Letters

¹¹ It would be tedious now to enumerate, what great additions and omissions the Septuagint has made, and all the passages which in church-copies are marked with daggers and asterisks. The Jews generally laugh when they hear our version of this passage of Isaiah, “Blessed is he that has seed in Zion and servants in Jerusalem.” In Amos also after a description of self-indulgence there come these words: “They have thought of these things as halting and not likely to fly,” a very rhetorical sentence quite worthy of Tully.

But how shall we deal with the Hebrew originals in which these passages and others like them are omitted, passages so numerous that to reproduce them all would require books without number? The number of the omissions is shown alike by the asterisks mentioned above and by my own version when compared by a careful reader with the old translation. Yet the Septuagint has rightly kept its place in the churches, either because it is the first of all the versions in time, made before the coming of Christ, or else because it has been used by the apostles (only however in places where it does not disagree with the Hebrew).

On the other hand we do right to reject Aquila, the proselyte and controversial translator, who has striven to translate not words only but their etymologies as well. Who could accept as renderings of “grain and wine and oil” such words as χεῖμα ὀπωρισμός στιλπνότης, or, as we might say, 'pouring,' and 'fruitgathering,' and 'shining'? Or, because Hebrew has in addition to the article other prefixes as well, he must with an unhappy pedantry translate syllable by syllable and letter by letter thus: σὺν τὸν ὀυρανὸν καὶ σὺν τὴν γήν, a construction which neither Greek nor Latin admits of, as many passages in our own writers show.

How many are the phrases charming in Greek which, if rendered word for word, do not sound well in Latin, and again how many there are that are pleasing to us in Latin, but which— assuming the order of the words not to be altered— would not please in Greek.