ST FRANCIS XAVIER UNIVERSITY
CONTEMPORIZING INTERPRETATION IN GREEK ISAIAH: REAL OR IMAGINED?
SUBMITTED TO DR. KEN PENNER
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
RELS 110 INTRODUCTION TO WORLD RELIGIONS
BY
KEN M. PENNER
JANUARY 24. 2011
Although the Greek translation of Isaiah differs considerably from the Hebrew text, the reason
for these differences has been hotly contested. Those who first studied these differences in Isaiah
over a century ago (Scholz, Ottley, and Swete) noted that major differences between the Greek
and Hebrew were very few, but minor discrepancies abounded. They therefore concluded that
the Hebrew text from which the translator worked was very similar to our Hebrew text, but they
questioned the competence of the translator to render that text carefully. However, within the last
century a new explanation for the differences has become dominant. Seeligmann, followed by
das Neves, Hanhart, Koenig, and van der Kooij, argued that the translator found the fulfillment
of Isaiah's "prophecies" in his own time. Recent proponents of this explanation claimed that
many of the differences were intentional, a result of a method called variously "fulfillment
interpretation," "actualization," or "contemporizing." Most recently, Ron Troxel has argued that
the differences are not the result of a contemporizing "method," but the translator wanted the
translation to convey the sense of the original oracles.
This paper argues that the significant differences between the Greek and the Hebrew texts
are mainly the result, not of a contemporizing method, but rather of the translator's incompetence
or carelessness. I will do so by first demonstrating that most of the differences are not readily
explained by a contemporizing method, secondly by showing that the differences are explainable
as either mistakes or updating with no change of referent, and thirdly by arguing that the
mistakes are better attributed to the translator than to the copyist of the Vorlage.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Michener, James. The Source. New York: Random House, 1965.
Shanks, Hershel, ed. Ancient Israel: from Abraham to the Roman destruction of the Temple.
Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1999.
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