Steven Avery
Administrator
Lost Keys: Text and Interpretation in Old Greek "Song of Songs” and Its Earliest Manuscript Witnesses (1996)
Jay Curry Treat
p. vii
The Greek rubrics focus on the narrative level of the text rather than its allegorical interpretation. The rubrics of Codex Sinaiticus bear a literary relationship with rubrics in several later Latin manuscripts Their use in both Greek and Latin is examined. Redaction criticism is used to speculate about the development of the rubrics from a hypothetical Greek predecessor
p. xv
In my first semester of graduate work, I participated in a course offered by E. Ann Matter called “Medieval Interpretations of Canticles.” In that course, I fell in love — with the Codex Sinaiticus text of the Old Greek Song of Songs. The codex is a beautiful labor of love, whether viewed in person at the British Museum or in Count Tischendorf's magnificent facsimile. Its text of Song of Songs is particularly intriguing, because the red ink of its rubrics are a bright splash of color scattered through the black words of the biblical text. These rubrics present the Song of Songs as a single narrative, a dialogue or
drama with characters and action. They are evidence of several early attempts to unwrap the mysteries of the Song of Songs.
The more I examined the rubrics and the text of the codex, the more deeply I was
embraced by the mysteries they represented. The rubrics had Latin cousins, and by
comparing their family resemblances, I could deduce what their common ancestor must
have looked like. And it looked surprising — a non-Christian, non-allcgorical narrative.
The text meanwhile led me to inquire into 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.
I began this research with the intention of gathering and evaluating all of the
surviving, fragmentary evidence for Jewish and Christian interpreters before Origen. It has
turned out that the Old Greek translation and its manuscripts have been more than enough
to absorb my efforts. My related study of Aquila’s translation will soon be published, and
I plan further investigations into the early Greek translations. The interrelations between
the comments attributed to Tannaitic, early Amoraic, and early Christian writers still need
to be analyzed.
Jay Curry Treat
p. vii
The Greek rubrics focus on the narrative level of the text rather than its allegorical interpretation. The rubrics of Codex Sinaiticus bear a literary relationship with rubrics in several later Latin manuscripts Their use in both Greek and Latin is examined. Redaction criticism is used to speculate about the development of the rubrics from a hypothetical Greek predecessor
p. xv
In my first semester of graduate work, I participated in a course offered by E. Ann Matter called “Medieval Interpretations of Canticles.” In that course, I fell in love — with the Codex Sinaiticus text of the Old Greek Song of Songs. The codex is a beautiful labor of love, whether viewed in person at the British Museum or in Count Tischendorf's magnificent facsimile. Its text of Song of Songs is particularly intriguing, because the red ink of its rubrics are a bright splash of color scattered through the black words of the biblical text. These rubrics present the Song of Songs as a single narrative, a dialogue or
drama with characters and action. They are evidence of several early attempts to unwrap the mysteries of the Song of Songs.
The more I examined the rubrics and the text of the codex, the more deeply I was
embraced by the mysteries they represented. The rubrics had Latin cousins, and by
comparing their family resemblances, I could deduce what their common ancestor must
have looked like. And it looked surprising — a non-Christian, non-allcgorical narrative.
The text meanwhile led me to inquire into 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.
I began this research with the intention of gathering and evaluating all of the
surviving, fragmentary evidence for Jewish and Christian interpreters before Origen. It has
turned out that the Old Greek translation and its manuscripts have been more than enough
to absorb my efforts. My related study of Aquila’s translation will soon be published, and
I plan further investigations into the early Greek translations. The interrelations between
the comments attributed to Tannaitic, early Amoraic, and early Christian writers still need
to be analyzed.
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