Article
Diacronia 7, April 27, 2018, art. A105 (p. 1–10)https://doi.org/10.17684/i7A105en

They made “a mistake” in Job, 4, 11; why not also in Prov, 30, 30? Implicitly, about limits in philology and the necessity of accepting them

Adina Chirilă

Affiliations

Faculty of Letters, History and Theology, West University, Bd. Vasile Pârvan 4, 300223 Timișoara, Romania

History

Received November 7, 2017
Accepted November 20, 2017
Published April 27, 2018

Key words

philology
historical lexicology
historical semantics
biblical text
translation

Abstract

The existence of the Greek term μυρμηκολέων in Job, 4, 11, in the biblical text of Orthodox tradition, on the steadfast line of the Septuagint, has seemed—time and again—bizarre, and has intrigued enough as to be approached as a textological problem in several articles and studies, some of them extended and well documented, during the last hundred years; it seems that we face an ordinary translation mistake: the Hellenised Hebrew translator of the Septuagint has missed the equivalent of the Heb. ַׁל ֭י ִש (layish [lah’-yish]) ‘a lion’ from the original story of Job, and has produced, consequently, what appears to be a hapax legomenon in the sacred text, an odd and obscure term. Reopening the case, the present study argues in favour of a different reading of the word μυρμηκολέων, which precludes the translator’s presumed mistake. Moreover, it reminds the researcher of the necessity to question, in a lucid manner, the arguments that seem to support a certain conclusion.

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    Text:Chirilă, A. (2018). They made “a mistake” in Job, 4, 11; why not also in Prov, 30, 30? Implicitly, about limits in philology and the necessity of accepting them, Diacronia 7 (April 27), A105 (1–10), https://doi.org/10.17684/i7A105en
    BibTeX:@ARTICLE{chirila2018,
     author = {Adina Chirilă},
     title = {They made “a mistake” in Job, 4, 11; why not also in Prov, 30, 30? Implicitly, about limits in philology and the necessity of accepting them},
     journal = {Diacronia},
     ISSN = {2393-1140},
     year = {2018},
     month = {April},
     number = {7},
     eid = {A105},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.17684/i7A105en},
     pages = "(1–10)",
     url = {https://www.diacronia.ro/journal/issue/7/A105/en}
    }

Copyright

© 2018 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.

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