The Book of Odes - a forgotten biblical text

I want to take a break from the St Mary's issues tonight and return to a bit of biblioblogging. This will be my first biblical piece for March. I thought I'd write about one of the forgotten biblical texts that no longer appears in any Christian bibles. I'm talking about the Book of Odes. What you may ask is the Book of Odes? Quite frankly it's a text found in one of the ancient Christian bibles, the Codex Alexandrinus, the oldest most complete codex of the Greek bible. The Odes are appended to the Psalms. The Odes also appear in the Psalms codex, Codex Turicensis, where again they are appended to the Psalms. So what are these Odes?

Basically they are a collection of prayers and canticles from the Old and New Testaments. The Rahlfs Septuaginta orders them as follows:

1. First Ode of Moses (Exodus 15:1-19)
2. Second Ode of Moses (Deuteronomy 32:1-43)
3. Prayer of Anna the Mother of Samuel (1 Samuel 2:1-10)
4. Prayer of Habbakuk (Habbakuk 3:2-19)
5. Prayer of Isaias (Isaiah 26:9-20)
6. Prayer of Jonah (Jonah 2:3-10)
7. Prayer of Azariah (Daniel 3:26-45, a deuterocanonical portion)
8. Song of the Three Young Men (Daniel 3:52-88, a deuterocanonical portion)
9. The Magnificat; Prayer of Mary the Theotokos (Luke 1:46-55) and Canticle of Zachariah (Luke 1:68-79)
10. Canticle of Isaiah (Isaiah 5:1-9)
11. Prayer of Hezekiah (Isaiah 38:10-20)
12. Prayer of Manasseh, King of Judah when he was held captive in Babylon (ref. in 2 Chronicles 33:11-13 and appears also as a separate deuterocanonical book)
13. Nunc dimittis; Prayer of Simeon (Luke 2:29-32)
14. Gloria in Excelsis Deo; Canticle of the Early Morning (some lines from Luke 2:14, Psalm 144:2 and Psalm 118:12)

I have not yet found any real studies on this quite intersting little text. Clearly as it is mostly texts from the Old and New Testaments any scholars that do know of it are likely more interested in those component texts in their other contexts.

This book interests me for two reasons. First, it was probably the vehicle that delivered the Prayer of Manasseh into scripture. Secondly I think it testifies to the close links between liturgy and scripture. Odes clearly has some liturgical role either in the Mass or in the liturgical rounds of daily prayer. Ode 14, incorporating as it does the Canticle of the Early Morning indicates that could most likely be its purpose.

So finally, lets bring back this little Book of Odes and return it to our Bibles so that it nestles snuggly once more behind the Psalms

International Septuagint Day

I've just found out from Tyler Williams' Codex blog that today is International Septuagint Day. As he says:

“The Sept-tu-a-what?” is what I hear from many of my students when I first mention the Septuagint in my introductory lecture on the text and transmission of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. By mid-term, however (or should I say by the midterm, i.e., the midterm exam), virtually all of my students are able to tell me that the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible begun around the third century BCE for the Pentateuch and completed sometime in the second or first century BCE for the rest of the books. Keen students should be able to further tell me that the title “Septuagint” comes from the Latin Septuaginta, which means “70” (thus the abbreviation LXX), and relates to the legendary origins of the translation by 70 Jewish elders from Israel (my “A” students may even relate how some versions of the legend report 72 elders were involved in the translation).

Strictly speaking Septuagint refers to the Old Greek translations of the Torah but nowadays is generally used to refer to not only the Old Greek translations of other Old Testament texts but also those texts written in Greek and other later Greek translations as well. The Greek Bible is itself a remarkably pluralist collection of texts. The Septuagint also represents the oldest large scale translation project extant, not only from one language to another but from one language family, Semitic, to another, Indo-European.

In terms of biblical studies, we know from Qumran that the Septuagint versions often represent different and older versions of the biblical texts than those now included in the Hebrew Bible. Furthermore, the Septuagint is the Old Testament of the early Church and is by far the more frequently cited and preferred version by the New Testament authors. The Septuagint is still the Old Testament of the Eastern Orthodox Church and is the basis of the Old Testaments of most of the Oriental Orthodox churches too. The Septuagint is the basis of the Old Latin bible and also shaped Jerome's later Latin translation known as the Vulgate even though he preferred to translate from Hebrew texts wherever he could and believed in the superiority of the Hebrew canon. The names of many of the Old Testament books, e.g. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deueteronomy, Psalms are derived from the Greek names for the books not the Hebrew names.

In the West and in Western biblical studies the Septuagint has for too long been ignored, in part becasue of both Jerome's and, subsequently, the Reformation's option in making the Hebrew Bible the basis of the Old Testament (on the assumption that original language must represent original text). For once I agree with Augustine who argued against Jerome that if the Hebrew Bible must form the Old Testament and can only do so with the Greek Bible alongside (I would add the Samaritan Torah/Joshua and some of the Qumran variants such as the Great Psalms scroll and the Great Isaiah scroll)

Notes on the Septuagint is a very good resource on the Septuagint in the New Testament, early church and eastern Christianity and Septuagint alignments with Hebrew versions of Old Testament texts found at Qumran, and much more.