Year: 2015

LXX Scholar Interview: Dr. W. Edward Glenny

It has become one of my favorite tasks for this site to put together a post for my Septuagint Scholar Interview series. It’s always a pleasure to learn more about others who have been active in the field for some time. We are now on the fourth installment, and if you pop over to the interview page using that link up there, you’ll see that I have a few others lined up that should be interesting reading.

Dr. W. Edward Glenny

Dr. W. Edward Glenny

But today we have a great interview with a real, live Septuagint scholar, Dr. W. Edward Glenny. I met Ed several years ago at an IOSCS session at the SBL national meeting, and we have gotten to know each other through that venue ever since. Ed and his wife also spent several months at Tyndale House, Cambridge, where I conduct my research, so he has become a good friend. He is also a fellow member of the steering committee for the brand new Septuagint Studies session at the annual ETS national conference.

For the past four years Ed has been the endowed professor of New Testament Studies and Greek at the University of Northwestern, St. Paul. He is one of those rare breeds that holds not one, but two doctoral degrees, both Th.D. from Dallas Theological Seminary and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (as you’ll read about below). As you can see by flipping over to his faculty page, Ed has a long list of academic publications, many of which are related to the Septuagint, especially his focus area, the Twelve.

The Interview

Without further delays, let’s hear from Ed.

1) Can you describe how you first became interested in LXX studies, and your training in the discipline?

My first contact with the LXX was through a class on the LXX with Allen Ross during my doctoral program at Dallas Seminary. I audited the course with Dr. Ross, and it was partly because of that course that I wanted to write a dissertation on the use of the OT in the NT for my doctoral program at Dallas. I began to use the LXX in my dissertation at Dallas on the use of the OT in 1 Peter. After I finished that project I felt like I wanted to learn more and improve my language skills further, so I enrolled in a graduate program in classics at the University of Minnesota. I majored in Greek, and my second ancient language was Hebrew. So, with my emphasis on those two languages the LXX was a natural topic for my dissertation at Minnesota, and I wrote on the translation technique in LXX-Amos. That dissertation was published in Brill’s Supplement to Vetus Testamentum series (Finding Meaning in the Text: Translation Technique and Theology in the Septuagint of Amos), and it was really my entry into LXX studies. I was able to spend time at Tyndale House at Cambridge University while I was researching and writing my dissertation on the LXX, and Robert Gordon and some of his students who were working in the LXX were a great encouragement and help to me in my work.

2) How have you participated in the discipline over the course of your teaching and writing career?

I have presented papers in the IOSCS section at the annual SBL meetings, and I have also presented at the triennial international meetings of the IOSCS. I have also had the privilege to write several book reviews, articles, and books on the LXX. In addition to my dissertation I have published three commentaries in Brill’s Septuagint Commentary series, the commentaries on Hosea, Amos, and Micah. Among other articles, I contributed the article on the Introduction to the Twelve in the LXX in Brill’s forthcoming work The Textual History of the Bible. In the days ahead I am looking forward to writing several other volumes for Brill’s Septuagint Commentary series, as well as a handbook on the LXX of Amos for Baylor University Press.

4) How has the field changed since you’ve been involved?

I think that I can give a general answer to this question. The field is becoming more sophisticated and complex, and scholars continue to build on the work of previous generations and go to greater levels of depth in the study of the LXX text. Continued study has resulted in more comparison of the LXX with other contemporary literature and with more detailed studies of the Septuagint itself.

5) For the benefit of graduate students who are potentially interested in

LXX studies in doctoral work, what in your opinion are underworked areas and topics in need of further research? I think that the area of translation technique is one of the most important areas of research that will continue to provide opportunities for work in the LXX for years to come. This is because the study of translation technique is wide-ranging and complex and can be applied to a LXX text in many different ways.

6) What current projects in Septuagint are you working on?

My main LXX project right now is a review of the T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint, edited by James K. Aitken. I published a commentary on LXX-Micah in early 2015, and now my main project is a New Testament commentary (1 Peter). But as I mentioned above I am looking forward to working in earnest on the LXX again in a year or so.

7) What is the future of Septuagint studies?

The future of Septuagint studies is very bright! There are many young scholars working in this area, and previous generations of scholars have provided them with some excellent tools to use in their studies and more LXX resources and studies are being published every year. I anticipate that the field will continue to grow and flourish.

Wrapping Up

Thanks to Ed for being willing to answer these questions! As I mentioned, stay tuned for further interviews in the near future. If you have a suggestion for a later interviewee, or a question you’d like to see added, please let me know in the comments.

Final Volume of La Biblia Griega Published

I was excited to see recently that the last installment of La Biblia Griega (LBG) has been released at last, covering the corpus of prophetical books. To repeat some information from a recent post in which I reviewed the approach of the Spanish translators, this four-volume set is published by Ediciones Sígueme in Salamanca under the directorship of Natalio Fernández Marcos and María Victoria Spottorno. The translation team is made up of ten to twelve scholars operating through the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid. It’s been underway for ten years already, so it’s great to see it come to completion.

IV. Libros proféticos

lbg4Although I was unable to find this resource for the newest volume, you can read samples from Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III. These samples include the full Prologue and General Introduction for each. These introductions are very useful, exceeding those of NETS and on par with the introductions in Septuaginta Deutsch in terms of quality in my opinion, although with less bibliography.

The best thing about these volumes, besides the high caliber scholarship involved, is the price for each, which ranges from €29-49. If you are working in a particular part of the LXX corpus, these are well worth having on your shelf at that price point. I have Volume II for my work in LXX-Judges, and can confirm that they are nicely bound hardback volumes.

I’ll close with a nice statement about the aims of this project:

Recuperar hoy Septuaginta no es, en ese sentido, un simple acto de justicia cultural, sino ofrecer nuevamente a todos la posibilidad de leer en castellano los textos sagrados que conocieron los autores del Nuevo Testamento, la Biblia que leyeron, escucharon y reflexionaron los creyentes en Jesús de los tres primeros siglos y que constituye la base de la que siguen usando los cristianos de Oriente hasta nuestros días.

New Article on Old Testament Textual Criticism in ZAW

Today I wanted to focus on something that I mentioned back in my Spring Update post quite a while back. (If you’ve published in academic journals then you know how long it can take for these things to finally surface in print.) I am pleased to have had an article accepted in Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, or simply ZAW for those less inclined to pronounce long German phrases. The journal is published quarterly, and my piece will be in the upcoming September issue (127/3). According to their website, ZAW “has been the leading international and interconfessional periodical in the field of research in the Old Testament and Early Judaism for over one hundred years.” Needless to say, it is an honor to have my own work included in this journal.

The Main Points of Argument

My article is entitled “Text-Critical Question Begging in Nahum 1,2-8: Re-evaluating the Evidence and Arguments.” In it, I examine the text of Nahum 1, where many scholars have drawn attention to what is almost an acrostic (in the Hebrew text). There are a few letters missing, namely daleth, zayin, and yod lines, and so it is fairly common in critical commentaries for scholars to suggest various ways of emending the Hebrew text in order to “restore” the acrostic to its supposed proto-form. While this may sound somewhat reasonable, this near acrostic is also, admittedly, a partial acrostic. This means that it only spans part of the alphabet (just the first half) even in its theoretical “original” form. In my view, that makes the whole assumption that it is, in fact, supposed to be an acrostic, much more speculative and therefore suspect.

So what I do is examine each of the three places where there is a “wrong” letter and where emendations are usually proposed. I summarize common arguments for altering the Hebrew text in a way that “restores” the acrostic. For the most part these must build on versional information (mainly the Septuagint, but also Latin and the Peshitta), since there are no proper variants in the extant Hebrew manuscript tradition. Then, I examine the text of the acrostic in the Old Greek version of Nahum (Zeigler’s text) to evaluate the translation technique that characterizes that unit of the book (1:2-8). I show that the divergences in the Greek version from the Hebrew MT are better accounted for as features resulting from the process of translation rather than a different Vorlage, namely one that contained the theoretical “acrostic.” Finally, I martial the results of other scholars’ studies conducted in the LXX-Twelve Prophets, which is thought to have been translated by a single individual, to demonstrate how their characterization of the translation technique of the entire Twelve further corroborates the translational and textual trends present in LXX-Nahum 1:2-8 (and therefore my argument against a different Hebrew Vorlage).

Why Bother?

I don’t see any acrostic on that scroll, do you?

In the end, the “payoff” of my paper is to seriously challenge what has become a tradition of messing with the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible unnecessarily. While it is certainly true that the MT does occasionally need emending (based as it is upon a 10th century codex), making the decision to actually alter the Hebrew text is one that must be preceded by much careful investigation, constantly reevaluated in light of further textual evidence. One of the reasons for my interest in Septuagint studies stems from my concern for the Hebrew text of Scripture. When examined from a text-critical standpoint, scholars of the Hebrew Bible must reckon with the Septuagint. Yet so often this does not happen, or does not happen very convincingly because of the technical nature of many aspects of Septuagint scholarship. (Hence, in part, this blog!)

When it comes to the so-called “acrostic” of Nahum 1:2-8, I find it much more interesting and exegetically rewarding to reckon with the possible reasons that the text is, in fact, nearly an acrostic … but not quite. I believe Tremper Longman’s view is fairly satisfactory here as he takes a literary critical approach: in the context, the judgement and wrath of the Lord brings upheaval upon all of creation to such a massive extent that even the very text involved in describing it is jarred and disrupted.* To me this approach to the text of Nahum 1 rightly expects much of the literary capabilities of biblical authors, and of the competence and meticulousness of later scribes.

Unfortunately, I can’t distribute the article itself in PDF form. But you can find it shortly in the forthcoming ZAW.

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*Tremper Longman, “Nahum,” in The Minor Prophets: An Exegetical and Expository Commentary, ed. Thomas E. McComiskey (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009): 765–830.