-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
J K Elliott, Leviticus: A Commentary on Leueitikon in Codex Vaticanus. By Mark A. Awabdy. Pp. xv + 475. (Septuagint Commentary Series.) Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020. isbn 978 90 04 40552 3. Hardback €154, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 71, Issue 1, April 2020, Pages 286–288, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flaa019
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Mark Awabdy dedicates his study of the ‘Old Testament’s’ Book of Leviticus (a title that came from Greek or Latin; not Hebrew) to students in ‘the Majority World’. By ending his Preface with thanks to ‘the Lord’ (translated into the nominative case in Greek) I suspect that Awabdy comes from a conservative evangelical background.
Many readers find this biblical book of Jewish laws (ritual requirements) difficult to interpret accurately throughout. It is, however, at the heart of Judaism and its legalism. There exist some who aim to read their Bibles from Genesis to the end, not missing a verse. I suspect that most abandon such an odd practice once they reach Leviticus (the third book of their Bibles) and probably the whole project too.
The book is divided basically into two—(1) the Greek text (plus an English translation) and (2) the commentary. There is an initial chapter in which we have introductory remarks and some 40 pages of bibliography and useful indexes at the end. They show our author’s academic interests. His opening paragraph in ch. 1 explains why, unlike other commentators, he uses only the ‘original’ text in one fourth-century A.D. Christian witness, i.e. Codex Vaticanus (normally designated B*). Most other commentaries are based on eclectic critical texts that use at least the early Greek majuscules on parchment or on papyrus, the Mas(s)oretic and Qumran Hebrew, and versions in, say, Latin or Coptic. On each page of the diplomatic, Greek, text there is an apparatus criticus, so that careful readers ought to be enabled to reconstruct all other addenda/corrigenda found in this witness. I am unsure why Awabdy adds a strange—and difficult—English translation on each page to face the Greek of B*, as it is in the commentary proper where such matters should occur. Our author, however, is generally very careful in his chapter, named ‘Commentary’, and I suspect that this is where most readers will find his book—and the prestigious series to which it belongs—most helpful. Vaticanus is in effect a pandect (if we may use such a term outside Latin) and it was doubtless devised to display within one set of covers the early church’s canon of scripture. Its Christian scribes wished to be exclusive in showing only those texts that were to be included in its canon and thus to avulse books ‘outside’ their lists of acceptable writings.
