human
Hexapla arose in his mind. The Hexapla was nothing less than a complete transcription of the Septuagint side by side with the Hebrew text, the agreement and divergence of the two illustrated by the parallel transcription of the versions of Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus; the remaining column containing the Hebrew text in Greek letters. The whole of the Old Testament was thus transcribed sixfold in parallel columns. These extra illustrations were furnished by the partial use of three other Greek versions which Origen found or picked up in his travels, and which he considered of sufficient importance to be occasionally used in his great work. And Origen was not content with the mere juxtaposition of the versions. The text of the Septuagint given in the Hexapla was his own; that is to say, it was an edition of the great authoritative translation completely revised and corrected by the master himself. It was a great and a daring work. Of its necessity there can be no doubt; but nothing except necessity could have justified it; and it is certainly to the bold and unprecedented character of the enterprise that we owe the shape that he has given it in performance. To correct the Septuagint to his own satisfaction was not enough; it must be corrected to the satisfaction of jealous friends and, at least, reasonable enemies. Side by side, therefore, with his amended text he gave the reasons and the proofs of his corrections. He was scrupulously exact in pointing out where he had altered by addition or subtraction. The Alexandrian critics had invented a number of critical marks of varied shape and value, which they industriously used on the works about which they exercised their propensity to criticise. Origen,
gpt
Aristarchus sacer, as an admiring author calls him, did not hesitate to avail himself of these profane _notae_. There was the
human
or star, which marked what he himself had thought it proper to insert, and which, therefore, the original authors of the Septuagint had apparently thought it proper to leave out. Then there was the
gpt
or spit, the sign of slaughter, as St. Jerome calls it; passages so marked were not in the original Hebrew, and were thereby set down as doubtful and suspected by sound criticism. Moreover, there was the
human
or pendent ribbon, and its supplement, the
gpt
what these marks signified the learned cannot agree in stating. It seems certain, however, that they were not of such a decided import as the first two, but implied some minor degree of divergence from the Hebrew, as for instance in those passages where the translators had given an elegant periphrasis instead of the original word, or had volunteered an explanation which a critic would have preferred to have had in the margin. The
human
and
gpt
still continue to figure in those scraps of Origen's work that have come down to us; so, indeed, does the lemniscus; but since the times of St. Epiphanius and St. Jerome no MS. seems to make much distinction between it and the