Here is the text of BHS for Genesis 44:23-26, where Judah is talking to that really creepy Egyptian dude that seems to know everything about he and his brothers. The creepy dude turns out to be their long lost brother, the one they sold into slavery because of the favoritism in the family. Even though it is a reported speech, it is told as straight narrative, using minimal reference to the participants and consecutive verb forms to connect the clauses. There is little in the way of formal marking of discontinuity. Despite this, there is plenty of discontinuity in the content itself, with Judah reporting the “he said, she said” back and forth. Note: even though there is discontinuity in the content, the writer has discretion about how to represent, based on the grammatical choices that are available. The Hebrew writer/editor plays it straight, letting the content speak for itself.
A significant point that Judah makes in presenting his case for Benjamin to be released is the impact that keeping him prisoner will have on their father. Don’t miss the references to Benjamin: he does not even have a name, he is essentially a prop–“the youngest.” However, jailing him in Egypt will be the death of their father from grief.
Although there are a few conditional frames (fronted conditional clauses), the text uses the expected encoding for Judah and his brothers in 26a and Joseph in 23a. If you recall from one of the posts on discontinuity, I talked about the idea of “countering moves, whereby turns in the conversation that go in a direction other than what the previous speaker wanted may be overencoded to make them stand out more. In this case, Joseph gave them an order in Gen 44:21 to bring Benjamin, but Judah tried to change that in v. 22. Joseph reaffirms his demand in v. 23, thus rejecting Judah’s countering move. We find the same thing again in v. 26, where Jacob has been told about a new reality, yet he tries to just ignore it by sending his boys for some more food. Verse 26 is the “Yeah, but..” reply to Jacob that he needs a reality check. No bro, no food. This is their new reality. Notice that I hedged my statement regarding overencoding countering moves. The countering move is there, based on the content of the speech. Adding markers of discontinuity doesn’t create the discontinuity, it accentuates what was already there. It spices things up, like I described in my cooking video. Now take a gander at the LXX rendering of this text. I think the translator wanted to pound the pulpit a bit, making sure that no one missed the build up that was going on. The Hebrew writer played it cool, the Greek translator not so much.
23 σὺ δὲ εἶπας τοῖς παισίν σου
Ἐὰν μὴ καταβῇ ὁ ἀδελφὸς ὑμῶν ὁ νεώτερος μεθ̓ ὑμῶν, οὐ προσθήσεσθε ἔτι ἰδεῖν τὸ πρόσωπόν μου.
24 ἐγένετο δὲ ἡνίκα ἀνέβημεν πρὸς τὸν παῖδά σου πατέρα δὲ ἡμῶν, ἀπηγγείλαμεν αὐτῷ τὰ ῥήματα τοῦ κυρίου. 25 εἶπεν δὲ ἡμῖν ὁ πατὴρ ἡμῶν
Βαδίσατε πάλιν, ἀγοράσατε ἡμῖν μικρὰ βρώματα.
26 ἡμεῖς δὲ εἴπαμεν
Οὐ δυνησόμεθα καταβῆναι, ἀλλ̓ εἰ μὲν ὁ ἀδελφὸς ἡμῶν ὁ νεώτερος καταβαίνει μεθ̓ ἡμῶν, καταβησόμεθα, οὐ γὰρ δυνησόμεθα ἰδεῖν τὸ πρόσωπον τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ τοῦ νεωτέρου μὴ ὄντος μεθ̓ ἡμῶν.
Here we see some differences in how the dialogue is reported. The last DE is found in v. 21, introducing Joseph’s demand that Benjamin be brought to Egypt despite him being the only son left that Jacod loves. Great family dynamics, huh. Jacob is recounting all that has happened, and the LXX translates v. 23 as though it is more sharp of a turn than the surface text of BHS. One finds DE to mark a new development, creating a new chunk of the speech. There is also a redundant personal pronoun that is fronted to create a topical frame of reference. The same is found in v. 26, where Judah pushes back on Joseph’s demand, trying to counter what he has been told. These are minor enough changes that the apparatus of BHS omits them.
The pronouns are redundant, based on the verbal morphology. However, creating a topical frame of reference requires a movable form, thus the pronoun is the minimal encoding possible. The traditional description of a “contrastive pronoun” is not far from the mark in this instance, as the usage sharpens the sense of discontinuity that was already present based on the speech content. Thus using either marked or redundant forms are a great way of slowing the discourse and highlighting things like discontinuity.
As I have been analyzing the Hebrew text for my day job, it has been interesting to see how often the LXX translator will add encoding to explicitly mark what is implicity present in BHS. Sometimes BHS represents something that LXX just smooths over. In most cases the overencoding of the Hebrew is maintained in LXX, but not always. I know that there are arguments for seeing a different Hebrew text driving some readings in LXX, but I have not seen that to be a necessary claim so far. I know there are more unstable texts than Genesis and Exodus. Hopefully some day I can find the time to analyze the LXX text itself, but for now it is done only in a corner of my mind.
In the same way that comparing the Synoptics allows one to see authorial discretion in representing things such as discontinuity, the BHS-LXX comparisons allow much the same thing. I do not beleive these things are anamalous, based on how consistently LXX represents the overencoding found in the Hebrew. It seems that here the LXX translator wanted to ramp it up a bit, making sure the reader enjoyed the ride a bit more as the climax of the speech nears. Who ever thought grammar could be so exciting!
