Soundings in Kings

Perspectives And Methods In Contemporary Scholarship

Klaus-Peter Adam

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780800697167
• eBook ISBN: 9781451412635
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Part One

Sources and Transmission

CHAPTER 1

Text and Literary History: The Case of 1 Kings 19 (MT and LXX)

Philippe Hugo

The context of my paper is the question of the relationship between text criticism and redaction criticism: how can text history contribute to a better knowledge of the literary development of the books of Kings? The discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls profoundly renewed the knowledge of the most ancient transmission of the biblical text and, in particular, of the place that the Septuagint (LXX) occupies in it. Some fragments, such as 4QSam^a or 4QJer^b, confirm that the LXX is not the simple product of an approximation or the fantasy of translators, but is probably founded on a Hebrew text that differs from the Masoretic Text (MT).¹ This is not some kind of methodological a priori. Some recent research on many biblical books has come to the conclusion that the Hebrew source of the LXX must represent a different literary form than that of the MT, and is sometimes older than it.² The most famous case is the double transmission of the book of Jeremiah,³ but other prophetic books certainly attest to the same phenomenon, for example Ezekiel⁴ and Haggai.⁵ The Former Prophets show many such cases in Joshua,⁶ Samuel,⁷—in particular the famous story of David and Goliath⁸—and in Kings, as we will see, just as some books of the Writings, like Ezra–Nehemiah⁹ and Daniel.¹⁰ The Pentateuch attests also to two distinct forms in some sections, as in Exodus 35–40¹¹ and in the Decalogue.¹²

In sum, in the first century BCE, the Hebrew Bible was attested to by a multiplicity of textual forms, to which the MT, the LXX, and the fragments of Qumran (and the Samaritan Pentateuch) bear witness. This multiplicity appears to be the result of the entangling of the textual and literary history of the Hebrew Bible.¹³ In other words, the period of the most ancient transmission of the text was again marked by some activities of literary creation. It becomes difficult to make an airtight distinction between the period of the production of the text and the period of its transmission.¹⁴ Thus, the two disciplines (text criticism and redaction criticism) find themselves modified. On the one hand, text criticism is given a new task: more than purifying the text of its errors of transmission, it must identify (in the textual witnesses at its disposal) the eventual distinct literary forms and place them in the course of the history of the text.¹⁵ On the other hand, redaction criticism must reevaluate its results in light of the textual witnesses (in particular the LXX) that attest to possible literary forms more ancient than the MT. It is to this debate that I intend to contribute, as an historian of the text, by the analysis of 1 Kings 19.

Methodological Preliminaries

When one carefully reads the MT parallel to the LXX in the books of Kings (as I will do for 1 Kings 19), one finds a multitude of small differences. This observation raises a series of questions regarding research on text history, to which several recent studies have attempted to bring some elements of response.¹⁶ The first question concerns the nature of the differences: are they strictly textual, that is to say, are they due to corruptions in the manuscript transmission or due to harmonizations, assimilations, or explanations; or should one consider them to be literary, as witnessing to voluntary and thoughtful intentions in order to modify the narrative and theological sense of an account?¹⁷ Once the corruptions are identified and explained, one can confirm the literary nature of the other differences. It is thus suitable to wonder who produced them: do they find their origin in the translation techniques, in the ideological interpretation of the translators (Wevers,¹⁸ Turkanik¹⁹), or even the midrashic methods employed by later Greek editors (Gooding,²⁰ van Keulen²¹)? Do they rather witness to two different Hebraic forms? If one admits that the LXX generally represents Hebrew Vorlage distinct from the MT, how must we judge the relationship between these two Hebrew texts? Three models are possible: first, the two literary forms attest to two parallel currents developed from a common source (Stipp,²² Bösenecker²³); second, the Hebrew source of the LXX is the product of literary activity of the midrashic type (Talshir²⁴); third, the predecessor of the MT (the proto-MT) is the result of a work of a literary edition that (for narrative, theological, and ideological motives) modified the most ancient form attested to by the Vorlage of the LXX (Trebolle Barrera,²⁵ Schenker,²⁶ Hugo).

We must submit each variant, each passage, and each biblical book to these questions. In fact, the most ancient transmission of the biblical text was never totally homogeneous, and all the mentioned phenomena are attested to in turn. However, the analysis of large narrative units (passages, chapters, or a whole of chapters) permits one to progressively extract the general tendency of the evolution of a text.

My study on 1 Kings 17–18²⁷ led me to confirm the hypothesis that Julio Trebolle Barrera and Adrian Schenker had already formulated concerning the antiquity of the Hebrew source of the LXX and of the secondary or editorial character of the proto-MT.²⁸ Generally, the MT and the LXX attest to two distinct literary forms of the history of the prophet Elijah, two faces of Elijah (Les deux visages d’Élie). Except for some rare exceptions, the MT bears witness to a coherent revision project, which can be summarized in three principal features. First, prophetic theology is modified accentuating the supremacy of the action of God over that of the prophet, the obedience of the prophet to the divine word, and the prophet’s fidelity to the Torah. Second, the portrait of King Ahab is also modified in order to point out his guilt. Finally, the idolatry of the royal house is rendered more concrete and overwhelming. My detailed examination of chapter 19 aims to pursue this inquiry and to test these conclusions.

Analysis of the Text

The questions I posed in the preceding paragraph will guide my analysis of the differences between the MT and the LXX²⁹ in 1 Kgs 19. I will therefore begin by identifying the phenomena that are clearly of textual nature—the corruptions, the explanations, the harmonizations—in order to progressively move on to the literary interventions in which one can discern a narrative and theological intention. With this approach, one must not forget that the text must be read as a unit and that, if suitable, to distinguish the differences and to classify them according to their nature, one must not proceed with an atomistic reading of the text. The text is a sense unit that has undergone a textual and literary evolution in its most ancient transmission.

Textual Corruptions

Textual corruptions are the first category of differences. To this group probably belongs the most important difference of the chapter (materially speaking), in verse 2. The LXX causes Jezebel to say ei sy ei Ēleiou kai egō Iezabel, “if you are Elijah, myself, [I am] Jezebel.” This “plus” is attested to by the whole of the Greek tradition as well as by the Vetus Latina (VL): “Et dixit: Si tu es Helias, et ego sum Iezabel, Et dixit: Haec faciant mihi Dii.”³⁰ Numerous authors since Thenius (1849) estimate that this phrase translated from a Hebrew text is probably the most ancient form: ’m ’th ’lyhw w’ny ’yzbl.³¹ In fact, this formula has no parallel in the Hebrew Bible, so much so that it is hard to see it as a secondary addition in the Hebrew and even harder to see it as having been formulated in Greek. Its difficulty speaks in favor of its originality.³² The question is therefore to figure out why this clause disappeared in the MT.³³ Otto Eissfeldt gave the most convincing explanation.³⁴ Based on the VL, he shows that the Old Greek certainly read a Hebrew text in which the statement of Jezebel contained two elements, each one introduced by l’mr, translated by et dixit. The VL (as it also happens sometimes in Reigns³⁵) represents here the most ancient form of the LXX, which disappeared from the Greek witnesses. The Hebrew Vorlage would therefore contain a text as: l’mr ’m ’th ’lyhw w’ny ’yzbl l’mr kh yʽśwn ’lhym … The scribe’s error consists of passing from the first l’mr to the second, leaving out part of the intermediate phrase. Therefore, the omission of Jezebel’s violent interrogation is due to a parablepsis, the passage from the same to the same. This is at least a provisional conclusion, which will be reconsidered below.

One encounters a second possible corruption in verse 11. During the passage of the wind before Elijah, the Codex Vaticanus (B) does not deny the presence of the Lord in the wind, but says: kai pneuma mega krataion dialyon orē kai syn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One: Sources and Transmission
• Part Two: Prophecy and Redaction
• Part Three: Authors and Audiences
• Response Kings Resisting Privilege
• Closing Remarks
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Author Index
• Scripture Index