2018 TWU Septuagint Summer Course: LXX-Job

There is more great news for those interested in learning about the Septuagint.

Among the various opportunities coming in the next six months that I’ve posted about recently, yet another is now available in the classroom setting.

From 22-26 May 2018 the Septuagint Summer Course will take place at the John William Wevers Institute for Septuagint Studies, hosted at Trinity Western University. If some of this sounds familiar to you, that’s probably because this is now the fourth time that TWU has offered this opportunity. I have participated in two of the previous seminars and it’s a great time of focused study with experts in a small group setting (see here, here, and here).

I won’t repeat information from those previous posts about the Septuagint Summer course. There is, however, a flyer for this year, which you can see below. The topic of the course is “Exploring Septuagint Job,” directed by Dr. Claude Cox of McMaster Divinity College. As it happens, Cox is part of the new PhD that McMaster is offering focused in Septuagint (here). If you’re considering pursuing that, this TWU course is a good way to get a sense of what’s on offer.

Note also that, if you cannot make it personally up to beautiful Langley, BC where TWU is located, you can also participate via live-stream. It is, of course, very much possible to take this for graduate credit.

Septuagint Job

There is much to be said about the Greek version of Job. For one thing, although Job is mostly poetry in the Hebrew Bible, it’s Septuagint translation is in fact entirely prose. What is more, although LXX-Job appears to have been based upon a text very similar to MT, the Greek version is quite a bit shorter.

LXX-Job is complicated, but not as much as theonomy.

And, interestingly, the degree to which it is shorter than its parent text increases over the course of the book. Still, this book is also one that is regarded as being composed in a more literary quality of Greek.

Cox has done a good deal of work in the book of Job, and will make an excellent guide to these complex issues. He contributed the translation of LXX-Job to the NETS project, which you can read here. You can also find several of his papers on the topic on Academia.edu, such as his account of the textual history of OG Job.

If this doesn’t whet your appetite to know more, you can read this recent post by Dr. John Meade about recensional developments in LXX-Job.

Course Flyer