In his Schweich Lectures on “The Septuagint and Jewish Worship” (for the British Academy, 1921) Mr. St. John Thackeray presents clear evidence from the different vocabularies in the Greek Version that this Version was the work of two translators, the division between whom is at Ch. xxix. verse 7. The dividing line cuts across the Greek arrangement of the chapters, which sets the Oracles on Foreign Nations in the centre of the Book. This shows that it was not the translators who placed them there, but that the translators found the arrangement in the Hebrew MS. from which they translated. Further, he thinks that the division of the Book into two parts was not made by the translators, but already existed in their Hebrew exemplar. For this the Hebrew text gives two evidences: (1) the titles of the Oracles, (2) the colophons appended to two of them. The titles are some long, some short. In the Hebrew order the Oracles with long titles are mixed up with those with short, but in the Greek order the six with long titles come together first and are followed by the five with short. There are two colophons—one to the Moab Oracle, the other to the Babylon Oracle; but the Moab Oracle stands last in the Greek order and the Babylon Oracle last in the Hebrew order.
From all this two conclusions are drawn: (1) when the titles were inserted the chapters were arranged as in the Greek, which, therefore, was the original arrangement; (2) they afford Hebrew evidence for a break or interruption in the middle of the Oracles—the longer titles cease about the end of Part I of the Greek Version, which therefore follows a division of the Book into two parts that already existed in the Hebrew original from which it was made. The Hebrew editor who amplified the titles had apparently only Part I before him.
Using the Greek, Duhm, Cornill and Skinner render this quatrain thus:—
Did not thy father eat and drink,
And do himself well?
Yet he practised justice and right,
Judged the cause of the needy and poor.