This work is a commentary on the Greek translation of Isaiah in Codex Marchalian (1/2) -- Isaiah in Codex Marchalianus

This work is a commentary on the Greek translation of Isaiah in Codex Marchalianus. It discusses both the reception and the production of the text, i.e., how the text was produced as well as how it was read. Because this commentary is on a translation, we comment on points where the translation is perhaps surprising or different than we might expect because it diverges from the Hebrew text. Because the translation is into Greek, we comment on the Greek language in its context, especially how the Greek language is being used in unusual ways, stretched beyond its normal range of use. Because it is a commentary on one particular manuscript, the peculiarities of this Codex will be addressed, including its history, scribes, divisions, and orthography. In this Introduction we provide some background to the Greek translation of Isaiah and then the particular manuscript Codex Marchalianus, before describing the format and purposes of this commentary. Greek Isaiah Origins Scholarly consensus since Seeligmann (1948, 75) has been that Isaiah was translated into Greek in Alexandria around 140 BCE (Troxel 2008, 24), although dates as early as 270 BCE have been proposed (Margoliouth 1900, 4–7). The basis for this location is the Egyptian vocabulary in Greek Isaiah. Ziegler (1934, 31–46) and Seeligmann (1948, 39–42) argued for a consistent translator(s) for the whole of Isaiah, whom I will refer to as G. Ziegler noted two patterns in Greek Isaiah that made it impossible to distinguish separate translators for Isaiah: interconnections between the two supposed parts, and translational inconsistencies within each supposed part. Van der Kooij has made a case that the translation of Isaiah was produced by Jewish scholars who fled to Egypt in the first half of the second century B.C.E. (1981, 50–65; see also 1997, 395; 1982, 71). Because of the kinds of mistakes made by the translator (the kinds of mistakes that should have been caught by a proofreader), and the consistency of the translation, we argue that the translation was made by an individual rather than a group. At that time, the vowel points developed by the Masoretes in the sixth century CE were of course not recorded in the translator’s Hebrew Vorlage. Ottley suggested that the translator may have followed a different tradition (Ottley 1904, 1:7), but there is no evidence that the translator made use of the resources of any reading community. On the contrary, instances in which the translator failed to understand his source text indicate that either Greek Isaiah was not part of a reading community that shared a common interpretation of Isaiah, or that he ignored that shared interpretation while expecting his own work to be accepted as a valid reading of Isaiah among this community, of which some others also knew both Greek and Hebrew. The latter option seems far-fetched to me; it is more reasonable to suppose there was no shared interpretive community at that time and place. On orthographic grounds, there a