Why give Abraham a rough breathing?

cross posted from the blog The Greek New Testament. Post by P.J. Williams.

The question of whether to give Abraham a rough or smooth breathing is difficult. Manuscripts differ. We could say that it begins with aleph and that aleph = smooth breathing. The problem with this is that it’s sheer prejudice. We don’t have data which show a regular alignment between aleph and smooth breathing. OK, you say, but rough breathing = aspiration, and we know from lots of languages, the original Hebrew, and the NT versions of Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, Latin, Syriac, etc., that it wasn’t represented by aspiration in those scripts. Fair point, but it still doesn’t settle the question of how it was (a) pronounced in Greek; (b) written by educated scribes.

Look at Liddell and Scott and you’ll see that, if you exclude alpha privatives, ἁβρ- (perhaps with the rough breathing representing Proto-Indoeuropean s) is a more common Greek word beginning than ἀβρ-, so why should Greek not use the rough breathing here and make Abraham sound a little more native?

Now look at some manuscripts for Matthew 1:1 and note the first 12 sources I come across.

B 35 689 690 774 1418 2278 2414 read rough

478 481 1424 read smooth

688 has one of each!

Look at Gal 3:29 and check some different sources as well as some of the same:

B 35 69 104 319 757 2298 read rough

D (06) 1424 read smooth

So it seems that the rough breathing is preponderant. How do we decide which to print? That’s tough, but we know that the accentor of B was really smart and I value him more than the accentor of D (Claromontanus). So with a bit of hesitation, we choose the rough breathing as representing the stronger learned tradition for Greek breathings. Now we’re not thereby saying that anyone ever pronounced this with aspiration. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Nor are we saying that this was pronounced with aspiration at the time of the NT. We’re just saying this: if you’re going to bother having breathings at all, they need to be there to give readers historical information which comes from manuscripts rather than from the heads of editors. Any reader who’s studied Hebrew knows that Abraham’s name in Hebrew begins with an aleph. They don’t need an NT editor to tell them that. What may be of more interest is for them to know that the strongest learned tradition of breathing in Greek is for Abraham to have a rough breathing.

What we’re printing here is not odd or a novelty. It was also what Erasmus printed and other early editions of the TR (which of course were closely based on the manuscripts available at the time). It’s also what you’ll sometimes find, for instance, in Niese’s edition of Josephus that Abraham is Ἅβραμος, given not only the nice Greek ending, but the nice Greek beginning of a rough breathing, in line with the mss.

So in making an edition where we try to model everything we can off the manuscripts we decided on balance to use a rough breathing for this name. It’s not necessarily a big deal, except that users may like to know that thought, care, and above all, documentary evidence has gone into decisions like these.

NA/UBS punctuation needing change at Mark 4:8, 20

Reading the parable of the sower synoptically can highlight what turns out to be an unnecessarily unique punctuation for all of Greek literature.
Some notes and a question (**) follow.

Mk 4:8 and 4:20 UBS/NA is ἕν τριάκοντα, … ἕν ... ἕν
assuming a calque on Aramaic חד תלתין thirty-times … -times … -times.

Our fellow blogger Maurice's Majority/Byzantine text reads
ἐν τριάκοντα, καὶ ἐν ἑξήκοντα, καὶ ἐν ἑκατον.
This appears sound.

This latter reading is understandable Greek, meaning "amounting to 30, 60, 100".
See BGU 970,14 ἐν δραχμαῖς ἐννακοσίαις, amounting to 900 drachma.
Luke 14:31 ἐν δέκα χιλιάσιν ὑπαντῆσαι to meet with 10000 [men].
Acts 7:14 ἐν ψυχαῖς ἑβδομήκοντα πέντε with 75 persons.

More interestingly, the Aramaic translations of Mark seem to have not recognized an Aramaic idiom here, or at least they do not use the available idiom in their translation. The Aramaic of the 2nd century Syriac reads בַתְלָתִין, which is equivalent to ἐν τριάκοντα. This seems to imply that the first Syriac Aramaic translation read the Greek as ἐν. Later translators followed suit.

Incidentally, the reading with εις in some manuscripts at 4:8 shares the same potential ambiguity with of εἷς 'one' εἰς 'to', though the only breathing listed by Swanson is ψιλή smooth on 28 and 700.

In addition, as far as I can tell, at least 99% of all Greek manuscripts with breathing marks have marked ἐν with ψιλή smooth "in, with, by". Swanson lists the Majority reading at 4:8 and 4:20 with a ψιλή smooth reading.

** However, at 4:8 Swanson lists the UBS reading and δασεῖα punctuation on the same line with family 13. Does anyone have access to a family 13 manuscript who can verify that ἕν 'one' exists in any of these miniscule manuscripts?

At 4:20 Swanson lists the UBS punctuation on the same line with L and Θ.

** Once again the question, does anyone have access to L or Θ who could verify that they indeed have a δασεῖα rough breathing?

Naturally, one is sceptical when a transcribed uncial group has this extra mark, and one suspects that the breathing mark may have been added to the line in Swanson in order to articulate the UBS punctuation, not to mark ancient manuscript authority. But then again, maybe a δασεῖα exists on those two uncials.

Curious minds would like to know if any Greek tradition really exists for a δασεῖα?

My textual conclusion, in any case, will not be following the potential two manuscripts above and one group, even though I have a lot of respect for 'Caesarean' readings. It appears that Nestle-Aland/UBS have unnecessarily created a unique reading in Greek literature with ἕν one.

We should probably accept the traditional punctuation as correct. Then we need to correct the NA/UBS in accord with 99-100% of Greek manuscripts which read ἐν 'in, with, by'.

On interpretation (yes, textual critical considerations can lead on to interpretation), I am interested in interpreting the minor agreement of Luke and Matthew, who both start with '100', and specifically Luke's version of only '100'. This latter seems to reflect a different literary tradition with perhaps an original midrashic allusion to Gen 26:12 where Isaac, too, has a divinely directed harvest. Luke may or may not have been aware of this allusion since he does not use the same phrase as the LXX ἑκατοστεύουσαν κριθήν "100-producing barley" [=שְׂעֹרִים]. In addition, the LXX misses this unique phrase in the Hebrew Bible מֵאָה שְׁעָרִים one hundred measures.