Paul of Tella and the Syro-Hexapla

The Syro-Hexapla is a translation of the Greek Old Testament into Syriac, made in Egypt in the second decade of the seventh century by Paul, bishop of Tella, and a small group of collaborators. It is not a translation of the Septuagint in any ordinary sense. Its source was the Greek text as revised and annotated by Origen in the fifth column of his great six-column Bible, the Hexapla, and Paul rendered that text into Syriac with a literalness so strict that the result can often be turned back into Greek word for word. He also kept the critical signs that Origen had placed in his column, the asterisk and the obelus, and he copied into his margins a large number of readings from the other Greek translators, Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. Because the Hexapla itself perished long ago and survives only in fragments, the Syro-Hexapla has become the single most important witness to what Origen’s edition looked like and to how he marked the differences between the Greek and the Hebrew. This article describes the circumstances in which the translation was made, the man who made it, the method he followed, the manuscripts in which his work survives, the modern recovery of those manuscripts and the uses to which scholars have put them.¹²³

The Background in Origen's Hexapla

Origen of Alexandria compiled the Hexapla in the first half of the third century, largely at Caesarea in Palestine. His purpose, as far as it can be recovered from his own remarks and from the description of Eusebius, was to set the Greek Bible used by the churches beside the Hebrew text used by the Jews, so that Christians disputing with Jews would know which passages the Jews accepted and which they did not. The work arranged the text in parallel columns: the Hebrew in Hebrew letters, the Hebrew transliterated into Greek letters, the Greek translation of Aquila, that of Symmachus, the Septuagint, and that of Theodotion. In some books further columns were added for anonymous versions that Origen had found. The whole ran to many volumes and was probably never copied entire. It remained in the library at Caesarea, where Jerome consulted it in the late fourth century, and it seems to have been lost when the city fell to the Arabs in the seventh century.⁴⁵⁶

The fifth column was the heart of the work. Here Origen did not simply reproduce the Septuagint as he found it. He compared it with the Hebrew, and where the Greek contained words or passages with nothing corresponding in the Hebrew, he marked them with an obelus, a horizontal stroke borrowed from the Alexandrian critics of Homer, who had used it to mark lines they suspected. Where the Hebrew contained material missing from the Greek, he supplied it, usually from the version of Theodotion, and marked the addition with an asterisk. The end of each marked passage was indicated by a metobelus, a sign shaped like a colon or a pair of points. The method was taken from the philology of the Alexandrian scholars, Aristarchus of Samothrace above all, and it allowed the reader to see at a glance both the traditional Greek and the extent to which it departed from the Hebrew.⁷⁸⁹

The difficulty was that the signs were fragile. Scribes copying the fifth column on its own, without the other columns, often omitted them, and once the signs were gone the result was a mixed text in which Origen’s additions from Theodotion sat inside the Septuagint with nothing to show that they had not always been there. Much of the later Greek tradition was affected in this way. Eusebius and Pamphilus produced copies of the fifth column at Caesarea in the early fourth century, and these copies, with their signs, were the main channel through which Origen’s edition reached later readers. It was a manuscript of this kind, a copy of the Hexaplaric Septuagint descended from the work of Eusebius and Pamphilus, that Paul of Tella translated three centuries later.¹⁰¹¹¹²

Syriac Christianity and Its Bibles

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic that took shape as a literary language in the region of Edessa, in upper Mesopotamia, in the first centuries of the Christian era. It became the language of a large Christian population stretching from the Mediterranean coast to Persia. The standard Syriac Bible, the Peshitta, was translated in the second and third centuries. Its Old Testament was made from the Hebrew, probably in part by Jewish or Jewish-Christian translators, and it follows a Hebrew text close to the one that the Masoretes later fixed. For the Syriac churches the Peshitta was, and remains, the Bible of liturgy and of ordinary reading.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

The fact that the Peshitta Old Testament was made from the Hebrew created a problem for Syriac theologians in the fifth and sixth centuries. The great controversies of that period were conducted in Greek, and the Greek fathers quoted the Old Testament in the form of the Septuagint. When a Syriac writer translated a Greek theological treatise, he found that its scriptural quotations did not match the Bible he knew. Arguments that turned on the exact wording of a verse could fail in translation. The Greek Bible also had a special prestige as the text of the church of the empire, and of the apostles who had quoted it. There was therefore a growing desire among Syriac scholars to have a Bible that corresponded closely to the Greek.¹⁶

The first major attempt was made at the beginning of the sixth century under Philoxenus, bishop of Mabbug, a leading opponent of the Council of Chalcedon. In 507 and 508 his chorepiscopus Polycarp produced a revision of the Syriac New Testament and at least parts of the Old Testament, bringing them closer to the Greek. Little of the Philoxenian Old Testament survives, apart from fragments of Isaiah and the Psalms. A century later, two further revisions were made at the same place and at almost the same time. Thomas of Harqel revised the Philoxenian New Testament, producing the version known as the Harklean, and Paul of Tella translated the Old Testament afresh from the Hexaplaric Greek. Both men worked in the monasteries of the Enaton near Alexandria, and both completed their work around 615 to 617. Their versions represent the culmination of a long movement in Syriac scholarship towards an ever more exact imitation of Greek.¹⁷¹⁸

The Church of Paul of Tella

Paul belonged to the church that rejected the definition of the person of Christ adopted at Chalcedon in 451. His party held, following Cyril of Alexandria and later Severus of Antioch, that the incarnate Christ had one nature, composed of divinity and humanity without confusion or division. Their opponents called them Monophysites; they called themselves orthodox, and modern scholars usually use the term Miaphysite. In the course of the sixth century, under pressure from emperors who sought to enforce Chalcedon, the Miaphysites of Syria built up a separate hierarchy of bishops, which became the Syrian Orthodox Church. Their natural allies were the Miaphysites of Egypt, the church of the Coptic patriarchs of Alexandria.^19202122

The relationship between the two churches was not always easy. In the later sixth century a quarrel over theological terminology divided the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria, and the two churches were for some years out of communion. One of the achievements of the Syrian patriarch Athanasius I, called Gammolo or the camel-driver because of his humble origins, was to heal this breach. Athanasius held the patriarchate from about 595 to 631. In 616 he travelled to Egypt, met the Coptic patriarch Anastasius, and concluded a union between the two churches. The union was celebrated in documents signed by the bishops present, and Paul of Tella’s name appears among the Syrian signatories.²³²⁴

War and Exile

The years in which Paul worked were among the most disastrous in the history of the eastern Roman empire. In 602 the emperor Maurice was overthrown and killed by the usurper Phocas. The Persian king Khosrow II, who owed his throne to Maurice’s help, took the murder as a pretext for war. Persian armies crossed the frontier in Mesopotamia and over the following years took the great fortress cities of the region one after another. Dara fell in 604, and the cities of upper Mesopotamia, including Edessa, were taken by about 610. In 610 Heraclius overthrew Phocas, but he could not halt the Persian advance. Antioch fell in 613, Damascus soon after, and Jerusalem in 614, when the relic of the True Cross was carried off to Ctesiphon. Egypt itself was invaded in 618 or 619, and Alexandria fell to the Persians in about 619.²⁵²⁶

Tella, the see of which Paul was bishop, lay in upper Mesopotamia, east of Edessa, at the place now called Viranşehir in south-eastern Turkey. It was known in Syriac as Tella de-Mauzelath and in Greek as Constantina. The city was in the path of the Persian invasion, and its bishop, like many others, found himself unable to remain in his see. The sources do not say exactly when Paul left Tella, but by the middle of the decade he was in Egypt, where many Syrian clergy had gathered. Egypt, until the Persian invasion of 618, offered a refuge where the Miaphysite church was strong and the scholars of Syria could find libraries, Greek manuscripts and the support of the Alexandrian patriarchate.²⁷²⁸

The place where Paul and Thomas of Harqel worked was the Enaton, a group of monasteries situated at the ninth milestone west of Alexandria, from which it took its name. The Enaton was a large and celebrated monastic settlement, with communities of different allegiances, and it had long been a centre of Miaphysite learning. The colophons of the Syriac manuscripts say that the translations were made in the monastery of the Antonians at the Enaton, or in Alexandria. It is likely that the Syrian exiles found there both the Greek manuscripts they needed and the conditions of peace for a long piece of scholarly work. They were not to enjoy them long. Within a few years of the completion of the translation, the Persians had taken Alexandria, and within a generation the Arabs had conquered both Syria and Egypt.²⁹³⁰

Paul of Tella the Man

Very little is known of Paul’s life beyond his work. He is not mentioned in many contemporary sources, and what can be said about him rests largely on the colophons of the manuscripts of his translation, on the documents of the union of 616, and on scattered notices in later Syriac historians. He was a monk before he became a bishop, and he was a skilled Greek scholar, as the translation demonstrates on every page. He was consecrated bishop of Tella in the early years of the seventh century, perhaps between 610 and 615. His tenure appears to have been short, and other bishops are recorded in the see within a few years. Whether this was because he died, because he remained in Egypt, or because of the confusion caused by the Persian occupation, is not known.³¹

Besides the Old Testament, Paul is credited with a translation into Syriac of the order of baptism of Severus of Antioch, the theologian whose works were the foundation of Miaphysite doctrine and who had himself died in exile in Egypt in 538. Paul is also credited with certain liturgical compositions. These attributions show a man devoted to the transmission of Greek Christian learning into Syriac, and in particular to the works of the Miaphysite fathers. His great translation of the Old Testament belongs to the same programme: it was intended to give Syriac readers access to the Bible of the Greek fathers in the most exact form possible.³²³³

Paul did not work alone. The colophons speak of the translation as having been made by him with the encouragement of the patriarch Athanasius, and later tradition associated other scholars with the project. It has been suggested that the work was divided among a team and that Paul’s name became attached to the whole. Certainly the number of books translated, and the speed with which the work appears to have been done, would make collaboration likely. The translation is, however, remarkably consistent in its method, which suggests either a single translator or a team working under close direction.³⁴³⁵

The Date of the Translation

The colophons give the date of the translation of several books. They are reckoned by the Seleucid era, the system of dating from the autumn of 312 BC used throughout the Syriac world. The colophon of the book of Kings in a Paris manuscript, for example, states that the translation was made in Alexandria in the year 928 of the Greeks, that is, in 616 or 617 AD, by the bishop Paul. Other colophons give similar dates. The Syriac historians placed the translation in the time of the patriarch Athanasius and of the Persian invasion. The usual range given by modern scholars is 615 to 617, and the work seems to have been completed before the Persian conquest of Egypt.³⁶³⁷³⁸

The Method of Translation

The Syro-Hexapla is the most literal translation of the Bible ever made into Syriac, and one of the most literal translations of any text from Greek. Paul’s aim was not to produce a version that would read naturally to a Syriac speaker. It was to reproduce the Greek so exactly that a reader who knew no Greek could reconstruct the original, and to preserve in Syriac every feature of the Greek that might matter for interpretation or for argument. The result is in many places barely idiomatic, but it is an instrument of extraordinary precision.³⁹⁴⁰

The translator followed the word order of the Greek, even where Syriac would naturally use a different order. He tried to render each Greek word by a single Syriac equivalent and to use that equivalent consistently. He distinguished grammatical features of Greek that Syriac does not normally mark, such as the definite article, by devising special conventions. Greek compound words were represented by combinations of Syriac words. Greek proper names were transliterated according to their Greek spelling, not adjusted to the forms familiar to Syriac readers from the Peshitta, which followed the Hebrew. Particles and conjunctions were translated one by one. A modern scholar can therefore usually tell from the Syriac not only what the Greek meant but often which Greek word stood in the text.⁴¹⁴²

This literalism did not arise from nowhere. Syriac translators of Greek philosophical and theological works had been moving towards a closer and closer style throughout the sixth century. In the earliest period, Syriac translators had felt free to paraphrase and adapt, aiming at the sense. By the time of Paul and Thomas of Harqel the ideal had become that of mirror translation, in which the form as well as the meaning of the original was preserved. The movement was driven partly by the needs of theological controversy, in which disputes could turn on a single term, and partly by a growing reverence for the Greek text as the authoritative form of the Christian tradition. The Syro-Hexapla is the most complete monument of this ideal in the field of the Bible.⁴³

There is a curious irony in the result. The Peshitta Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew and therefore stood, in many respects, closer to the original text of the Old Testament than the Septuagint did. The Syro-Hexapla abandoned that closeness to the Hebrew in favour of fidelity to a Greek translation of the Hebrew. Yet because the Greek was that of Origen’s fifth column, which had itself been corrected towards the Hebrew in many places by the addition of asterisked material, the Syro-Hexapla brought back into the Syriac Bible, by a roundabout route, some of the Hebrew content that the Septuagint lacked.⁴⁴⁴⁵

The Signs and the Margins

What gives the Syro-Hexapla its special value is not only its literalism but its preservation of Origen’s apparatus. Paul copied the asterisks, obeli and metobeli of his Greek exemplar into the Syriac text, placing them at the same points. Because the Syriac follows the Greek word for word, the extent of each marked passage can be determined with some precision. In the Greek manuscripts that survive, the signs are often omitted or misplaced, and only a few Greek witnesses, such as the Codex Colbertino-Sarravianus of the Pentateuch and historical books and the Codex Marchalianus of the Prophets, preserve them in any quantity. The Syro-Hexapla preserves them throughout the books it contains, and it is the fullest single record of how Origen marked his text.⁴⁶⁴⁷⁴⁸

In the margins Paul recorded readings from the other columns of the Hexapla. These are introduced by Syriac abbreviations for the names of the translators: the letter alaph for Aquila, semkath for Symmachus, and taw for Theodotion. Sometimes all three are cited together, sometimes the reading is attributed to two of them. The marginal notes also include Greek words written in Greek letters, explanations of difficult terms, and occasional notes about the Hebrew. These marginalia are of the greatest importance, because the versions of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion survive in Greek only in fragments, and the Syro-Hexapla margins are one of the principal sources from which those fragments have been collected.⁴⁹⁵⁰⁵¹

Aquila’s version, made in the early second century, was a word-for-word rendering of the Hebrew, made, according to tradition, by a proselyte to Judaism under the influence of the rabbis. It was so literal that it rendered the Hebrew particle that marks the direct object by a Greek preposition. Symmachus, writing later in the second century, aimed at a clear and idiomatic Greek. Theodotion, whose work is associated with a revision of the older Greek towards the Hebrew, was the source from which Origen filled most of the gaps in the Septuagint. The Syro-Hexapla margins allow the different character of these three versions to be seen side by side, in passage after passage.⁵²⁵³⁵⁴

The marginal readings were not added at random. They appear to have been selected from the Greek exemplar, which itself contained marginal notes drawn from the Hexapla. Paul’s copy, like other copies descended from the work of Eusebius and Pamphilus at Caesarea, seems to have carried these notes in its margins, and Paul translated them along with the text. Some colophons in the Syriac manuscripts reproduce colophons from the Greek, recording that the exemplar had been corrected against the Hexapla in the library at Caesarea. These notes form a direct chain of transmission from Origen’s own copy to the Syriac manuscripts of the eighth century.⁵⁵⁵⁶

The Text of the Greek Exemplar

The Greek text that Paul translated belongs to the family that scholars call the Hexaplaric or Origenian recension. Textual critics of the Septuagint distinguish several major groups of Greek manuscripts, of which the Hexaplaric is one. Other groups include the Lucianic or Antiochene text, associated with the martyr Lucian of Antioch, and in the prophets a text associated with Hesychius. Jerome, writing around 400, described the situation in a famous passage: Alexandria and Egypt used the text of Hesychius, the region from Constantinople to Antioch used that of Lucian, and the provinces between used the Palestinian manuscripts edited by Origen and spread by Eusebius and Pamphilus. The Syro-Hexapla is the most extensive witness to the third of these.⁵⁷⁵⁸

For the editors of the Septuagint, the Syro-Hexapla is therefore a precious resource. It allows them to identify the readings of the Hexaplaric recension, to distinguish them from the older text, and to trace the influence of Origen’s work on later manuscripts. The Göttingen edition of the Septuagint, which has been in progress since the early twentieth century, cites the Syro-Hexapla systematically in its apparatus, and the editors of individual volumes have repeatedly emphasised its importance for reconstructing the Hexaplaric text and its signs.⁵⁹⁶⁰

The Manuscripts

The Syro-Hexapla never replaced the Peshitta as the Bible of the Syriac churches. It was a scholar’s Bible, used for study, for commentary and for occasional liturgical readings. It was copied far less often than the Peshitta, and no complete manuscript of it survives. What remains is one great manuscript containing about half the Old Testament, a number of manuscripts of individual books, and many fragments, some of them in palimpsests and in the manuscripts brought to Europe from the Monastery of the Syrians in the Wadi al-Natrun in Egypt.⁶¹⁶²

The chief witness is the Codex Ambrosianus, now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Milan under the shelfmark C. 313 inf. It is a large manuscript on parchment, written in an elegant Estrangela script, usually dated to the eighth century. It contains the second half of the Old Testament in the order of the Syro-Hexapla: the Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, the Twelve Prophets, Jeremiah with Baruch, Lamentations and the Letter of Jeremiah, Daniel with Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, Ezekiel and Isaiah. It preserves the critical signs and the marginal readings with great care. Andrea Masius’ companion volume, described below, is presumed to have formed the first half of the same set.⁶³⁶⁴

The Ambrosian manuscript came to Milan in the early seventeenth century, when the library was founded by Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who sent agents to the East to acquire oriental manuscripts. It was studied by scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them Matthaeus Norberg, who published Jeremiah and Ezekiel from it in 1787, and Heinrich Middeldorpf, who published a large part of it in 1835. The whole manuscript was finally made available in 1874, when Antonio Maria Ceriani, prefect of the Ambrosiana, published a photolithographic facsimile. This was one of the earliest complete photographic reproductions of a major manuscript, and it opened the Syro-Hexapla to scholars everywhere.⁶⁵⁶⁶

Among the other surviving witnesses are manuscripts in Paris and London. A Paris manuscript of the Syriac collections of the Bibliothèque nationale contains the fourth book of Kings, and it is the source of one of the dated colophons. The British Library holds manuscripts and fragments from the Nitrian collection, including parts of Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Ruth and Kings. These were published by Paul de Lagarde in his Bibliothecae Syriacae, issued in 1892 after his death, together with other material. Further fragments have been identified in palimpsests and in later Syriac manuscripts, and Willem Baars collected and published a number of new texts in 1968.⁶⁷⁶⁸⁶⁹

The Lost Volume of Andreas Masius

The first half of the Syro-Hexapla, containing the Pentateuch and the historical books, was once known to exist in Europe. In the sixteenth century the Flemish humanist and orientalist Andreas Masius, one of the first Western scholars to master Syriac, owned a Syriac manuscript containing the Hexaplaric version of the earlier books. He used it in preparing his commentary on Joshua, which was published by Christophe Plantin at Antwerp in 1574, the year after his death. Masius printed the Greek text of Joshua with Origen’s signs restored from the Syriac, and he cited the Syriac margins for the readings of the other translators. His work was the first use of the Syro-Hexapla in Western scholarship.⁷⁰⁷¹

After Masius’ death his manuscript disappeared. Its fate is unknown. It may have perished, or it may lie unrecognised in some collection. For three centuries the Pentateuch and historical books of the Syro-Hexapla were known only from fragments, from Masius’ citations and from quotations in later Syriac writers. The loss of the Masius volume is one of the great disappointments in the history of biblical manuscripts, because it would have provided for the first books of the Bible the same full witness to the Hexapla that the Ambrosian manuscript provides for the second half.⁷²⁷³

The Midyat Discovery

A remarkable discovery partly repaired this loss in the twentieth century. In 1964 the Estonian-American scholar Arthur Vööbus, travelling among the Syrian Orthodox communities of south-eastern Turkey in search of manuscripts, found in the town of Midyat in Tur Abdin a manuscript containing the Pentateuch in the Syro-Hexapla. Vööbus announced the discovery in a short book in 1971 and published a facsimile edition in 1975 in the series Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium. The manuscript is a later copy, of the thirteenth century, but it gives the complete text of the five books of Moses with the signs and many of the marginal readings.⁷⁴⁷⁵

The Midyat discovery was welcomed by Septuagint scholars as a major addition to the evidence for the Hexapla in the Pentateuch. It allowed the editors of the Göttingen Septuagint to take it into account in their volumes on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, which John William Wevers published between 1974 and 1991. Its value is somewhat limited by its late date and by the fact that later copyists did not always reproduce the signs with complete accuracy, but it remains the fullest witness to the Syro-Hexapla of the Pentateuch.⁷⁶⁷⁷

The Syro-Hexapla in Syriac Scholarship

Within the Syriac churches the Syro-Hexapla had a long and active life. Syriac commentators used it alongside the Peshitta, often citing both and comparing them. In the later seventh century Jacob of Edessa, the greatest Syriac scholar of his age, undertook a revision of parts of the Old Testament in which he combined the Peshitta and the Syro-Hexapla, drawing on Greek manuscripts as well. Moses bar Kepha in the ninth century and Dionysius bar Salibi in the twelfth cited it in their commentaries, and the encyclopaedic scholar Gregory Bar Hebraeus in the thirteenth century used it extensively in his Storehouse of Mysteries, a collection of notes on the whole Bible.⁷⁸⁷⁹

The Syro-Hexapla also entered the liturgy. Lectionaries of the Syrian Orthodox Church include readings from it, especially for books or passages where the Greek text differed significantly from the Hebrew, and where the Greek form had a theological or liturgical importance. The Psalms of the Syro-Hexapla were studied, and Robert Hiebert has shown that a number of manuscripts of the Psalter labelled Syro-Hexaplaric in fact contain a more complex text, which must be studied on its own terms. The Syro-Hexapla was thus not merely a document of scholarship but a living part of the tradition of the Syrian church.⁸⁰⁸¹

The influence of Paul’s work extended beyond the Syrian Orthodox Church. The Melkite community of Palestine, which used a dialect of Aramaic known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic and accepted Chalcedon, seems to have made use of Greek texts of a Hexaplaric kind in its own Bible. The Arabic translations of the Bible made by Christian scholars in the Middle Ages sometimes drew on the Syro-Hexapla as well as on the Peshitta. Through these channels some of Origen’s textual work reached communities that never read Greek at all.⁸²

Use in Modern Textual Criticism

For modern scholarship the Syro-Hexapla has two main uses. The first is in the reconstruction of the Hexapla itself. In the nineteenth century the English scholar Frederick Field gathered all the known fragments of the Hexapla into his monumental Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt, published at Oxford in 1875. Field drew heavily on the Syro-Hexapla, translating its marginal readings back into Greek and using its signs to determine which parts of the Septuagint Origen had marked. Field’s work remains indispensable, and a new edition under the auspices of the Hexapla Institute has been undertaken to incorporate the material discovered since his time, including the Midyat Pentateuch.⁸³⁸⁴

The second use is in the textual criticism of the Septuagint. The Göttingen editors cite the Syro-Hexapla as a witness to the Hexaplaric recension, and they use its signs to identify readings that entered the Greek tradition from Origen’s work. Scholars studying particular books have examined the Syro-Hexapla in detail to establish its value for each. Because the translation is so literal, retroversion into Greek is generally reliable, but scholars have also noted the limits of the method: some Greek features cannot be represented in Syriac, and some Syriac renderings could correspond to more than one Greek word. Careful study of the translator’s habits is therefore necessary before the Syriac can be used as evidence for the Greek.⁸⁵⁸⁶⁸⁷

The Syro-Hexapla has also been important for the study of the books of the Greek Old Testament that have no Hebrew original or that differ greatly from the Hebrew. In Daniel, for example, the Septuagint version was replaced in Christian use by that of Theodotion, and the original Old Greek survived in only one Greek manuscript and in a papyrus. The Syro-Hexapla is the other main witness to the Old Greek of Daniel, preserving it with Origen’s signs. In Job, where the Old Greek was considerably shorter than the Hebrew and Origen supplied the missing material from Theodotion with asterisks, the Syro-Hexapla allows the original shorter text to be identified.⁸⁸⁸⁹⁹⁰

The Syro-Hexapla and the Nature of the Septuagint

One of the questions that has occupied scholars of the Septuagint for more than a century is the relationship between the Old Greek translation and the various revisions of it made towards the Hebrew in the centuries around the beginning of the Christian era. The discovery of the Greek scroll of the Minor Prophets from Nahal Hever showed that Jewish scholars had already revised the Septuagint towards the Hebrew before Aquila, and that Theodotion’s version stood in this tradition of revision. The Syro-Hexapla margins, with their readings of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, form an essential part of the evidence for this history.⁹¹⁹²

The signs of the Syro-Hexapla also illuminate Origen’s own aims. Scholars have debated whether Origen intended to produce a corrected Septuagint for church use or merely a tool for comparison. The careful marking of every addition and every suspected passage, preserved in the Syriac, suggests that he wished to preserve the traditional Greek while making its relationship to the Hebrew visible. That the result was later used as a standard text, with the signs omitted, was not his doing. The Syro-Hexapla, by preserving the signs, allows modern scholars to see the work as Origen intended it.⁹³⁹⁴

The Language of the Translation

The Syriac of the Syro-Hexapla is an artificial language in many respects, formed by the pressure of the Greek original on Syriac grammar and vocabulary. It contains Greek loanwords, calques and constructions that do not occur in natural Syriac. For students of the history of the Syriac language it is an important document of the Hellenizing tendency of the seventh century. Some of its innovations entered the general vocabulary of learned Syriac, especially in theology and philosophy, while others remained confined to translation literature.⁹⁵⁹⁶

The vocabulary of the Syro-Hexapla was studied by nineteenth-century lexicographers, and its words were included in the great Syriac dictionaries, notably the Thesaurus Syriacus of Robert Payne Smith. Later scholars have produced concordances and studies of its translation technique for particular books, comparing its renderings with those of the Peshitta and of the Harklean New Testament. These studies show a consistent set of conventions that suggest a single school of translation, perhaps the same circle at the Enaton that produced both versions.⁹⁷⁹⁸

Editions and Modern Study

The publication of the Syro-Hexapla has proceeded slowly over more than two centuries. After Masius’ citations in the sixteenth century, the first substantial publications came from Scandinavian and German scholars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Norberg published Jeremiah and Ezekiel from the Ambrosian manuscript in 1787, and Middeldorpf published Kings and most of the Ambrosian books in 1835. Ceriani published scattered texts in his Monumenta sacra et profana before producing the facsimile of 1874. Lagarde’s posthumous Bibliothecae Syriacae added the London fragments. Vööbus’ facsimile of the Midyat Pentateuch in 1975 and Baars’ collection of new texts in 1968 complete the main body of published material.^{99100101102103}

Modern study of the Syro-Hexapla is closely bound up with the study of the Hexapla in general. The conference volume edited by Alison Salvesen in 1998, Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, gathered the work of an international group of scholars and set out a programme for a new edition of the fragments. The Hexapla Institute, founded to carry out that programme, has drawn extensively on the Syro-Hexapla, as Field did before. The translation technique of individual books has been studied by scholars such as Robert Hiebert for the Psalms, and the whole field has been surveyed by Sebastian Brock in his studies of the Bible in the Syriac tradition.^104105106

Assessment

The Syro-Hexapla is a work of exceptional scholarly precision produced in exceptionally difficult circumstances. Paul of Tella and his collaborators worked as refugees, their churches divided, their homeland under foreign occupation, and the libraries of Syria cut off. They nonetheless produced a translation of the whole Old Testament which, in its literal accuracy and in its preservation of the critical apparatus of its original, has no equal in the ancient world. That they did so for a scholarly and theological purpose, to give their church an exact image of the Bible of the Greek fathers, does not diminish the achievement.¹⁰⁷¹⁰⁸

For the modern reader, the Syro-Hexapla is above all a window onto the Hexapla of Origen. The great Greek work disappeared in the seventh century; its fifth column, with Origen’s signs, survives in Greek only in scattered and damaged form. The Syriac translation preserves that column for half the Old Testament in a single fine manuscript and for much of the rest in later copies and fragments. Without it, our knowledge of how Origen worked, and of the readings of the Greek translators of the second century, would be far poorer. The work of a seventh-century bishop in exile has thus become one of the indispensable tools of modern biblical scholarship.^109110111

The history of the Syro-Hexapla also illustrates the long chain of transmission through which ancient texts reach us. Origen’s columns, copied at Caesarea by Eusebius and Pamphilus, carried to Egypt, translated in exile by Syrian scholars, copied by Syrian monks in the eighth century, carried to Milan by the agents of a seventeenth-century cardinal, published in facsimile by a nineteenth-century librarian, and studied by scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: at every stage the survival of the work depended on the care of individuals working in their own circumstances and for their own purposes. The Syro-Hexapla is one of the clearest examples of how much the history of the Bible owes to that long and often unseen labour.^112113114115

Notes

1. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice editus, Monumenta sacra et profana 7 (Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). ↩
2. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
3. Grokipedia, “Paul of Tella”. ↩
4. Grokipedia, “Origen”. ↩
5. Grokipedia, “Hexapla”. ↩
6. See also “The Hexapla of Origen” on this site. ↩
7. Grokipedia, “Aristarchus of Samothrace”. ↩
8. Grokipedia, “Obelism”. ↩
9. Alison Salvesen, ed., Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 58 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). ↩
10. Alison Salvesen, ed., Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 58 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). ↩
11. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
12. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). ↩
13. Grokipedia, “Peshitta”. ↩
14. Grokipedia, “Syriac language”. ↩
15. See also “The Peshitta and Its Hebrew Vorlage” on this site. ↩
16. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
17. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
18. See also “The Syriac New Testament” on this site. ↩
19. Grokipedia, “Miaphysitism”. ↩
20. Grokipedia, “Syriac Orthodox Church”. ↩
21. Grokipedia, “Severus of Antioch”. ↩
22. Grokipedia, “Coptic Orthodox Church”. ↩
23. Grokipedia, “Paul of Tella”. ↩
24. Grokipedia, “Syriac Orthodox Church”. ↩
25. Grokipedia, “Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628”. ↩
26. Grokipedia, “Khosrow II”. ↩
27. Grokipedia, “Paul of Tella”. ↩
28. Grokipedia, “Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628”. ↩
29. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
30. Grokipedia, “Alexandria”. ↩
31. Grokipedia, “Paul of Tella”. ↩
32. Grokipedia, “Paul of Tella”. ↩
33. Grokipedia, “Severus of Antioch”. ↩
34. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
35. Arthur Vööbus, The Hexapla and the Syro-Hexapla: Very Important Discoveries for Septuagint Research (Stockholm: Estonian Theological Society in Exile, 1971). ↩
36. Heinrich Middeldorpf, ed., Codex Syriaco-Hexaplaris: Liber Quartus Regum e codice Parisiensi, Iesaias, duodecim Prophetae minores, Proverbia, Iobus, Canticum, Threni, Ecclesiastes e codice Mediolanensi (Berlin: Enslin, 1835). ↩
37. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
38. Grokipedia, “Paul of Tella”. ↩
39. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
40. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
41. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
42. Robert J. V. Hiebert, The “Syrohexaplaric” Psalter, Septuagint and Cognate Studies 27 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). ↩
43. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
44. Grokipedia, “Peshitta”. ↩
45. Alison Salvesen, ed., Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 58 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). ↩
46. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice editus, Monumenta sacra et profana 7 (Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). ↩
47. Alison Salvesen, ed., Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 58 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). ↩
48. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). ↩
49. Grokipedia, “Aquila of Sinope”. ↩
50. Grokipedia, “Theodotion”. ↩
51. Frederick Field, ed., Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt; sive veterum interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum fragmenta, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩
52. Grokipedia, “Aquila of Sinope”. ↩
53. Grokipedia, “Theodotion”. ↩
54. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
55. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice editus, Monumenta sacra et profana 7 (Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). ↩
56. Alison Salvesen, ed., Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 58 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). ↩
57. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
58. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). ↩
59. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
60. Robert J. V. Hiebert, The “Syrohexaplaric” Psalter, Septuagint and Cognate Studies 27 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). ↩
61. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
62. Willem Baars, New Syro-Hexaplaric Texts, Edited, Commented upon and Compared with the Septuagint (Leiden: Brill, 1968). ↩
63. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice editus, Monumenta sacra et profana 7 (Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). ↩
64. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
65. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice editus, Monumenta sacra et profana 7 (Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). ↩
66. Heinrich Middeldorpf, ed., Codex Syriaco-Hexaplaris: Liber Quartus Regum e codice Parisiensi, Iesaias, duodecim Prophetae minores, Proverbia, Iobus, Canticum, Threni, Ecclesiastes e codice Mediolanensi (Berlin: Enslin, 1835). ↩
67. Paul de Lagarde, Bibliothecae Syriacae a Paulo de Lagarde collectae quae ad philologiam sacram pertinent (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1892). ↩
68. Willem Baars, New Syro-Hexaplaric Texts, Edited, Commented upon and Compared with the Septuagint (Leiden: Brill, 1968). ↩
69. Grokipedia, “Paul de Lagarde”. ↩
70. Andreas Masius, Iosuae imperatoris historia illustrata atque explicata (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1574). ↩
71. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
72. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
73. Arthur Vööbus, The Hexapla and the Syro-Hexapla: Very Important Discoveries for Septuagint Research (Stockholm: Estonian Theological Society in Exile, 1971). ↩
74. Arthur Vööbus, The Pentateuch in the Version of the Syro-Hexapla: A Facsimile Edition of a Midyat MS. Discovered 1964, CSCO 369, Subsidia 45 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1975). ↩
75. Arthur Vööbus, The Hexapla and the Syro-Hexapla: Very Important Discoveries for Septuagint Research (Stockholm: Estonian Theological Society in Exile, 1971). ↩
76. Arthur Vööbus, The Pentateuch in the Version of the Syro-Hexapla: A Facsimile Edition of a Midyat MS. Discovered 1964, CSCO 369, Subsidia 45 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1975). ↩
77. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
78. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
79. Grokipedia, “Syriac Orthodox Church”. ↩
80. Robert J. V. Hiebert, The “Syrohexaplaric” Psalter, Septuagint and Cognate Studies 27 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). ↩
81. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
82. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
83. Frederick Field, ed., Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt; sive veterum interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum fragmenta, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩
84. Alison Salvesen, ed., Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 58 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). ↩
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. Robert J. V. Hiebert, The “Syrohexaplaric” Psalter, Septuagint and Cognate Studies 27 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). ↩
87. Willem Baars, New Syro-Hexaplaric Texts, Edited, Commented upon and Compared with the Septuagint (Leiden: Brill, 1968). ↩
88. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice editus, Monumenta sacra et profana 7 (Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). ↩
89. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
90. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). ↩
91. See also “The Nahal Hever Greek Minor Prophets Scroll and the Kaige Recension” on this site. ↩
92. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
93. Alison Salvesen, ed., Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 58 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). ↩
94. Grokipedia, “Origen”. ↩
95. Grokipedia, “Syriac language”. ↩
96. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
97. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
98. See also “The Syriac New Testament” on this site. ↩
99. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice editus, Monumenta sacra et profana 7 (Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). ↩
100. Arthur Vööbus, The Pentateuch in the Version of the Syro-Hexapla: A Facsimile Edition of a Midyat MS. Discovered 1964, CSCO 369, Subsidia 45 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1975). ↩
101. Paul de Lagarde, Bibliothecae Syriacae a Paulo de Lagarde collectae quae ad philologiam sacram pertinent (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1892). ↩
102. Heinrich Middeldorpf, ed., Codex Syriaco-Hexaplaris: Liber Quartus Regum e codice Parisiensi, Iesaias, duodecim Prophetae minores, Proverbia, Iobus, Canticum, Threni, Ecclesiastes e codice Mediolanensi (Berlin: Enslin, 1835). ↩
103. Willem Baars, New Syro-Hexaplaric Texts, Edited, Commented upon and Compared with the Septuagint (Leiden: Brill, 1968). ↩
104. Alison Salvesen, ed., Origen’s Hexapla and Fragments, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 58 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998). ↩
105. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
106. Robert J. V. Hiebert, The “Syrohexaplaric” Psalter, Septuagint and Cognate Studies 27 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). ↩
107. Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2006). ↩
108. Grokipedia, “Paul of Tella”. ↩
109. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice editus, Monumenta sacra et profana 7 (Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). ↩
110. Frederick Field, ed., Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt; sive veterum interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum fragmenta, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875). ↩
111. Grokipedia, “Hexapla”. ↩
112. Antonio Maria Ceriani, ed., Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice editus, Monumenta sacra et profana 7 (Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). ↩
113. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). ↩
114. See also “The Septuagint and the Letter of Aristeas” on this site. ↩
115. See also “Codex Vaticanus and the Oldest Large Bible” on this site. ↩