iainduguid
Puritan Board Junior
Translations can be used in textual criticism, though caution is necessary. Sometimes the differences may be due to a free translation, or even a misunderstanding of the original word, but at other times it is pretty obvious that they are reading a different base text (or in the case of unpointed Hebrew, they are reading a different set of vowels. You can see this easily by comparing English translations of the NT. In many places, the differences are due to translation approach, but there are plenty of places where the differences are due to different text critical decisions - i.e. they are witnesses to different Greek texts. In the case of the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls now sometimes give us direct evidence of the different Hebrew text.That article starts off with the correctly with the [preserved] Masoretic Text but then he compares it to the LXX [a translation] and then brings in the Syriac Peshitta which is another translation. We can agree that the original authors of the OT wrote in a singular language, not Hebrew AND Greek simultaneously. Therefore the LXX is nothing more than a translation from Hebrew to Greek. We can say the same for the Latin Vulgate. Show me different textual families in the Hebrew and you might have an argument but until you do, all you have is conjecture and a baseless assertion, no matter how many people cite it or say the same thing.
By the way, as in the NT, this is not just micro differences. The Septuagint of Jeremiah is about 10% shorter than the MT and (in my view) attests a different edition of his collected prophecies (probably earlier, but not on that account necessarily "better")
OT text criticism is its own field and I just wanted to clarify a few basic facts. Of course, different people will deal with those facts differently.