The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

NORTON Jews, Greeks and the Hexapla of Origen 401
by the context in which these same patristic citations are found.
From the point of view presented here, the Hexapla is of interest as
a secondary source. The Hexapla was a work which assembled already
existing texts (with the possible exception of the second column of
transliteration). Its originality lay in the comparison of these texts,
which are themselves a precious source of information concerning the
history of the biblical text and its interpretation in the centuries preceding
the work of Origen. With the discoveries of the Hebrew and
Greek texts from the Judaean Desert, the focus of interest has been
changed to the study of the revisions as such, and what they tell us
about the status and state of the text in this crucial period for the history
of Judaism and Christianity and the relations between them.
In one sense, the work of Field confused the issues. By his assembly
of all material relating to the revisions of the Old Greek, and by his
inclusion of 'hexaplaric evidence' for books which may not have been
in the Hexapla at all, he merged the specific work of Origen with a
more general collection of fragments of Greek biblical translations
and their revisions from the centuries preceding the work of Origen.
Outline of the History of the Hexapla
We start with the fact that there existed in the library at Caesarea a
work of comparison of biblical texts arranged in columns attributed to
Origen. There are several incomplete and tantalizing descriptions of
the finished work, nearly all relating to the Psalter. These tell us
someting about the appearance of the finished work but not how the
work was fabricated, or its extent. 3 The attribution to Origen may
mark his contribution in terms of initiative, organization, and even
financial resources (surely through his patron Ambrosius), but tells us
less concerning who actually executed the work. Practical considerations
must lead us to doubt that Origen himself executed the work. We
are familiar with the estimation of Swete that, if written in codex
form, the Hexapla must have filled 3,250 leaves or 6,500 pages,
exclusive of the Quinta and Sexta which would have swelled the total
3. Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. 6.16; Epiphanius, Panarion 64.3.5 (GCS 31, p. 407, 3
f), de mensuris et ponderibus 15 (Aquila), 16 (Symmachus), and 17 (Theodotion)
PG 43.3, coll 268c-269a. The texts are discussed in P. Nautin, Origene: Sa vie et
son Oeuvre (Christianisme Antique, 1; Paris: Beauchesne, 1977).