The Greek Septuagint version of Judges, some thoughts on the construct state of Bayit

Tweet

Right now I'm reading the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, commonly called the Septuagint-as I've said from time to time, the Septuagint as a literary work is important for a few reasons...one because in reality, it was the main version of the Bible used in the early Church, and the New Testament quotes it often, so in terms of theme and theological terms (Christos, ekkelsia, etc.)...it is important as well because it appears the writers were going from a different version of the Old Testament then the common Hebrew text used today, and hence it reflects a different family of manuscripts...but there is also another aspect of that, as I have pointed out before, re. transliterations of Hebrew words. This is somewhat in relation to that, and my point of interest is re. the construct state of the Hebrew word bayit (that is, a house). For those unfamiliar, construct state, means the vowel inflection of words which slightly changes it's meaning-in this case, basically meaning something similar to the English word "of"-that is to say, in this case, house "of" something. That is, the construct state of the Hebrew word for "house" (bayit), is bet (sometimes written as Beth), meaning "house of"...for example, a school is called "bet sefer", that is, a house of books...and a hospital is called a "bet holim", a house "of" sick people. Though coming from the same root, there is a very real different shade of meaning between bayit or bet-and this is the kind of thing that if a person doesn't know, well, then they don't know Hebrew well enough to speak about Hebrew-that's a fact. However here is something interesting...in the Septuagint version of Judges, this construct state does not seem to exist in the transliterations and instead we see the more or less the basic form of bayit being preferred. Or rather, an understanding of the construct state existed (contextually this can not be denied), however, it's signalization by vocalization, appears to have NOT existed with the writer or groups of writers here. This is not a mistake-it reflects something real in the history of the language-something which does not exist in our current understanding of the rules of Hebrew grammar. Many ppl would say to this "who cares?", and that is a valid question...but it also has an answer-Hebrew scholars and people concerned with translation of ancient text-and that has implications on followers of that text. For those who have studied Hebrew in depth, we see different layers of usage which reflect different time periods-this is just one other reminder that some of our rules...may actually not be rules as handed down from Moses (or God), and in reality reflect usage which has grown, or even changed, over time. That is important for believers in the Bible to understand-the difference between what is actually written, and what is read into it. Btw if you are curious, when the New Testament transliterates such terms, we actually do see the form of the construct state as is commonly used today-which means that what we call the construct state is actually fairly ancient-even if it does not appear to have been universally used at all times by all groups of Jews always. That is to say, it is a variant-and the simple fact is, variant vocalizations did (and do) exist.