The Ostrog Slavonic Bible of 1580-1581 and the printed editions of the Septuaginta: the problem of sources

Abstract

The first printed Church Slavonic Bible appeared in Ostrog, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, between 1580 and 1581. This corpus is essentially based on the late-fifteenth century Gennadian Bible, which included Church Slavonic translations of different origin that were revised or newly rendered by taking the Vulgate as a model. The compilers of the Ostrog Bible, for their part, corrected or retranslated these texts by using the Septuagint as a source. The problem of establishing which printed editions of the Septuagint were specifically used for this purpose still remains open for debate. This paper aims at shedding some light on this unresolved issue. The author compares the Ostrog Bible with the Complutensian Polyglot Bible of 1517 and the Aldine Bible of 1518 and offers a few preliminary textual remarks on Exodus 35-40. This analysis has led to the following conclusions: the Ostrog Bible shows a closer textual affinity with the Aldine Bible, but follows the Complutensian Polyglot in the order of chapters. However, an in-depth scrutiny suggests that the textual arrangement was borrowed not from the Complutensian Polyglot, but almost certainly from the Gennadian Bible, where the subdivision of the text replicates that of the Vulgate. Therefore, it is strongly advised that future research should focus on each single biblical book in order to obtain a more detailed assess-men of the textual relationship between the Aldine edition and the Ostrog Bible.