[B-Greek] IHSOUS (Joshua/Jesus)

Stephen Walch swalchy at thewaytoyahuweh.com
Sun Jun 3 16:21:47 EDT 2007


I've currently been going through my copy of the Greek Septuagint (Alfred Rahlphs) and comparing it to the Masoretic Hebrew (from the Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text, 2006) with regards to how the Septuagint transliterates the Hebrew names into Greek (like transliterating the Hebrew letters of Abraham - Aleph, bet, resh, hey, mem - Alpha, beta, rho, alpha, alpha, mu, ABRAAM) and was checking how the Greek Septuagint transliterated the name of Joshua (Hebrew Yehoshua) aka, the same name as Jesus. Now, most of the time it's usually transliterated IHSOUS, but I did find a few strange anomalies:

1 Sam 6:14, Sept: KAI H AMAXA EISHLQEN EIS AGRON (WSHE) TON EN BAIQSAMUS

The word in the brackets (WSHE) - Omega, Sigma, Eta, Epsilon, is in the Masoretic Hebrew YHWSHA (Yod, hey, Vav/Waw, shin, ayin - Yehoshua/Joshua/Jesus). It is also transliterated this way in 1 Sam 6:18 as well.

Why is this? Were the Greek Septuagint translators working from a different text? (I do believe the DSS don't contain 1 Sam 6:14, and is missing the ending of v18 where the Hebrew Yehoshua is used in the Masoretic).

I also know that the Greek Septuagint that Lucian compiled at the beginning of the 4th century also contained a different transliteration - IWSHE - which is basically what the usual Greek Septuagint has with an added Iota at the beginning of the transliteration. And Lucian also transliterated it this way in 2 kings 23:8.

I'd have expected Lucian to at least have known that YHWSHA = IHSOUS, yet he appears to have been either working from a different Hebrew Text, or there didn't seem to be a completely set way of transliterating YHWSHA into Greek, even by the beginning of the fourth century.

Does anyone have an explanation for this rather odd anomaly in the Septuagint?

Stephen Walch




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