Jerome's sources in his translation of the Hebrew Bible
Modern scholars consistently present the Vulgate as Jerome’s translation of the Hebrew Bible. Jerome himself, who produced this Latin translation between the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century CE, argued that it followed the Hebrew Bible, which in his view conveyed the “true” meaning of Scripture (the *hebraica veritas*), against the other versions that circulated in his time. This thesis shows that the Vulgate is not a strict translation of the Hebrew Bible, but one that is based on the Hebrew and that has relied also on a variety of other sources. Indeed, as Jerome translated the Hebrew-Aramaic version of Scripture, he also resorted to different Greek and Latin forms of the text and to Jewish traditions that informants taught him to understand the Hebrew-Aramaic text. I demonstrate this through a series of case studies, in which I explore verses adduced from the Joseph story in the Book of Genesis, from the Book of Daniel, and from the Book of Esther: more specifically, I compare the Vulgate translation of these verses with the Hebrew-Aramaic version, the Septuagint one, the Latin translations of the Septuagint, the Greek translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, and, where relevant, with the Targumim and with specific passages from rabbinic literature. This comparative analysis sheds light on Jerome’s responses to texts written in four languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin, and on his treatment of both Christian and Jewish traditions. Furthermore, the Vulgate translations of Daniel, Genesis and Esther were produced at the beginning (392-393), at the middle (late 390s), and at the end of his career as a translator of the Hebrew Bible (404-405), respectively. Investigating these three translations therefore allows us to study his translation technique (*sensus de sensu*) in a chronologically relevant way.
Hebrew studies, Jerome, Translation technique, Vulgate studies
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations