Report on the Göttingen Septuagint

This article provides a brief history of the Göttingen Septuagint Editions up to 2019, and focuses on the new Psalter Project “ Editio critica maior des griechischen Psalters” (Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen), which started at the beginning of 2020. The article illustrates some of the challenges of the planned editorial work, and uses Psalm 1 as a test case. First, an overview is provided of the editorial history, from the earliest printed versions that reveal a major influence of the Lucianic recension, to the Sixtine edition that marks a turning point, followed by all other modern editions (e.g. by Paul Anton de Lagarde and Alfred Rahlfs). Second, attention is drawn to one of the most urgent research tasks, namely the reconstruction of the fragmentary hexaplaric tradition, giving examples of the hexaplaric fragments of Psalm 1 transmitted in ms. Rahlfs 113 ( Cod. Ambros . B 106 sup.) and Rahlfs 271 ( Cod. Vat. gr . 1747).


Editio critica maior des griechischen Psalters (since 2020)
A new long-term Academy project was established in 2020: "Editio critica maior des griechischen Psalters." This edition of the Greek Psalter is based at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities and funded by the governments of Lower Saxony and the Federal Republic of Germany. The research project began on 1 January 2020 and will run for twenty-one years. It is led by Reinhard Gregor Kratz (Projektleitung) and Felix Albrecht (Arbeitsstellenleitung).
The new project on the Psalter relates to the most widespread, complex, and extensively interpreted book in the Bible. As a liturgical prayer and individual meditation book, it combines Judaism with Western and Orthodox Christianity. Its influence on poetry (e.g., Arnold Schönberg, Moderne Psalmen; Paul Celan, Tenebrae), music (e.g., Igor Stravinsky, Symphony of Psalms; Leonard Bernstein, Chichester Psalms), and visual arts (e.g., Marc Chagall, Psalms of David) reaches to the present day and makes it one of the fundamental texts of European culture, and world literature as well.
The fact that the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities houses another long-term project, which deals with the edition of the Coptic-Sahidic daughter version of the Greek Old Testament ("Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament," directed by Heike Behlmer and Frank Feder), makes Göttingen a central research location when it comes to the edition and research of the Septuagint. The establishment of these editorial projects under the same roof also enables unique synergic effects in the daily work on the Greek Bible texts of the Old Testament.
The aim of the new Psalter project is to explore the tradition and textual history of the Greek Psalter, and to prepare a new critical edition of the Septuagint Psalms and Odes for the Göttingen series that will replace the outdated edition by Alfred Rahlfs (1931). Although Rahlfs' edition of the Psalter can be seen as either preliminary or rather inadequate, especially regarding the integration of the Hexaplaric tradition (see below, § III.2), it is unquestionable that his editorial work influenced decisively the further course of any text-critical work on the Greek Psalter. The aim of a new edition will be the same as for Rahlfs, that of the text-critical reconstruction of the pre-recensional, oldest attainable Greek text.10 When completed, the critically reconstructed text will be provided in a hybrid edition, as a book and online. 10 On this editorial principle, see Bernhard Neuschäfer, "Die kritische Edition des griechischen Alten Testaments. Anspruch und Aufgabe des Göttinger Septuaginta-Unternehmens," in Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 2004 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 129-139; idem, "Die Göttinger Septuaginta-Ausgabe. Stand-In the following, I would like to discuss the planned editorial work by illustrating some of the challenges caused by the extremely complex textual history. Therefore, I would like to use Psalm 1 as a test case and focus on two aspects: (1) As a first step, I would like to provide a brief overview of the editorial history of the Greek Psalter, focusing on the earliest printed versions. This overview will show the major influence of the Lucianic recension on the whole tradition. This influence serves as one of the main challenges and can be seen from the early printed editions (several incunabula, Aldina, Complutensis), while the Sixtine edition marks a turning point, followed by all other modern editions. The editorial procedure for the new Psalter project will be to detect the textual evidence of the Lucianic recension and to determine the degree of its influence, in order to recover the pre-recensional text form, i.e., the oldest reachable pre-Antiochene text; (2) In the second stage, I would like to draw attention to one of the most urgent research tasks, namely the reconstruction of the fragmentary Hexaplaric tradition, reflected by, for example, MSS Ra 113 and Ra 271. In the case of the Hexaplaric remains, the editorial procedure is similar: First of all, the Origenic text must be identified in order to determine its recensional elements and to reach the oldest attainable pre-Hexaplaric Psalter text.

3.1
The History of Printed Greek Psalteria The Septuagint Psalter-the most important book in the Greek Old Testament-has a long editorial history, which in turn is closely interwoven with the history of book printing. So, it is hardly surprising that the earliest printings of the Greek Bible in Renaissance Italy were printed editions of the Septuagint Psalter. A first look at these three incunabula shows that they follow a clear textual tradition. Ps 1:4b indicates that all three witnesses can be attributed to the Lucianic tradition, since the varia lectio ὡσεί for ὡς ὁ is clearly Lucianic. This result is hardly surprising, because the manuscript tradition of Septuagint Psalms is strongly influenced by the Lucianic recension.14 This applies in particular to the later Byzantine tradition. The fifteenth-century incunabula are clearly standing in the tradition of their time. As we have seen, the Greek Psalter belongs to the earliest printed portions of the Greek Bible. Therefore the first printed polyglot Bible text was a Psalter polyglot, edited by Agostino Giustiniani (1470-1536) and published in Genoa in 1516.17 The Greek text is based on the Aldine Psalter (M36248). Subsequently, many polyglot Psalters were published whose Greek Psalter text is always based (directly or indirectly) on the Aldine Psalter, e.g., the Psalter printed in 1516 by Johann Froben in Basel as an appendix to vol. 8 of St. Jerome's works;18 and that 14 On the Lucianic recension, its historical background and characteristics, see Felix Albrecht, "Von der hebraica veritas zur vera graecitas: In general, the Sixtina provides a Septuagint text, which is based mainly on Codex Vaticanus (B) and the Aldina.27 The Sixtine Psalter text is not written in stichoi, but the punctuation reveals the stichometric structure in the background. Regarding the textual character of the Sixtina, the dependence on Codex B is unmistakable. In addition, the Sixtina offers a major innovation that enhances it enormously compared to the previous editions: The critical apparatus of the Sixtina, prepared for the first edition of 1586/1587 by Pierre Morin (Petrus Morinus) and augmented for the Latin edition of 1588 by Flaminio de Nobili (Flaminius Nobilius),28 provides rich Hexaplaric material that, at least in the case of the information on Ps 1:1a and 1:1c, derives from MS Ra 1175 (Cod. Vat. gr. 754).29 MS Ra 1175 is a witness of the Palestinian catena of Psalms that belongs to catena type XIII (Karo-Lietzmann) and has many Hexaplaric readings. These readings derived-according to Gilles Dorival-from a common collection of Hexaplaric readings, which were added secondarily to an original catena type without such readings. For Sixtina's dependence on the Aldina, cf. Alfred Rahlfs, "Die Abhängigkeit der sixtinischen Septuaginta-Ausgabe von der aldinischen," ZAW 33 (1913)

Comments:
Psalm 111 LXX (112 MT) is one of the alphabetical songs in which each half-verse begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In our MS Ra 271, the second line of the text transcribed in Greek letters contains the rest of the Hebrew letter aleph misunderstood by the copyist of the manuscript: the manuscript incorrectly reads "καλεφ" for ‫א"‬ αλεφ." The Hebrew alphabet on the same page can be compared to the shape of the aleph with confusing similarity to the Greek kappa: α ἀλφ ‫א‬

3.3
Perspectives This article has provided insight into some of the challenges of the new longterm research project "Editio critica maior des griechischen Psalters" (Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen), which started at the beginning of 2020. The transmission problems of the Greek Psalter are extremely complex and require in-depth research. According to Alfred Rahlfs, especially in the case of the Greek Psalter, the Coptic daughter versions of the Septuagint are extremely relevant for understanding the textual history. Therefore, it is particularly for- 63 Field, Origenis Hexaplorum fragmenta II, 87. tunate that the other major Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities project on the Old Testament is dedicated to the edition of the Coptic Old Testament. These two projects will work together closely, and I am sure that promising new insights will come to light within the next few years.