Laws of the Book of Exodus through the Lenses of the Reader of the Ostrog Bible (after copy Kyr.4476p from the collections of Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine)

Abstract

The copy of the Ostrog Bible from the collections of Vernadsky National library of Ukraine (Kyr.4476p) contains a significant number of handwritten marginalia, representing an attempt of one of its readers to comment and translate biblical concepts from the Old Church Slavonic into the prosta mova. Especially interesting are his notes on the so-called Laws from the Book of Exodus with interpretations of legal formulas.Its owner was Ioanykii Seniutovych, abbot of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery (mentioned in 1710, 1713) and Archimandrite of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra (1715–1729). Though the intellectual heritage of this Kyiv hierarch has not attracted the attention of scholars so far, a collection of books he left behind, most of which are commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, is known. Lesser known is the fact that Seniutovych himself or someone from the persons close to him elaborated his copy of Ostrog Bible so that each page contained various traces of his (their) thoughtful reading. Systematic comparison of Cyrillic and much more rare Latin notes on the margins with the 16th century Catholic and Protestant editions of the Bible have brought an unexpected find. While on the whole the parallels have revealed the heavy impact of the Polish biblical translations, the main source for Ostrog Bible reader and commentator came to be the Krakow 1599 year edition of Jakub Wujek, which demonstrates literal coincidences of the texts. It seems that our reader has undertaken the difficult task of juxtaposing the Old Church Slavonic translation from the Greek Septuagint with the Polish translation from the Latin Vulgate. On the way of analyzing the texts he made both mistakes and correct conclusions regarding biblical semantics. Thus, the case study of just one fragment of this extremely interesting copy involves a lot of issues concerning the understanding of the Holy Scripture in Kyiv in the late 17th-18th centuries.