Primary source · Greek

The Later Greek Versions: Aquila and Symmachus

Aquila of Pontus · Symmachus the Ebionite · Aquila c. AD 130 · Symmachus c. AD 190

What this text is

The two great post-Christian Jewish translations of the Old Testament — Aquila's hyper-literal word-mirror ('a slave to the Hebrew letter', said Jerome) and Symmachus's fluent idiom. Both survive only in wreckage: Hexapla marginalia, patristic citations, and palimpsest leaves. TRAGEDY: the Hexapla original at Caesarea, too vast ever to be copied whole, perished with the library in the seventh century.

Profile of Aquila the Translator →

Public-domain translations

Working translation (fragments, ed. Field)

Genesis 1:1 in Aquila's manner: 'In heading founded God the heavens and the earth' — the Hebrew word-order kept at any cost; where Symmachus renders, 'In the beginning God created.'

Manuscript witnesses

Cairo Genizah palimpsests (Cambridge, T-S 12.184 etc.)

6th c. under-writing

Aquila's Kings and Psalms recovered from reused synagogue parchment — the only continuous stretches of his text.

EARLIEST WITNESS

Codex Ambrosianus of the Syro-Hexapla

8th–9th c.

Paul of Tella's Syriac (616) preserves the Hexapla's margins, with hundreds of Aquila and Symmachus readings.

KEY VERSION

Mercati palimpsest (Milan, Ambros. O 39 sup.)

9th–10th c.

Psalter columns in parallel — the closest surviving image of Origen's page.

HEXAPLARIC WITNESS

Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt

1867–1875

The great Oxford collation of every recoverable fragment; still the citation base.

PRINTED PROXY

Provenance

Palestine and the diaspora synagogues; gathered by Origen into the Hexapla's third and fourth columns

Editions & scholarship

Critical editions and standard translations behind the text above.

Figures named in this text (2)