Notice especially how the circular 4th century theory forces the Sinaiticus features to be done on the fly by the Sinaiticus scribes.
Chapter 2 The Septuagint in Codex Sinaiticus Compared with Other Sources
EMANUEL TOV
While the Christian Odes are lacking in Codex Sinaiticus, in one detail, that manuscript may well be more Christian than the other sources, such as in the identification of the supposed speakers written in the margins in the Song of Songs text of Sinaiticus and other sources. These identifications were sometimes necessary in the translations and not in the original Hebrew, in which the genders are clearly indicated.43 These notes in Sinaiticus, in rubrics written with red ink, present the content of the book as an ancient drama, for example,44 before 1:1b ‘the bride’ is added to identify the speaker; before 1:4ΕΙΣΗΝΕΓΚΕΝ ΜΕ Sinaiticus adds, ‘The bride tells the maidens the things about the groom that he gave to her’; before 1:4ΑΓΑΛΛΙΑΣΩΜΕΘΑSinaiticus reads,‘While the bride was talking to the maidens, they said’.45 In one case, the speaker is identified in Sinaiticus and not in the other sources as ΠΡΟΣ ΤΟΝ ΝΥΜΦΙΟΝ Χ̅Ν (1:7). It is unclear whether the Christian element in this rubric derived from the scribe of Sinaiticus or should be ascribed to his source.46
According to Treat, these notes derived from ‘a non-Christian, non-allegorical narrative’. Treat investigated ‘its oldest ancestor and its other relatives: the Old Latin, Jerome’s two versions, and what turned out to be the oldest non-Hebrew manuscript of the Song, a translation of the Old Greek into a rare Fayyumic form of the Coptic language’
(Treat, ‘Lost Keys’(1996), p. xv). These
rubrics occur in Codices Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Venetus and 161, and not in Vaticanus, Ephraimi, etc. The most basic form of the rubrics is in Codex Alexandrinus where they occur as Η ΝΥΜΦΗ, Ο ΝΥΜΦΙΟΣ, while
Codex Sinaiticus contains an elaborate group of dramatis personae, and those in Codex Venetus are even more elaborate. Comparing the rubrics in Codices Alexandrinus, Sinaiticus, Venetus, 161 and in Origen’s Homilies and Commentaries, Treat suggested that
the elaborate text of Sinaiticus is the oldest Greek witness, but it does not represent the earliest form of these rubrics. That earliest form, not preserved, must have been similar to the short text of Alexandrinus, but is not that text itself (Treat, ‘Lost Keys’ (1996), pp. 406–07).
The form of Codex Sinaiticus is closely related to the rubrics in some early sources of the Old Latin, namely Stuttgart HB II 35 (eighth century) and Fribourg L 75 (thirteenth century), both transmitted in manuscripts of the Vulgate. According to the analysis of de Bruyne, ‘Les anciennes versions latines du Cantique des Cantiques,’ Revue Bénédictine, 38 (1926), 118–22, the tradition of the Latin sources, though translated from Greek, is closer to the original form of the rubrics (‘the proto-Sinaiticus form’) than to the one in Codex Sinaiticus. On the other hand, according to Treat, ‘Lost Keys’ (1996), pp. 481–90, the Greek form of Sinaiticus reflects the earlier tradition, though
not Codex Sinaiticus in its present form, but a reconstructed source of that manuscript. The Latin rubrics then form a later development. Treat reconstructed this ‘proto-Sinaiticus form’ by removing from the text of Codex Sinaiticus all the details that have no parallels in the Latin tradition. In this way, interestingly enough, the Christian references among these rubrics are lacking. Thus,
these rubrics were added by the scribe of Codex Sinaiticus himself. In 1:7, ΠΡΟΣ ΤΟΝ ΝΥΜΦΙΟΝ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΝ appears in the earlier text only as ΠΡΟΣ ΤΟΝ ΝΥΜΦΙΟΝ (ad sponsum sponsa).
