The Seventy

English

In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Greek

LXX Gen 1:1 (Rahlfs) · pd

Notes

ἐν ἀρχῇ without an article and without a governing noun: the Greek turns a Hebrew word that may be construct into an adverbial phrase, and in doing so closes off the reading Rashi and Ibn Ezra will call the plain sense. Note also ἐποίησεν, 'made', where the Vulgate will write creavit: the Latin bench's whole argument that creare means to make from nothing has no purchase on the Greek. Every Latin witness here quotes fecit or creavit according to which Latin text is in front of him, and the variation is evidence, not noise.

Threads

• ← contests · Babylonian Talmud
  Phase 4. The baraita says the seventy-two elders wrote 'God created in the beginning' for Ptolemy, moving the divine name to the front so that bereshit could not be read as a subject. The Septuagint as transmitted has not moved it: en archē epoiēsen ho theos keeps the Hebrew order. The change the rabbinic bench remembers making is not in the Greek the Church inherited, and the Latin reading of the verse stands in the space it would have closed.
• ← cites · Jerome
  Jerome names the Seventy as his first witness against the reading 'in the Son': 'Nam et Septuaginta Interpretes, et Symmachus, et Theodotion, in principio, transtulerunt.' The Greek is what decides the Latin.
• ← transmits · Jerome
  in principio renders ἐν ἀρχῇ and nothing else, and the translator says in the Hebrew Questions why he refused in Filio. Every Latin argument on this crux is conducted on a word Jerome chose against pressure to choose another.
• ← parallel · Targum Onkelos
  be-qadmin and ἐν ἀρχῇ make the same decision independently: turn the Hebrew word into a plain adverb of time, supply nothing, and let no construct be heard. Pseudo-Jonathan's min avvela does the same a third time.