Hey everyone,
I have the Orthodox Study Bible that contains an original translation of the Old Testament from the Septuagint. I was reading the book of Jonah, and Jonah 3:4 reads "Yet three days and Nineveh shall be overthrown." The New King James Version of the Bible reads "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown."
Does anyone know if there is a mistake in the translation in one of these Bibles?
Comments
I personally use the NETS LXX edition. In their translation - which I think is a full translation from scratch - the verse says...
And Ionas began to go into the city about one day’s journey. And he proclaimed and said, “Three days more and Nineue shall be overthrown!”
I did buy an OSB but I ended up giving it to my Dad as a Christmas present as I didn't get on with it so well.
Are there any footnotes for that verse in the OSB which show that 'three' is the word used in the LXX?
In Christ
Deacon Peter
The Greek LXX manuscript tradition has three and the later Hebrew texts have forty. I am surprised that the OSB would use forty if the LXX uses three as it is supposed to be a rendering of the LXX.
I think you misread my post, because I said that the OSB says "three days" and the NKJV says "forty days".
Anyways, do you know why there is a difference in the translation between the Greek LXX manuscript and the Hebrew texts? Is one more accurate than the other? I'm just confused as to why two different translations do not agree with each other on something so concrete, like the number of days. If it was something more abstract, then a difference in translation would be more understandable.
The LXX is not always the same as the Hebrew. There are some very good introductory essays in the online copies of the NETS LXX that suggest where and how differences arose.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/
In the case of this verse it could either be that the original translator of the LXX misread the line in v3 that says Nineveh was a city of three days journey and doubled the reference to three when he came to the bit that says 'yet three days..'
Or it could be that for some reason the Hebrew text transmission became corrupted in some way.
Or it could be that it was the will of God that in the LXX which was the Bible of the Church the reference should be to three days.
Or it could be (I don't know Hebrew at all) that the numbers three and forty could have been confused in the LXX translation.
I have emailed the translator of the NETS Jonah to ask him his opinion about this question.
He does say in the translation of the Minor Prophets...
There are reasons why some passages within these twelve Greek books vary from the MT: (1) The Hebrew
text used by the translator sometimes appears to have been corrupt and difficult to render. For this
reason, the translator sometimes rendered his text according to its general meaning, not according to the
exact wording of the Hebrew. (2) The Hebrew parent text read by the translator sometimes actually differed
from the MT, or the translator, for some reason, misconstrued the Hebrew in such a way as to view
it differently from the MT. Although both these reasons, on occasion, are valid, one should probably not
look to a different parent text as the cause for most differences. Emanuel Tov put the situation into correct
perspective when he wrote, “Although there are thousands of differences between [MT] and the translations,
only a fraction of them was created by a divergence between [MT] and the Vorlage of the translation.
Most of the differences were created by other factors that are not related to the Hebrew Vorlage.”
(Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992] 123).
In Christ
Deacon Peter
Caesarius of Arles has three days.
Origen has three days.
Chrysostom has three days.
It would be interesting to see which Christian writers first use the Hebrew text and have forty days. It is certainly established in East and West that three days is the text known by the Church.
The parallel between the three days of Jonah's repentance in the great fish, and the three days time for repentance of the Ninevites makes sense.
Augustine is aware that there are two textual traditions and says the number of days is not so important and both speak of Christ.
Jerome is also aware of the variant and prefers forty as giving sinners more time to repent.
In Christ
Deacon Peter