Department of Bible
Subject: Between Literality and Interpretation: Analysis of the Lexical and Grammatical Choices in the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever.
Supervisor: Prof. Noam Mizrahi.
Abstract: My research focuses on the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), whose discovery had far-reaching repercussions for the history of the Greek biblical tradition. The scroll proved that revisions of the Old Greek text circulated in Judea as early as the late Second Temple period, well before those of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, the Jewish revisions preserved in the Hexapla and compiled in the third century CE by Origen of Caesarea. Strikingly, thirty years after the editio princeps, there is virtually no monographic research on 8ḤevXIIgr. My research seeks to fill this gap by systematically analyzing the revised and unrevised material in the scroll. A nuanced and thorough analysis of the lexical and grammatical choices is expected to shed new light not only on the translational and linguistic profile of the scroll, but also on its interpretative dimension, which is yet to be studied. Valuable insight is likely to be gained into the way the revisor understood the text at various levels, as well as into his motivation and strategies for its transmission. The identification of interpretative traditions and approaches embedded in the scroll and their comparison with contemporary sources will further our understanding of the scriptural traditions in the late Second Temple period, when biblical texts in Hebrew and Greek coexisted and were copied, transmitted, and read together in constant negotiation and dialogue about their exact form and meaning.