Greek Esther and Heb. 4:16

Steve Puluka spuluka at hotmail.com
Tue Dec 7 06:35:33 EST 1999


>Steve Conrad
>
>(2)  "Mercy and Grace" -
>
>In Greek Esther the same word CARIN is translated as "favor,"
>throughout the book.
>     snip
>The following quote from Brenton's translation, illustrates this:
>
>LXE  "And the king loved Esther, and she found favour beyond all
>the other virgins: and he put on her the queen's crown."

Here I go again.  The Old Church Slavonic translation of the Septuagint 
translates CARIN as BLAHODAT, grace.  "And the King loved Esther and assured 
her grace more than all  the virgins, and pronounced (her) fiance upon her 
head."

The Old Church Slavonic obviously departs from a literal translation of the 
Greek.  While the Septuagint translations to Old Church Slavonic can be as 
old as the 9th century and translated by Greek speaking missionaries, many 
scholars place the translation of this book to Old Church Slavonic in the 
12th Century.  The evidence is not conclusive either way.

Perhaps this would be much too late to be of much value in your quesion on 
CARIN.  BLAHODAT is indeed the religiously significant term that grace is in 
English.

>I understand there were five different forms of Greek Esther . . . if
>someone has access to these other forms, I'd appreciate hearing
>their findings (either way).

One of the other major forms of the Septuagint is Rahlfs version which 
contains some critical notes.  However, this verse is rendered the same as 
Brenton's version.  You can download a Word version of Rahlf's from

http://arts-sciences.cua.edu/ecs/jdk/LXX/readme.htm

There is a Septuagint homepage with a discussion list available at:

http://arts-sciences.cua.edu/ecs/jdk/LXX/index.htm

This includes a link to Rahlf's on line at the University of PA.  The Gopher 
site at the University of PA also has documents of some major variants 
available, unfortunately there is none for Esther at this time.

Thanks for the interesting observations.



Steve Puluka
Adult Education Instructor
Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy of Pittsburgh
http://arrive.at/byzantinecatholic

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