Supervisor:

Professor Urmas Nõmmik, University of Tartu

Opponent:

Professor Juliane Eckstein, University of Education Freiburg (Germany)

Summary

The Book of Job, one of the poetic books in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), was first translated into Ancient Greek approximately in the middle of the 2nd century BCE, in the city of Alexandria. This dissertation studied ten speeches across the Old Greek (OG) translation of the book of Job in an attempt to find out whether and how the translator’s stylistic and poetic efforts reflect the state of the Hebrew text at the time. The choice of speeches under study reflects a variety in terms of textual problems in Hebrew, passages left out in Greek, and overall length, giving the perfect opportunity to survey the translator’s activities across the multilayered source-text.

The study established that, although not poetry, the OG translation of Job is poetically stylised and structured in strophes, both reflecting the structure that can be seen in the Hebrew text but also deviating from it. It was further found that when introducing changes into the text, the translator more often than not, took the whole strophe or even several strophes into account. OG Job gives testament to the fact that not only is the strophic structure visible to today’s scholars who have the capability and opportunity to format the text as they like, it was already visible to at least one of the ancient translators, the OG translator, who probably only had a handwritten scroll at their disposal.

This dissertation proved that the translator was sensitive to textual issues in their source text, related to corruptions in the manuscript and suspected later additions to body of the Hebrew text. Most importantly, we can confirm that in most cases the source text of OG Job was essentially the same text as the received Hebrew text, already containing many of the suspected expansions, irregularities, ambiguities, and complexities we see today. The study did find several sections, however, that might have been missing in the source text. The translator’s divergences are overwhelmingly due to interpretive, stylistic, and poetic choices, not a radically different Hebrew source. Where the source text was very difficult or corrupt, in the majority of the cases, the translator opted to still construct meaningful verses and strophes out of bits and pieces, rather than omit them. Larger omissions seemed rather to be due to redundancy or unsuitability of the contents rather than textual difficulties.