Over the last several months, I have proofread and edited the proper names of the Greek Old Testament. As the other widely available English translations of the Septuagint (Brenton, and the NETS of Pietersma and Wright) demonstrate, the idiosyncratic spelling of many Greek proper names can be quite an annoyance when reading such a version in the midst of those employing a translation of the Masoretic Hebrew text. Greek lacks equivalents of several Hebrew consonants; it can't distinguish between Aleph and Ayin (both silent letters), He ("h") and Cheth ("ch"), Zayin ("z") and Tsade ("ts"), Teth ("t") and Tav ("t" or "th"), Kaph ("k") and Qoph ("q"), and Samech ("s") and Shin ("s" or "sh"), and since the letters Daleth ("d") and Resh ("r") are almost identical in appearance, especially in handwritten manuscripts, these two consonants are frequently transposed. In addition, since ancient Hebrew texts lack any vowel signs, the vowels in Greek proper names are often very different from those assumed by Masoretic text editions.
The main principle I adopted in handling Greek proper names is that of consistency. For example, in the Septuagint balla is the name of both Jacob's first concubine (Gen. 30:3) and the king of Sodom (Gen. 14:2), thus my version renders both as "Bilhah," whereas Masoretic versions render the latter as "Bera." Such divergences are rarely footnoted, even as Masoretic versions rarely note divergences from the Septuagint. But when the underlying Hebrew equivalent of a proper name is uncertain, a footnote is attached containing both the Greek spelling behind my proposed transliteration and any alternate Masoretic text reading. These are almost always unique occurrences, where the Masoretic text has a very different name, or no name at all.
In reviewing the differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic version of the Old Testament, I was reminded that there are several places where the order of these texts is so divergent as to make comparison virtually impossible. These are Exodus 36-40, 3 Kingdoms 5-6, Proverbs 24 and 30, and Jeremiah 25-51. The material in these chapters has been re-ordered according to the Masoretic versification and placed at the end of the respective books.
The other reason for this latest revision was to provide a translation of Codex Sinaiticus' divergent text of Tobit. As noted in a previous post, Rahlfs' Septuagint presents three entire books, and parts of a fourth, in two parallel columns. I still view the differences between the Vaticanus and Alexandrinus versions of the book of Judges, as well as the lists of proper names in Jesus (Joshua) 15:21-62 and 18:21-19:45, to be insufficient to warrant separate translations. However, motivated by the importance of Sinaiticus' version of Tobit 6:13 in understanding the biblical concept of betrothal (see the note at Matt. 1:18), I changed my opinion about preparing a distinct translation of the entire Sinaiticus text, which I have placed in the OT History II section immediately following that of Tobit according to Vaticanus and Alexandrinus. Felicitously, my final translated sentence turns out to be a fitting epitaph for any biblical believer's life: "He blessed the Lord God forever and ever. Amen."
