Proverbs 7 in MT and LXX: Form and Content

166
Tova Forti and Zipora Talshir
Verse 27
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c b a *
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b’ c’ a’ *
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The severe consequences of the dangerous liaison with another man’s wife
are similarly pictured in Prov 2:18–19 @ (
((@ “for her house sinks down to death,
and her paths to the shades; none who go to her come back nor do they
regain the paths of life.” The author goes as far as the underworld to depict
the disaster that will befall a man who becomes involved with another
man’s wife. The translator follows suit.
***
The translator clothed Prov 7 in new garb, but the contribution he made to
its content and message is minor. We have seen him striving for suitable
equivalents and forms. Occasionally he added a word or two, creating
parallelisms of his own where his Vorlage was satisfied with rhythmical
balance, while at other times he condensed the parallels found in his
Vorlage, mainly by fusing redundant elements. He reproduced the
synonymous parallelism, characteristic of the introduction and the
conclusion, but, as the parallelism became more elaborate and more
dependent on rhythm and balance, he departed from it, creating a
somewhat more narrative-like style. He sometimes repainted the contents
of his Vorlage with colors borrowed from his own milieu, but this, too, was
triggered by the problems he encountered in the Hebrew text, such as the
enigmatic & replaced by . His main contribution was the change of
scene, when he presented the woman—rather than the wisdom-teacher—as
looking through her window. He may have misread his Vorlage, or changed
it deliberately, influenced by the common inter-cultural motif of the woman
at the window. However, he did not imbue this woman with an image that
she did not have in the Vorlage. The creative translator of Proverbs is surely
active in ch. 7 in multifarious ways—aesthetically and culturally, but his