Not long ago, I posted a book announcement for my coedited volume with Greg Lanier, The Authority of the Septuagint. You can read more about that there if you haven’t already.

Today I want to begin highlighting several other publications of mine that have either appeared recently, or are will appear in the coming month or so. There are five of them, so I’ll discuss each one in a separate post in no particular order.

Here is the first:

“Flouted Conventions in Septuagint Translation”

This essay is in a now-published Festschrift for Robert Hanhart entitled Das Erbe der Göttinger Septuaginta, edited by Felix Albrecht and Reinhard Kratz (Vandehoeck & Ruprecht 2025). Septuagint people will know that Hanhart revised Albert Rahlfs’ edition of the Septuagint in 2006, which is now fondly known as “Rahlfs-Hanhart.” Prof. Hanhart also had a major role in producing the Göttingen Septuagint over the decades, so it was an honor to contribute to this Festschrift for such a significant scholar.

There is also a pretty remarkable tale attached to this (very sizeable!) volume, since it was intended to mark a very special occasion. Here is what Felix Albrecht wrote to contributors:

Together with Reinhard G. Kratz, I had the privilege of presenting Professor Dr Dr Dr h.c. Dr h.c. Robert Hanhart with an advance copy of the Festschrift to mark his 100th birthday on 6 July 2025. 

He received it with visible emotion as a testimony to the esteem of so many colleagues. Five days later, on 11 July 2025, Robert Hanhart passed away.

With his passing, Septuagint studies has lost one of its most distinguished editors, theology an eminent philologist and Old Testament scholar, and we all a person of exceptional stature. 

You can read (in German) a fuller obituary for Robert Hanhart here.

As noted above, my essay is called “Flouted Conventions in Septuagint Translation.” In it, I use a case study to demonstrate that, sometimes, Septuagint translators deliberately chose not to render the source text in a way that would have conformed to contemporary linguistic conventions, even though they easily could have done so. Most of Septuagint scholarship would categorize this sort of thing as “interference” from Hebrew upon the Greek translation.

I’m challenging that concept and the metaphor that comes with it. As I say in the essay, “the term [interference] implies a sense of unintentionality …, as if a translator is a passive or incompetent agent. Conversely it implies unwanted or inappropriate disruption of some kind on the part of the source text, as if it was the active agent. Wherever interference is declared present, then, these implications subtly deter or discourage any expectation of intentionality in the translation process. Put simply, the interference metalanguage that is ubiquitous in Septuagint scholarship is problematic because it precludes motivation.”

For those reasons (and lots more detail), I offer “flouted conventions” as new metalanguage for the discipline. “I suggest that flouting is a better metalinguistic term than interference because it implies more accurate assumptions about the ancient translators. By definition, flouting implies intention, and intention subsequently implies motivation. It sets an expectation that the translators were in control with regard to the qualities of the Greek language they produced in their work, unlike the term interference.”

In my judgment, flouted conventions fit neatly under the rubric of style. But to hear more about that, you’ll have to read the full essay.