Do I misunderstand the distinction between edition and ancient verions under textual variants or is the Hebrew original here misclassified?
Sirach is a difficult text to classify - there's the original Hebrew version, and then two versions in Greek, one short, and the other long. Normally we would just consider the original Hebrew to be the "original version", but with Sirach there are a couple of factors that complicate the decision - firstly, we only have two-thirds of the Hebrew text; secondly, and more importantly, the text that was handed down and used in Christian liturgy for the past 2000 years, up to and including today, is the longer version of the Greek text, which includes texts which were probably originally written in Greek.
My opinion is that based on this situation, Faithlife should classify both the original Hebrew and the original Greek as "original". That would imply as well that modern editions of the Septuagint should appear under Editions, and that the text that MJ points to should be considered a transcription.
The other Deuterocanonicals are also misclassified by this tool. Including texts that do not have the difficulties or are debatable in the ways that Sirach is.
For example, all agree that the book of Wisdom was originally written in Greek. And yet, the Textual Variants tool does not classify the Septuagint versions as Editions. Instead, they are placed in the Ancient Versions.
Hoping these can be fixed....
Thanks for weighing in. I was aware that the other Deuterocanonicals were presenting problems as well but had no up to date source I truly trusted on the Hebrew/Greek issue. But this was one I had in my library to illustrate the problem.
unacknowledged possible bug 5
Hi MJ.
We did have a discussion about this during the beta phase, as I recall. I'll look into this particular Sirach resource.
Thanks again, MJ.
Here's what I'm doing with our currently available options (we have some ideas on the larger classification issue in the LXX & deuterocanon, but those may take a little time).
1: Marking "The Original Hebrew of a Portion of Ecclesiasticus: Hebrew Text" as a Transcription. The Hebrew portion of the resource is a transcription, so this seems appropriate; moreso than marking it as an edition.
2: Preserving "The Original Hebrew of a Portion of Ecclesiasticus: Greek Text" as an Ancient Version. Again, this seems appropriate.
3: Same for Latin and Syriac; they are translations so categorizations as Ancient Versions are proper.
The metadata on the server is updated, so the next time you sync (force it by clicking the sync indicator) this should be reflected in the Textual Variants tool. (Though I don't know if Logos needs to be restarted for this to be reflected in the application).
The metadata on the server is updated, so the next time you sync (force it by clicking the sync indicator)
Technical nitpick: clicking the sync icon doesn't download new resource metadata; the application will do it shortly after startup so you currently have to restart to get a metadata change "right now".
Thanks - that gives understandable results
Technical nitpick:
Thanks for the clarification, Bradley!
