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A semantic comparison of the conclusion of LXX Tobit and Semitic 4QTobit

Summary

Evans asks why the ending of Tobit reads so differently across versions. She focuses on the gap between the short Greek recension GI (the LXX text in Codex Sinaiticus) and the Semitic fragments from Qumran, especially the Aramaic 4Q196. GI strongly promotes almsgiving as a route to righteousness and reward. Her starting point is a translation choice: the DJD edition renders the Semitic righteousness root (ṣdq) as "almsgiving", while the Greek translators used words for mercy (ἐλεημοσύνη/ἔλεος).

She first looked for mercy vocabulary appearing next to righteousness in 4QTobit. Finding none, she switched to comparing how each version motivates almsgiving. The Hebrew 4Q200 agrees with GI's reward-centred passage. The Aramaic copies lack that passage, and in them the righteousness lexeme survives only in reconstruction. At its close, 4Q196 stresses truthfulness and praising God rather than personal gain.

The paper suggests that early reconstructions of 4QTobit may have been shaped by the long dominance of GI. It also suggests the Aramaic ending may not be mainly about almsgiving at all.

Key points

  • Qumran yielded one Hebrew copy (4Q200) and four Aramaic copies (4Q196–199). These are the oldest surviving pre-Christian witnesses, and Tobit was likely composed in Aramaic around 225–175 BCE.
  • GI is now seen as a reworking of the longer GII. Since the Qumran finds, GI is no longer treated as the oldest text.
  • The Aramaic word for mercy occurs only three times in all 4QTobit fragments. Each time it describes God and never appears alongside righteousness.
  • GI 4:7–18 ties almsgiving to reward and limits it to righteous recipients. This passage is absent from GII and from every Aramaic copy, but 4Q200 fragment 2 parallels it, including the image of alms as a good deposit.
  • In the Aramaic copies the righteousness lexeme always appears in reconstructed form. This makes rendering it as "almsgiving" there doubtful, though the author finds that rendering defensible for Hebrew 4Q200.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The author compares versions by how they justify an act (reward for oneself versus praise of God) rather than by individual words, and this exposes ideological differences that word glosses hide. — For Mova (frames): Frames could carry an explicit purpose or motivation slot, so that "gave alms to gain" and "gave alms to honour" yield different frames even though the verb is the same.
  • I2. She treats irony as a pattern of juxtaposition: a character claims a virtue and then acts against it, for example Tobit falsely accusing his wife and later protesting that he himself was falsely accused. — For Mova (frames): An irony detector could compare a character's self-description against the events recorded for that character and flag contradictions as candidate irony.
  • I3. She keeps attested text separate from reconstructed text and refuses to build arguments on reconstructed readings alone. — For Mova (learn): Silver data could record which labels were observed and which were inferred by a teacher, with inferred labels given less weight in training and evaluation.
  • I4. She warns that editors can project a familiar, long-dominant version onto fragmentary evidence. — For Mova (learn): This is a reminder that an LLM teacher may impose its habitual reading on Mova's data, so disagreement checks against independent witnesses and negative controls are needed.
  • I5. She starts with a co-occurrence hypothesis (mercy alongside righteousness), checks the actual counts, and drops the hypothesis when the evidence is absent. — For Mova (world): Compiled lexical links, such as associations between concepts in the ontology, could be accepted only after a corpus check confirms they actually co-occur.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Hebrew & Aramaic · Semitic languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.4102/hts.v77i1.6672

@article{evans2021semantic,
  title = {{A semantic comparison of the conclusion of LXX Tobit and Semitic 4QTobit}},
  author = {Evans, Annette H.M.},
  journal = {HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 77},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.4102/hts.v77i1.6672},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v77i1.6672}
}

References

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