HistoricalChristian.Faith

Should the Latin Old Testament be translated from the Hebrew rather than the Septuagint?

Type: interpretive argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — Jerome's decision to render the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek of the Seventy was right, and for the reasons he gave: there was no single stable Septuagint left to translate, a translation of a translation compounds every error in both, and the New Testament itself quotes readings found in the Hebrew and not in the Greek. His slogan, Hebraica veritas, claims more than his warrant — the Hebrew scrolls he consulted were not simply the autographs, and the Greek sometimes preserves an older Hebrew text than they do — but the working decision is the one the whole later Church, East and West, came round to.

Related arguments: translating the Old Testament — see also what the plant of Jonah 4:6 actually was · whether the churches' settled text constrains a translator

The claim

… it would have been but fair to have given me credit for the same fidelity in the Old Testament; for I have not followed my own imagination, but have rendered the divine words as I found them understood by those who speak the Hebrew language.

— Jerome, Letter 112 (to Augustine), §20. Against Augustine's repeated request that he simply put the Greek Seventy into good Latin, Jerome held that the base text of a Latin Old Testament must be the Hebrew original.¹

Who advances it

Jerome, in the prefaces he attached to the books of his version and at length in Letter 112 to Augustine. Augustine's counter-request — “I would much rather that you would furnish us with a translation of the Greek version of the canonical Scriptures known as the work of the Seventy translators” — is pressed in Letters 71 and 82, and rests partly on the Septuagint's apostolic use and partly on the pastoral objection weighed separately. Jerome won the practical argument in his own lifetime's aftermath, and Augustine conceded the scholarly half of it before the correspondence was over.²

The case, at its strongest

There was no single Septuagint to translate. This is Jerome's best argument and it is an empirical one. By 400 the Greek Old Testament survived in three competing regional recensions, and the one nearest to hand was itself a scholar's composite:

The region of Alexandria and Egypt praises in their Seventy the authority of Hesychius; the region from Constantinople to Antioch approves the version of Lucian the Martyr; in the middle, between these provinces, the people of Palestine read the books which, having been labored over by Origen, Eusebius and Pamphilius published. And all the world contends among them with this threefold variety.

— Jerome, Prologue to Chronicles. Worse, the Palestinian text everyone used was Origen's Hexaplaric column, into which Origen had “mixed the edition of Theodotion” under asterisks — so that, as Jerome tartly told Augustine, “you do not read the books of the Seventy translators in the genuine form in which they were originally given to the world, but as they have been corrected, or rather corrupted, by Origen.” A translator asked to render “the Septuagint” has first to be told which Septuagint.³

The apostles quote the Hebrew. Jerome turns Augustine's own appeal to apostolic usage around. Several New Testament citations of the Old cannot be found in the Greek at all: “Out of Egypt I have called My Son,” “He shall be called a Nazarene,” “They will look on Him whom they have pierced.” “Therefore let us ask them where these are written,” he writes, “and when they are unable to say, we may produce them from the Hebrew books.” If the apostolic seal is the criterion, it does not fall on the Greek alone.⁴

A version that can be argued from. Jerome's other practical motive was disputation with Jews, who would not be moved by a Greek text they did not accept. He tells Sophronius that he undertook the Psalms from the Hebrew precisely because a Jewish opponent had answered every proof-text with “it is not found thus in Hebrew.” A church apologetic that cannot survive contact with the original is not worth much.⁵

What the Church actually did. Jerome's version from the Hebrew became the Latin Bible of the West, and the principle behind it is now universal: every serious modern Old Testament translation, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant alike, renders the Hebrew and uses the Greek as a witness to it rather than as its base. Augustine himself, who had resisted for a decade, conceded the point in the last of the disputed letters — “you have now convinced me of the benefits to be secured by your proposal to translate the Scriptures from the original Hebrew” — and in the City of God he praises “the presbyter Jerome, a man most learned, and skilled in all three languages.”⁶

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The core decision — translate from the source language, use the versions as witnesses — is correct and has been vindicated as thoroughly as a methodological judgment can be. The recension argument alone is close to decisive: Augustine was asking for a faithful Latin rendering of a Greek text that did not exist in one form, and never squarely answered the objection.

Where the slogan outruns the warrant. Hebraica veritas asserts more than “render from the source”: it treats the Hebrew scrolls of Jerome's day as simply the original, and the Greek as a derivative liable to error. That is too clean. The Hebrew Jerome consulted was a proto-Masoretic text, itself the product of a transmission history; and in several books the Septuagint demonstrably translates a different and sometimes earlier Hebrew text than the one that became the Masoretic standard. The Greek Jeremiah is about an eighth shorter than the Hebrew and differently ordered, and Hebrew scrolls from Qumran — 4QJer^b and 4QJer^d — attest that shorter Hebrew edition; comparable evidence turns up in Samuel. On those books the Seventy are not careless translators of Jerome's Hebrew but careful translators of another Hebrew. None of this restores Augustine's proposal — the remedy is to weigh the Greek as a text-critical witness, which is exactly what modern editions do — but it does deflate the rhetoric of a single pristine Hebrew truth standing behind a muddled Greek.⁷

Jerome's polemical surplus. He habitually explained Greek–Hebrew divergences as things “omitted or tampered with by the Jews,” a charge Augustine pressed him on directly — by which Jews, the pre-Christian translators or later ones? — and never got answered. Where the two texts differ, the ordinary causes are the ones text-critics find everywhere: different Vorlagen, scribal accident, translational freedom. The tampering charge is a rhetorical habit rather than a finding, and it is flagged on Jerome's page; the wider claim that the rabbis corrupted the text is weighed elsewhere on this wiki.⁸

The cost Augustine correctly named. Going to the Hebrew did divide the Latin liturgical text from the Greek churches', and it did put the version beyond the reach of the congregations that had to receive it. That objection is not answered by the translation-base argument at all; it is a separate question, and contested on its own terms. The strongest indication that Augustine had hold of something real is that the one Old Testament book the Western Church went on singing from was the Psalter Jerome revised from the Greek, not the one he made from the Hebrew.

Assessment

Sound. Translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek was the right call and is now the near-universal practice; Jerome's reasons for it — the collapse of any single Septuagint text, the compounding of error through a double translation, and the New Testament's own citations of Hebrew readings — are good ones, and Augustine, whose objections were mostly pastoral, conceded the scholarly half of the case himself. Two qualifications belong to the honest version of the verdict. The slogan Hebraica veritas overstates: the medieval Hebrew text is not the autograph, the Greek sometimes preserves an older Hebrew, and the sound modern practice is Hebrew base with the versions as primary witnesses — a refinement of Jerome's principle, not a retreat from it. And Jerome's recurring charge of Jewish tampering is conjecture beyond his evidence, distinct from the translation-base argument and noted on his page.

Sources