Codex Marchalianus and the Greek Prophets

Codex Marchalianus is a Greek manuscript of the Prophets written in Egypt in the sixth century and now kept in the Vatican Library under the shelfmark Vat. gr. 2125.¹² It contains the sixteen prophetic books of the Septuagint, from the Twelve Minor Prophets through Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, together with the additional books and passages which the Greek Bible associates with them. Its text is one of the most important witnesses to the Greek Prophets, but its fame rests above all on its margins. A reader of the manuscript, writing somewhat later than the main scribe, entered hundreds of notes recording the readings of the Jewish translators Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, together with critical signs, drawn ultimately from the great six-column edition of the Old Testament compiled by Origen in the third century.³⁴⁵ Since the Hexapla itself is lost, these notes are among the richest surviving sources for its contents. This article describes the manuscript, its history, the character of its text and of its marginal notes, and its place in the study of the Greek Old Testament.

The Greek Prophets

The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made by Jews in Egypt from the third century BCE onwards, included the prophetic books in an order and form that differ in several respects from the Hebrew. In the Greek Bible the Twelve Minor Prophets usually precede the major prophets, and their own internal order differs in the first six books, with Hosea, Amos, Micah, Joel, Obadiah and Jonah instead of the Hebrew order of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah. Jeremiah is accompanied by Baruch, Lamentations and the Letter of Jeremiah. Daniel includes the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men, and is accompanied by the stories of Susanna and of Bel and the Dragon.⁶⁷

The Greek text of the prophets is also different in character from the Hebrew in places. The Greek Jeremiah is about one-eighth shorter than the Masoretic text and arranges its material differently, placing the oracles against the nations in the middle of the book. The Greek Daniel circulated in two forms, the Old Greek and the version associated with Theodotion, the latter having almost entirely replaced the former in Christian use by the time Codex Marchalianus was written.⁸⁹¹⁰

For all these books Codex Marchalianus is an important witness. It belongs to the small number of early majuscule manuscripts that preserve the prophetic corpus complete or nearly so, alongside the great biblical codices Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus.¹¹¹²

The manuscript

The codex is written on parchment in a single column per page, in a sloping majuscule script of the type often associated with Egypt in the sixth century. Its letters show features influenced by Coptic writing, and this, together with the character of its text, has led scholars to locate its origin in Egypt. It consists of several hundred leaves, of a size suited to a book for reading and study rather than for display.¹³¹⁴

The manuscript was later bound in an order that differs from that of the original. Some of its leaves were misplaced, and the opening portion has suffered damage. These features have been described in the catalogues of Rahlfs and his successors and in the introduction to Ceriani’s facsimile.¹⁵¹⁶

The main text was written by a single scribe in an even and careful hand. The margins and spaces between the lines were later filled by another hand, which added the Hexaplaric material for which the codex is known. A third set of additions, including corrections and liturgical notes, comes from later readers.¹⁷¹⁸

History of the codex

The codex was written in Egypt and, as described more fully below, passed through southern Italy and France before it entered the Vatican Library, where it received its present shelfmark.¹⁹²⁰

The manuscript attracted the attention of scholars from the seventeenth century, when its marginal readings began to be used in collections of the fragments of the Hexapla. Bernard de Montfaucon, in his edition of the Hexaplaric fragments published in 1713, drew on its notes, and Frederick Field, whose two-volume collection Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt appeared at Oxford in 1875, made extensive use of them.²¹

In 1890 Antonio Maria Ceriani, prefect of the Ambrosian Library in Milan and a leading authority on Syriac and Greek biblical manuscripts, published a complete photographic facsimile of the codex. This publication made the manuscript accessible to scholars throughout Europe and remains a fundamental resource. Today the codex can also be consulted in high-resolution images through the Digital Vatican Library.²²²³

The text of the codex

Within the textual history of the Greek Prophets, Codex Marchalianus has been assigned to the group of witnesses that reflect an Egyptian form of the text. The editors of the Göttingen Septuagint, notably Joseph Ziegler, who edited the prophetic books between 1939 and 1957, classified the manuscripts into groups and identified an Alexandrian group, represented by Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Marchalianus and several minuscules, in distinction from the Hexaplaric and Lucianic groups.²⁴

Ziegler and others have argued that this Alexandrian text may correspond in part to the revision of the Septuagint attributed in ancient sources to Hesychius, an Egyptian scholar of the late third or early fourth century, although the identification remains uncertain because nothing of the work of Hesychius survives under his name. Whatever its exact origin, the text of Codex Marchalianus is valued as a relatively early and independent witness to the Greek Prophets.²⁵²⁶

In Daniel the codex contains the version associated with Theodotion, which had become the standard text of Daniel in the Greek-speaking church. The Old Greek of Daniel survives in only a few witnesses, chiefly the minuscule known as Codex Chisianus and a papyrus from the Chester Beatty collection.²⁷²⁸

The Hexapla and its fragments

Origen of Alexandria, the third-century Christian scholar, compiled at Caesarea a vast edition of the Old Testament arranged in six parallel columns. The first contained the Hebrew text, the second a transliteration of the Hebrew into Greek letters, and the remaining four the Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint in a revised form and Theodotion. For some books further columns were added with other versions. In his Septuagint column Origen marked with an obelus the passages present in the Greek but absent from the Hebrew, and with an asterisk those present in the Hebrew but absent from the Greek, which he supplied from the other versions, usually from Theodotion.²⁹³⁰³¹

The Hexapla was a work of enormous size, and it was probably never copied in full. It was kept in the library at Caesarea, where it was consulted by scholars such as Eusebius and Jerome, and it seems to have perished at the latest during the Arab conquest of Palestine in the seventh century. Its contents are known through excerpts. The fifth column, Origen’s revised Septuagint with its critical signs, was copied separately by Pamphilus and Eusebius and circulated widely, and in the early seventh century it was translated into Syriac by Paul of Tella in the version known as the Syro-Hexapla.³²³³ The readings of the other columns survive mainly as marginal notes in Greek manuscripts and in the Syro-Hexapla, and in quotations by ancient commentators.³⁴

Codex Marchalianus is among the most important of these sources. Its marginal hand recorded the readings of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, each marked with the initial letter of the translator’s name, alpha, sigma and theta. It also preserved the asterisks and obeli of Origen’s fifth column and occasionally notes about the Hebrew. Field drew on the codex for a large share of his reconstruction of the Hexaplaric fragments of the Prophets.³⁵³⁶

The marginal hand also left notes stating the source from which they were taken. In several places notes record that the text was compared with copies derived from the library of Caesarea. Such notes link the codex to the scholarly tradition stemming from Origen, Pamphilus and Eusebius, and they show that the Hexaplaric materials continued to be valued and copied in Egypt in the late antique period.³⁷³⁸

The three Jewish translators

The value of the marginal readings lies in the information they give about the three Greek versions associated with Jewish scholarship of the second century. Aquila, said to have been a proselyte from Pontus and a pupil of the rabbis, produced a translation of extreme literalness, seeking to render every element of the Hebrew, even particles, with a consistent Greek equivalent. His version was widely used by Greek-speaking Jews for centuries. Symmachus, whose identity is less certain, produced a version in more idiomatic Greek that sought to convey the sense of the Hebrew clearly. Theodotion’s version, whose date and origin are debated, revised an existing Greek text towards the Hebrew and is closely related to the kaige revision attested in the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever.³⁹⁴⁰⁴¹

For the Prophets the marginal readings in Codex Marchalianus provide a substantial sample of all three versions. They allow scholars to compare the translation techniques of the three and to trace the Hebrew text that each translated. Since the Hebrew underlying these versions was close to the proto-Masoretic text, the marginal readings also offer indirect evidence for the Hebrew text of the second century.⁴²⁴³

The codex in modern scholarship

In the Göttingen edition of the Septuagint, Codex Marchalianus is cited under the siglum Q, the designation given it by Alfred Rahlfs in his catalogue of Greek Old Testament manuscripts. Its marginal readings are recorded in the second apparatus of the Göttingen volumes, which collects the evidence for the readings of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion.⁴⁴⁴⁵

The codex has also been studied as a document of the book culture of late antique Egypt. Its script, layout and marginal apparatus illustrate the way in which learned readers in Egypt engaged with the biblical text. The codex is a product of the same world that produced the great Christian libraries and scriptoria of Alexandria and the monasteries of the Nile valley.⁴⁶⁴⁷

Leaves, quires and script

In its present state the codex consists of 416 leaves of thin parchment, measuring about 295 by 180 millimetres. The text is written in a single column of twenty-nine lines to the page, each line containing between twenty-four and thirty letters. The leaves were gathered in quires of five sheets folded to make twenty pages, an arrangement common in Egyptian books, and the last quire is unusual in having twenty-four pages.⁴⁸⁴⁹⁵⁰ Paragraphs are marked by enlarged letters set out into the margin, a practice found in many biblical manuscripts of late antiquity.

The first twelve leaves did not belong to the original manuscript. They contain an extract from the Synopsis of Scripture transmitted among the works attributed to Athanasius, here attributed to Eusebius, and extracts from the Lives of the Prophets of the kind printed among the works of Epiphanius. These texts, in a hand close in date to the main text, were added as a preface to the prophetic books, which follow in the order found in Codex Vaticanus.⁵¹⁵²

The script is the form of Greek majuscule which palaeographers call Coptic majuscule, because it was used in Egypt and resembles the letters adopted for writing Coptic. Swete, summarising the judgement of Ceriani, described the characters as simple, firm and free, with the exception of epsilon, theta, omicron and sigma, which are narrow in a manner more usual in the following century. Ceriani argued that this feature, which appears already in older Egyptian papyri, did not require a later date in a manuscript written in Egypt, and he placed the codex not later than the sixth century. The Göttingen catalogue now gives its date as the sixth or seventh century.⁵³⁵⁴ Other features noted by later describers are the very large phi and psi, the compressed loop and long stroke of rho, and the flattened oval of the round letters.⁵⁵⁵⁶

The first scribe wrote without breathings or accents and, apart from a few corrections by the corrector who checked the copy against its exemplar, left the margins empty. The critical signs inside the text, the asterisks and obeli, were however part of the original copy. The great mass of marginal notes for which the codex is famous was added afterwards.⁵⁷

The prefatory texts

The two works copied on the added leaves at the front of the codex show how a reader of late antiquity approached the prophetic books. The Lives of the Prophets is a short collection of notices, probably Jewish in origin and later transmitted and expanded by Christians, which gives for each prophet his place of birth, a few traditions about his life and death, and the place of his burial. It circulated in several Greek recensions, some attributed to Epiphanius of Salamis and others to a Dorotheus, and it was often copied at the head of the Prophets in Byzantine Bibles.⁵⁸⁵⁹

The Synopsis of Scripture is a guide to the contents of the biblical books, summarising each in turn. Its attribution in Codex Marchalianus to Eusebius, rather than to Athanasius, under whose name it is usually transmitted, illustrates how such handbooks moved between the names of famous scholars. Placed before the Prophets, these texts turned the codex into a study volume, supplying the reader with background on the authors and contents of the books that followed.⁶⁰

A fuller history of the codex

The successive owners of the codex can be traced in more detail than was once thought. According to Swete, all the additions and corrections written in majuscule are by Egyptian hands, which suggests that the book remained in Egypt until at least the ninth century. It then passed to southern Italy, probably before the eleventh or twelfth century, and there it received patristic scholia and a number of readings in text and margin marked with the abbreviation for γράφεται, meaning that a word is written differently elsewhere. In Italy it also received Latin notes, mostly renderings from the Vulgate and explanations of the Greek, and these continued to be added after it reached France.⁶¹⁶²

From Italy the codex came to France, perhaps in the hands of a Norman or French owner, and was kept at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis near Paris, where it is recorded at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the second half of that century it left the abbey and became the property of René Marchal de Boismoreau, whose name it still carries. By about 1636 it belonged to Cardinal François de La Rochefoucauld, who gave it to the Jesuit Collège de Clermont in Paris. After the suppression of the Jesuits in France the library of the college was dispersed, and in 1785 the codex was purchased for the Vatican Library under Pope Pius VI.^63646566 A further hypothesis, recorded in the Pinakes database of Greek manuscripts, associates an earlier stage of its history with John Kamateros, patriarch of Constantinople from 1198 to 1206, but this remains a proposal rather than an established fact.⁶⁷

The codex was known to scholars long before it reached Rome. Jean Morin, the French Oratorian who edited the Samaritan Pentateuch for the Paris Polyglot, used it in the seventeenth century, and Bernard de Montfaucon drew on it for his collection of the Hexaplaric fragments. It was collated for the great Oxford edition of the Septuagint by Robert Holmes and James Parsons, published between 1798 and 1827, in which it bears the number XII. Constantin von Tischendorf edited portions of it in 1870 in the ninth volume of his Monumenta sacra inedita.⁶⁸⁶⁹

Frederick Field, who had used all the available evidence of its readings for his Hexapla of 1875, was so convinced of the importance of a complete reproduction that, according to Ceriani’s own account, he offered around that time to contribute four thousand Italian lire towards the cost of a photolithographic edition. Field died in 1885, before the project could be completed, and Ceriani’s facsimile appeared in 1890.⁷⁰⁷¹

Ceriani and the facsimile

Antonio Maria Ceriani, who produced the facsimile of 1890, was one of the most accomplished editors of biblical manuscripts in the nineteenth century. As a scholar of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, and later its prefect, he devoted much of his career to the Syriac and Greek Bibles. His most important earlier work was the photolithographic edition, published in 1874, of the Ambrosian manuscript of the Syro-Hexapla, the Syriac translation of Origen’s fifth column made by Paul of Tella. The Syro-Hexapla preserves the Hexaplaric signs and many marginal readings of the three translators in Syriac, and Ceriani was therefore especially well placed to understand the Greek marginal apparatus of Codex Marchalianus.⁷²⁷³

The edition of 1890 consisted of the photographic plates together with a commentary in Latin, in which Ceriani discussed the date and script of the manuscript, its hands and its history. His argument that the narrow forms of certain letters were compatible with a sixth-century date in Egypt was based on comparison with Egyptian papyri and with a Coptic manuscript of comparable date, and it shaped the dating accepted by later scholars.⁷⁴⁷⁵ Ceriani also held that the main text of the codex represented the Egyptian recension associated with Hesychius, a view which, as noted above, later editors accepted only with qualifications.

The facsimile was one of a series of photographic publications of great biblical manuscripts produced in the last decades of the nineteenth century, at a time when photography first made it possible to distribute exact images of a manuscript to libraries across Europe. For the study of the Hexaplaric fragments it was decisive, since scholars no longer depended on the collations of earlier editors, whose reports of the marginal notes had sometimes been incomplete or inaccurate.⁷⁶⁷⁷

Signs and sigla

The marginal apparatus of Codex Marchalianus uses a small set of signs whose meaning was established in antiquity. The asterisk, a star-shaped mark, indicated words present in the Hebrew which Origen had supplied in the Septuagint column, usually from Theodotion. The obelus, a horizontal stroke sometimes with dots above and below, marked words present in the Greek but without equivalent in the Hebrew. A third sign, the metobelus, shaped like a colon or a short slanting stroke, showed where the passage governed by an asterisk or obelus came to an end. Origen borrowed these signs from the critical practice of the Alexandrian scholars who edited Homer, among whom Aristarchus of Samothrace had used the obelus to mark lines he suspected.⁷⁸⁷⁹

The readings of the later translators are introduced by abbreviations: alpha for Aquila, sigma for Symmachus and theta for Theodotion. Where two or three translators agreed, the note says so, using expressions for the three together, for all of them, or for the others, meaning those apart from the Septuagint.⁸⁰ These abbreviations allow the reader to see at a glance how far each version departed from the Septuagint and from one another. Because marginal annotators often abbreviated, combined or simplified their sources, the attributions in the margins are not infallible, and modern editors compare them with the evidence of the Syro-Hexapla, of other annotated manuscripts and of quotations in Christian writers before accepting them.⁸¹⁸²

Reading the three translators

The character of the three versions can be illustrated by examples that are well documented in the ancient sources. Aquila aimed to represent each element of the Hebrew by a fixed Greek equivalent. He rendered the Hebrew particle that marks the definite direct object by the Greek preposition σύν, which ordinarily means with, so that his Greek can be scarcely intelligible to a reader without knowledge of Hebrew. Symmachus, by contrast, chose the natural Greek idiom and sometimes paraphrased, removing expressions that might be misunderstood. Theodotion’s version stands closer to the Septuagint, which it often revises rather than replaces.⁸³⁸⁴⁸⁵

A famous case shows why Christian scholars paid attention to these versions. At Isaiah 7:14 the Septuagint renders the Hebrew word ʿalmah by παρθένος, virgin, whereas Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion are reported by ancient Christian writers to have used νεᾶνις, young woman. The point was debated between Jews and Christians from the second century onwards, and Origen’s Hexapla allowed readers to see the renderings side by side.⁸⁶⁸⁷ Such passages explain why the readings of the three were carefully copied into the margins of Christian Bibles, including Codex Marchalianus, even though the versions themselves were Jewish in origin.

For the Prophets the evidence of the margins is particularly rich because Origen used Theodotion extensively to fill the gaps in the Septuagint. In Jeremiah, where the Greek is markedly shorter than the Hebrew, many passages absent from the Old Greek were supplied under asterisk in the Hexaplaric text. In Daniel the version of Theodotion had replaced the Old Greek altogether, and the margins accordingly record readings of Aquila and Symmachus against a Theodotionic text.⁸⁸⁸⁹

Comparison with other witnesses

Codex Marchalianus stands in a small company of early manuscripts that preserve the Greek Prophets. The great fourth-century codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus contain them, the latter only in part, and the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus contains them all. Older still are papyrus witnesses from Egypt, among them the Freer codex of the Minor Prophets in Washington, of the third century, and the Chester Beatty and Scheide papyrus known as 967, which preserves much of Ezekiel and the Old Greek of Daniel.⁹⁰⁹¹⁹² Against this background Marchalianus is distinguished not by its age but by its completeness and by the critical material in its margins.

Within the Göttingen apparatus Q is frequently cited with Codex Alexandrinus as a leading member of the Alexandrian group, and the agreements of the two have been used to define the Egyptian form of the text in the Prophets. Ziegler showed, however, that the affiliations of Q are not uniform across all the books, and the Göttingen catalogue describes its text-type as varying from book to book.⁹³⁹⁴ The study of the codex therefore has to proceed book by book rather than by a single classification.

A further comparison links Codex Marchalianus with the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever, written in the first century BCE or CE. That scroll contains a Jewish revision of the Septuagint, the kaige recension, whose readings frequently coincide with those attributed in later sources to Theodotion. Some readings attributed to the three translators in the margins of Q can therefore be traced back to a revision already current before the Christian era, which shows that the marginal notes preserve material of considerable antiquity.⁹⁵⁹⁶

The margins and the Hebrew text

The marginal readings of Codex Marchalianus are evidence not only for the history of the Greek versions but, indirectly, for the Hebrew text from which they were made. Because Aquila translated so literally, his Greek can often be turned back into Hebrew with confidence, and where his reading differs from the Septuagint it usually shows the Hebrew word that stood in his source. The Hebrew text known to Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion was, as far as can be determined, very close to the proto-Masoretic consonantal text, the form attested in the Hebrew scrolls of the Bar Kokhba period from Wadi Murabbaʿat and Nahal Hever.⁹⁷

This has two consequences for textual criticism. On the one hand, the readings of the three translators seldom offer independent evidence against the Masoretic Text, since they were made from a text of the same family. On the other hand, they provide valuable evidence for the state of that text in the second century, many centuries before the earliest complete Hebrew manuscripts, and for the way in which particular words were understood. Where the Septuagint differs from the Masoretic Text, the agreement of the three with the Hebrew helps to show that the difference arose in the Septuagint or its Hebrew source rather than in the later Hebrew tradition.⁹⁸⁹⁹

For the Septuagint itself the margins have a further value. Origen’s asterisked additions entered many later Greek manuscripts without their signs, so that copies of the Hexaplaric recension often present a Greek text expanded to match the Hebrew. The signs preserved in Q, and the notes that identify the source of the additions, help editors to separate these later insertions from the Old Greek translation and so to reconstruct a text closer to the original Septuagint.¹⁰⁰¹⁰¹

The codex in the digital age

The publication of the codex in images by the Digital Vatican Library has changed the conditions of its study. Ceriani’s facsimile of 1890, though excellent for its time, reproduced the pages in monochrome, and readers had to rely on his commentary for many details of the faint marginal hands. High-resolution colour images now allow the different inks and hands of the margins to be distinguished, the later Latin annotations to be told apart from the Greek, and the corrections of the first scribe to be compared with those of later readers.¹⁰²¹⁰³

Digital access has also made it easier to place Marchalianus alongside other witnesses. The Göttingen Septuagint now maintains an online catalogue of the manuscripts cited in its editions, recording for each its date, format, owners and collations, and the catalogue entry for Q brings together the information formerly scattered across printed sources.¹⁰⁴ Such resources do not replace the critical editions, but they make it possible for any reader to follow the evidence from the edition back to the page of the manuscript.

Modern editions and the Hexapla

The critical edition of the Prophets in the Göttingen Septuagint was the work of Joseph Ziegler, who published Isaiah in 1939, the Twelve Prophets in 1943, Ezekiel in 1952, Susanna, Daniel and Bel and the Dragon in 1954, and Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations and the Letter of Jeremiah in 1957. The volumes on Ezekiel and Daniel were later revised with supplements by other scholars. In each volume Q appears both in the first apparatus, as a witness to the Septuagint text, and in the second, which collects the Hexaplaric readings.¹⁰⁵

Field’s collection of the Hexaplaric fragments, though still indispensable, is now well over a century old, and since the 1990s scholars have worked towards a new edition that would take account of the many sources discovered since his day. A colloquium held at Oxford in 1994 and published under the title Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments surveyed the state of the question, and an international project has since been working towards a new collection of the fragments, book by book.¹⁰⁶ In this work Codex Marchalianus remains one of the principal sources, and the digital images now available from the Vatican Library allow its marginal notes to be checked directly rather than through printed reports.¹⁰⁷

The order of the books

Codex Marchalianus contains the Prophets in the order usual in the major Greek codices, with the Twelve Prophets standing before Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. Within the Twelve, the Greek tradition follows an order that differs at the beginning from the Hebrew Bible: Hosea, Amos and Micah precede Joel, Obadiah and Jonah, after which the two sequences agree. The difference is old and is attested in other early Greek manuscripts, and it is one of the small signs that the Greek translation of the Twelve circulated as a book with its own arrangement. In the volumes of the Göttingen edition that cover the Prophets, Codex Marchalianus is cited under the siglum Q among the principal witnesses to this Greek text.¹⁰⁸¹⁰⁹

With Jeremiah the codex includes the books that the Greek tradition associated with him, namely Baruch, Lamentations and the Letter of Jeremiah. Daniel appears in the Greek version that circulated under the name of Theodotion, which had replaced the older Greek translation of the book in almost all church use, together with the additional narratives that the Greek Daniel contains. The presence of Theodotion’s Daniel in the main text of a manuscript whose margins quote Theodotion elsewhere illustrates how the work of the later translators entered the Greek Bible by more than one route.¹¹⁰¹¹¹

Related material on this site

Origen’s six-column edition and its fate are described in the article on the Hexapla of Origen.¹¹² The Syriac translation of the fifth column, the most important complement to the Greek marginal notes, is treated in the article on Paul of Tella and the Syro-Hexapla.¹¹³ The kaige revision, which is closely connected with the work of Theodotion, is described in the article on the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever.¹¹⁴

Conclusion

Codex Marchalianus is a sixth-century Egyptian manuscript of the Greek Prophets whose main text is a valuable witness to the Alexandrian tradition of the Septuagint and whose margins preserve one of the largest bodies of Hexaplaric readings to survive in Greek. Through the work of a learned reader who copied into it the readings of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion and the critical signs of Origen’s edition, the codex has kept alive a portion of a scholarly achievement that was otherwise largely lost. From the sixteenth century, when it belonged to René Marchal, to the present, when it can be read in digital images from the Vatican Library, it has remained an essential source for the history of the Greek Bible.^115116117

Notes

1. Alfred Rahlfs, Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften des Alten Testaments (Berlin: Weidmann, 1914); revised by Detlef Fraenkel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). ↩
2. Digital Vatican Library, Vat. gr. 2125. ↩
3. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
4. Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩
5. Grokipedia, “Hexapla”. ↩
6. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
7. Grokipedia, “Septuagint”. ↩
8. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
9. Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (London: T&T Clark, 2004). ↩
10. Grokipedia, “Theodotion”. ↩
11. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
12. Grokipedia, “Codex Sinaiticus”. ↩
13. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
14. Alfred Rahlfs, Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften des Alten Testaments (Berlin: Weidmann, 1914); revised by Detlef Fraenkel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). ↩
15. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
16. Alfred Rahlfs, Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften des Alten Testaments (Berlin: Weidmann, 1914); revised by Detlef Fraenkel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). ↩
17. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
18. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
19. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
20. Göttingen Septuagint, catalogue entry Ra Q. ↩
21. Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩
22. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
23. Digital Vatican Library, Vat. gr. 2125. ↩
24. Joseph Ziegler, ed., Duodecim prophetae, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis editum 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1943), with the companion volumes on Isaiah (1939), Ezekiel (1952), Daniel (1954) and Jeremiah (1957). ↩
25. Joseph Ziegler, ed., Duodecim prophetae, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis editum 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1943), with the companion volumes on Isaiah (1939), Ezekiel (1952), Daniel (1954) and Jeremiah (1957). ↩
26. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
27. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
28. Grokipedia, “Theodotion”. ↩
29. Grokipedia, “Hexapla”. ↩
30. Grokipedia, “Origen”. ↩
31. See also “The Hexapla of Origen” on this site. ↩
32. See also “The Hexapla of Origen” on this site. ↩
33. See also “Paul of Tella and the Syro-Hexapla” on this site. ↩
34. Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩
35. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
36. Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩
37. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
38. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
39. Grokipedia, “Aquila of Sinope”. ↩
40. Grokipedia, “Theodotion”. ↩
41. See also “The Nahal Hever Greek Minor Prophets Scroll and the Kaige Recension” on this site. ↩
42. Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩
43. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
44. Joseph Ziegler, ed., Duodecim prophetae, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis editum 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1943), with the companion volumes on Isaiah (1939), Ezekiel (1952), Daniel (1954) and Jeremiah (1957). ↩
45. Alfred Rahlfs, Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften des Alten Testaments (Berlin: Weidmann, 1914); revised by Detlef Fraenkel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). ↩
46. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
47. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
48. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
49. F. Vigouroux, ed., Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 4, “Marchalianus (Codex)”, text on Wikisource. ↩
50. Göttingen Septuagint, catalogue entry Ra Q. ↩
51. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
52. F. Vigouroux, ed., Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 4, “Marchalianus (Codex)”, text on Wikisource. ↩
53. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
54. Göttingen Septuagint, catalogue entry Ra Q. ↩
55. F. Vigouroux, ed., Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 4, “Marchalianus (Codex)”, text on Wikisource. ↩
56. Grokipedia, “Uncial script”. ↩
57. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
58. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
59. Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (London: T&T Clark, 2004). ↩
60. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
61. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
62. Göttingen Septuagint, catalogue entry Ra Q. ↩
63. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
64. F. Vigouroux, ed., Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 4, “Marchalianus (Codex)”, text on Wikisource. ↩
65. Göttingen Septuagint, catalogue entry Ra Q. ↩
66. IRHT, Pinakes, Città del Vaticano, BAV, Vat. gr. 2125. ↩
67. IRHT, Pinakes, Città del Vaticano, BAV, Vat. gr. 2125. ↩
68. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
69. Göttingen Septuagint, catalogue entry Ra Q. ↩
70. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
71. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
72. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
73. See also “Paul of Tella and the Syro-Hexapla” on this site. ↩
74. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
75. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
76. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
77. Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩
78. Grokipedia, “Hexapla”. ↩
79. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
80. F. Vigouroux, ed., Dictionnaire de la Bible, vol. 4, “Marchalianus (Codex)”, text on Wikisource. ↩
81. Joseph Ziegler, ed., Duodecim prophetae, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis editum 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1943), with the companion volumes on Isaiah (1939), Ezekiel (1952), Daniel (1954) and Jeremiah (1957). ↩
82. See also “Paul of Tella and the Syro-Hexapla” on this site. ↩
83. Grokipedia, “Aquila of Sinope”. ↩
84. Grokipedia, “Theodotion”. ↩
85. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
86. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
87. Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (London: T&T Clark, 2004). ↩
88. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
89. Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (London: T&T Clark, 2004). ↩
90. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
91. Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (London: T&T Clark, 2004). ↩
92. Grokipedia, “Codex Sinaiticus”. ↩
93. Joseph Ziegler, ed., Duodecim prophetae, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis editum 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1943), with the companion volumes on Isaiah (1939), Ezekiel (1952), Daniel (1954) and Jeremiah (1957). ↩
94. Göttingen Septuagint, catalogue entry Ra Q. ↩
95. See also “The Nahal Hever Greek Minor Prophets Scroll and the Kaige Recension” on this site. ↩
96. Grokipedia, “Theodotion”. ↩
97. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
98. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
99. Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (London: T&T Clark, 2004). ↩
100. Joseph Ziegler, ed., Duodecim prophetae, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis editum 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1943), with the companion volumes on Isaiah (1939), Ezekiel (1952), Daniel (1954) and Jeremiah (1957). ↩
101. Grokipedia, “Hexapla”. ↩
102. Digital Vatican Library, Vat. gr. 2125. ↩
103. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
104. Göttingen Septuagint, catalogue entry Ra Q. ↩
105. Joseph Ziegler, ed., Duodecim prophetae, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis editum 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1943), with the companion volumes on Isaiah (1939), Ezekiel (1952), Daniel (1954) and Jeremiah (1957). ↩
106. Alison Salvesen, ed., Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 58 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). ↩
107. Digital Vatican Library, Vat. gr. 2125. ↩
108. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
109. Göttingen Septuagint, catalogue entry Ra Q. ↩
110. Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 2nd ed. rev. R. R. Ottley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). ↩
111. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
112. See also “The Hexapla of Origen” on this site. ↩
113. See also “Paul of Tella and the Syro-Hexapla” on this site. ↩
114. See also “The Nahal Hever Greek Minor Prophets Scroll and the Kaige Recension” on this site. ↩
115. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Prophetarum codex Graecus Vaticanus 2125 vulgo Marchalianus (Rome, 1890). ↩
116. Joseph Ziegler, ed., Duodecim prophetae, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum auctoritate Academiae Scientiarum Gottingensis editum 13 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1943), with the companion volumes on Isaiah (1939), Ezekiel (1952), Daniel (1954) and Jeremiah (1957). ↩
117. Frederick Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩