The Slavonic Book of Esther: Translation from Hebrew or Evidence for a Lost Greek Text?

Abstract

Fifty years ago, Charles C. Torrey, writing about Esther, asked on the pages of this journal, “Why is there no Greek translation of the Hebrew text? Every other book of the Hebrew Bible, whatever its nature, has its faithful rendering (at least one, often several) in Greek. For the canonical Esther, on the contrary, no such version is extant, nor is there evidence that one ever existed.” It is common knowledge that the extant Greek versions of Esther, both the longer Septuagint text and the shorter A-text, are textually distant from the Hebrew Masoretic version. Indeed, the distance is so great that when a passage in the Complutensian edition (5:1–2) does correspond to the Masoretic text, Robert Hanhart confidently labels it as “newly translated.” His characterization seems justified in this case; the two verses required a new translation because the original Septuagint text had been removed, along with the apocryphal addition D, and put at the end of the book in accordance with the Latin tradition. Hanhart correctly states, “It is improbable that such an intervention, which sacrifices the inner coherence of the Greek text to the benefit of the Masoretic text, belongs to old Greek tradition,” indicating “a scholarly re-working according to the Masoretic text in the period of the Renaissance”; his confidence, however, rests on the fact that scholarly literature contains nothing about a Greek Esther that resembles the Masoretic text.