Francesca Schironi, The Best of the Grammarians: Aristarchus of Samothrace on the Iliad (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).
• 2
  Spelling updated.
• 3
  But even here these fascinating revisions tell different tales. For example, the ending of Job in the older Greek translation came to have a longer ending beyond the Hebrew text which ended with “And Job died an old man and full of days.” The earlier reviser, Theodotion, continued to revise the longer ending of Job, while the slightly later revisers of Aquila and Symmachus ended their revisions precisely where the Hebrew ended.