3 February 2022

In a former entry we started to analyze Paul's non-literal quotations in the Romans. In this entry we finalize the list of them. Before continuing:

Start bibref in a new window first.

We begin our study with Romans 9:33. It contains a combination of two quoted texts, both from Isaiah. The first passage is from Isaiah 8:14, and the second one is from Isaiah 28:16:

The bibref commands getrefs SBLGNT LXX Isaiah 8:14 and getrefs SBLGNT LXX Isaiah 28:16 help us to find the matches. You will note that in both cases the outputs need to be carefully selected: here a manual study seems much more helpful than the mechanical check. Also, between the two passages in Isaiah there is a long amount of text on 35929 characters. In fact, Paul begins quoting the passage from Isaiah 28:16 and then the one from Isaiah 8:14, but there is some overlapping text that belongs to both.

The next matches are somewhat simpler to visualize:

Note that the last match cannot be found with the getrefs command.

Further matches follow:

The last two matches seem to be rather fuzzy. The differences are highlighted with lighter colors as well. (Finding the literal matches from I_Kings may take several seconds.)

The next quotation combines two passages from LXX, but the text taken from Isaiah cannot be found with the getrefs algorithm:

There is an overlapping part in which 0+9 and 9+0 letters are present. In fact, the word “οφθαλμους” (“eyes”) are used in both passages in the LXX.

The next one shows a long quotation (it consists of 5 different getrefs chunks):

Next, another mixed quotation of two different parts from Isaiah (use getrefs SBLGNT LXX Isaiah 59:20 and getrefs SBLGNT LXX Isaiah 27:9 to find the literal submatches):

Further matches:

The last entry cannot be found via a literal submatch.

Additional matches:

Now we finished the listing of the non-literal matches in the Romans. In the next blog entry we will try to find conclusions by summarizing our results.