... The Vorlage of the translation matches the Masoretic Text of Ezra and Nehemiah for the most part. There is a variety of small minuses of one to three words, but there are also more significant differences, such as at 4.14 where ‘Now because we share the salt of the palace’ is lacking in the Greek (see further on chapter 4 below), and at 18.3 where ‘facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning’ becomes ‘from the hour the sun dawned until half the day’, owing both to a minus in the Greek and to the expansion of מן האור to ἀπὸ τῆς ὥρας τοῦ διαφωτίσαι τὸν ἥλιον (διαφωτίσαι ‘to dawn’ being a hapax legomenon in the Septuagint canon). In addition to these, in the Nehemiah material there are significant minuses in the Greek with respect to the Hebrew, at Nehemiah 3.37-38 (14.6 Septuagint); 9(19).5, 36-37; 11(21).12-35; and 12(22).2-9, 25, 29. Although it is possible that these may be due merely to textual corruption, it is also possible that they are evidence of a pre-Masoretic Text version of the book ...