This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
29 July 2022
The German word Vorlage is a technical term for the hypothetical original behind a translation. Unfortunately, due to a lack of very early Hebrew manuscripts, those who seek to understand the textual history of the Hebrew Bible are forced to try to reconstruct early versions of the text from translations into other languages.
So, for example, if the Septuagint reads kyrios o theos ("Lord God") in some particular place, a reasonable guess would be that its Vorlage, the Hebrew text that the Septuagint translators worked from, once read, Yhwh elohim ("Yahweh God"). The reconstruction of a Vorlage of a particular passage is not perfectly reliable -- differences between, say, the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text could be due to the Vorlage varying from the Masoretic Text. But they could, just as easily, be due to the translator paraphrasing or making a mistake.
The difference is not always clear, but can sometimes be worked out with reasonable accuracy.
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