The Contribution of Philip's Commentary on Job to the History of the Text of the Book of Job: Outline of a Study

International audienceThe commentary on Job written by Philippus presbyter, a disciple of Jerome of Stridon, probably very soon after Jerome completed his translation of the book of Job from the Hebrew, has never been the subject of a critical edition. This is partly due to the fact that some of the manuscript tradition passed it on under the name of Jerome. Nevertheless, we can study it on the basis of the edition given by J. Sichard in Basel in 1527 and the ten or so manuscripts currently known. The text is a lemmatic commentary on the book of Job, and Philip's exegesis is based, among other things, on a comparison between the text of the translation made by Jerome, his teacher, on the Hebrew text of Job and the other versions of the text that Philip knew.The present paper aims to highlight the relevance of Philip's commentary to the textual criticism of Job. Indeed, Philip uses Old Latin versions of Job as well as Jerome's translation of the book of Job from the Greek Septuagint text. Based on the manuscripts, we would like to show that Philip's commentary is an interesting witness to the Latin textual tradition of the book of Job. It also presents variants of the Vulgate text which are partially documented in the edition of the monks of St. Jerome, and which have a posterity in late antique and medieval commentators. In addition, Philip's commentary uses some Latin renditions of the book of Job that are un paralleled in the Latin patristic and biblical literature but are in the Eastern patristic and biblical tradition. Philip's commentary on Job, whose critical edition I am working on, is thus an important witness to the complex history of the biblical text of Job, and we would like to sketch here some features of its contribution to this history