Between the search in the word and the asking to God: two mantic verbs in the textual history of Samuel-Kings

Resumen

This paper, our contribution to honor Professor Anneli Aejmelaeus, isdeeply indebted to her intense and fruitful research in the textual his-tory of the Septuagint of Samuel-Kings. Our years of collaboration withand learning from her at different seminars and workshops have offereda detailed and inspiring landscape of the complex life of the Greek ver-sion of the Bible and its connections with the Hebrew. In particular, shehas shared important research on the presence of features of revision ofthe Old Greek text which may fall outside the boundaries of the καὶ γεrecension, but belong to a related sphere of activity in the transmissionof the text.2The material we are presenting here tries to contribute tothat line of research, by focusing on a particular textual feature which,through a detailed analysis of the different text-types of the Septuagintand its secondary versions, may lead to consider changes in their HebrewVorlagen which reflect meaningful changes in the history of Samuel-Kingsin the vein of the textual plurality (and later processes of homogenizationtowards a proto-Masoretic text) attested both by the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls in the centuries around the turn of the era. The featurewe have chosen implies not only textual variation but may be witnessingan important ideological change in the conceptions and expressions ofcertain practices associated to the religion of Israel and later on to Juda-ism, namely the reinterpretation of mantic verbs associated with divineconsultation as examination or inquiry on the ‘word of God’, which, asJudaism developed, would become a salient element of the relationshipwith the divine, in the form of interpretation and exegesis of the sacredtexts understood precisely as the ‘word of God’. Textual criticism existsin the context of tradition, transmission and interpretation of the text andat times may hold key information which should not be overlooked in thestudy of the Bible from the angle of other disciplines, such as literarycriticism, theology or history of religions. Professor Aejmelaeus’ activityhas underscored this fact in her analyses and approaches to the Septua-gint. Our brief research here is therefore an homage to her leading men-torship in this field.