Septuagint scholarship is still a young discipline. I tell people this all the time and they don’t seem to believe me. Sure, study of the Greek version(s) and recensions of the Hebrew Bible is virtually as old as Hellenistic Judaism itself. So there is certainly lots of history to the discipline, from antiquity through the early modern period and beyond. But the scholarly discipline as it exists today is really only about fifty years old.

One of the reasons this field is exciting is the fact that key primary and secondary texts are emerging year by year. Critical editions are still being produced, lexicons and encyclopedias underway or recently completed (and already needing revision), a grammar only a few years old, a handful of modern translations, and only two commentary series in the works (and mostly incomplete).

Speaking of translations and commentaries, a few years back I wrote a brief description (with a second part) of La Bible d’Alexandrie, a French project published by Éditions du Cerf that has been in the works for decades. Just last month, a new volume appeared in this series, adding the Song of Songs to the list of completed books. The volume was produced by Jean-Marie Auwers, professor at the Université catholique de Louvain.

This is great news! And it’s made all the better by the fact that this new volume can be purchased for about thirty-five bucks on Amazon.