LXX

Exegeting the Septuagint Psalms – 2016 Course at Trinity Western University

Just a quick post today to publicize the 2016 course at Trinity Western University’s John William Wevers Institute for Septuagint Studies, near Vancouver, B.C. If you’re interested in advanced coursework in Septuagint, you should go. I have posted in the past about graduate programs that focus on Septuagint studies in North America – the short story is that there aren’t many. However, the Wevers Institute is the only place in North America where a full-fledged Septuagint degree is offered, as both a Master of Theological Studies and the shorter Master of Theology. If you are interested in LXX studies, you should definitely look into this program.

This year’s seminar will be led by Dr. Cameron Boyd-Taylor, a very prolific and respected scholar in the field.  Along with Dr. Albert Pietersma, Boyd-Taylor is one of the most vocal proponents of the Interlinear Paradigm for interpretation of the Septuagint. If you don’t know what that is, then please understand that you cannot be a Septuagint scholar without wrapping your mind around and engaging it. This seminar will be a fantastic way to get familiar with the concept of “interlinearity” from a (the?) leading scholar currently employing it. And it is not an uncontested issue!

The Wevers Institute also benefits from several excellent scholars, including Drs. Robert Hiebert (director), Larry Perkins, Dirk Büchner, and Peter Flint, each of whom are working on Pentateuchal commentaries in the SBLCS.

Seminar Details

The seminar will be 3 credit hours and is entitled Exegeting the Septuagint Psalms: Theory, Method and Interpretation. It will be held from May 30 – June 3 of this year. I can personally attest to the benefits of traveling to the Vancouver area for this event. It’s a beautiful region that you won’t regret visiting. However, if you can’t swing the trip, the Wevers Institute is also offering live-streamed video sessions. The course description includes:

Students will study the translation technique, language and ideology of the text with a view to understanding the larger methodological and interpretive issues, and they will be introduced to the foundational principles and methodology of the above-mentioned research initiatives.

If you’re interested, email acts@twu.ca. Check out the poster below for more details:

2016 LXX Poster

Happy Septuagint Day 2016

Today is the 10th annual International Septuagint Day! So don’t forget to read some Greek Old Testament, browse some early editions of Liddell Scott, and brush up on your accentuation rules in celebration.

A Brief History

I have posted some about this history of Septuagint Day here and here. But the long and short is this:

Emperor Justinian

Dr. Robert Kraft made the observation that today’s date is the only one we to be historically related to the Greek Scriptures. In a document dating to February 8th, 533 C.E. the Emperor Justinian, announces permission for public reading of Jewish Scriptures in the Roman Empire. He proclaims his approval of any language, but where Greek is used he states that “those who use Greek shall use the text of the seventy interpreters [i.e. the LXX], which is the most accurate translation, and the one most highly approved…” An English translation of the novella is available here.

In recognition of the joyous event, in November of 2006 the IOSCS approved the institution of this grand day. Here is an excerpt from the General Business Meeting minutes:

A motion to establish February 8 annually as International Septuagint Day to promote the discipline on our various campuses and communities was moved by Karen Jobes, seconded by James Aitkin and carried.

LXX Scholar Interviews

Some of you will know about the various interviews I have conducted with scholars active in the field of Septuagint.
Thus far I have had thepleasure of interviewing:

I have also been hard at work preparing more interviews with prominent scholars active in the discipline, and I am very exited to share these with you in the coming months. You can look forward to seeing posts from…

  • Dr. Jan Joosten
  • Dr. Cameron Boyd-Taylor
  • Dr. Claude Cox
  • Dr. Cécile Dogniez
  • Dr. Emanuel Tov
  • Dr. Albert Pietersma
  • Dr. Natalio Fernández-Marcos
  • Dr. Anneli Aejmelaeus
  • Dr. Robert Kraft

I am very grateful to all who have given me their time and energy to complete these interviews. It is my hope that they will help fulfill the goal of International Septuagint Day: generating attention and interest in the discipline among those less familiar with it.

Two Recent Book Reviews, and Some On the Way

I’ve been working on reviewing books pretty steadily over the last year or so. It’s a good discipline to keep you reading texts closely, keep up with topics of interest that are not immediately connected with my dissertation, and get my hands on some free premium volumes.

Two of my reviews were recently published in the Bulletin for Biblical Research, the journal of the Institute for Biblical Research (IBR). At the moment BBR is holding first place in my review contributions, mainly because they publish so many and there is plenty of opportunity to do it.

Here are the two that I reviewed in BBR 25.3 (2015).

The Hebrew Bible (BHS) Reader’s Edition

It’s an odd task to review a Reader’s Edition. In case you don’t know, a Reader’s Edition is simply a primary text – in this case Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia – reproduced with vocabulary helps included throughout. In this case, any word that occurs seventy times or fewer in the Hebrew Bible is given a note in the text that corresponds to a footnote, where the parsing (where appropriate) and a contextual gloss appears. This allows you to read your Hebrew as easily as you like, whenever you hit an unknown word it’s there for you to check and/or parse.

I really like this volume. It’s very well produced by Hendrickson, one of the highest quality publishers in the industry in my opinion when it comes to primary sources. The German Bible Society teamed up with Hendrickson to allow them to use the BHS 5th edition text (’97), so aside from the Masorah Parva and textual apparatus, you’re also getting a high quality scholarly source also. In terms of kethiv/qere variants, the editors of the Reader’s Edition have smoothed things out using their apparatus at the bottom of the page.

There are a few drawbacks. For the most part, this consists of the parsing system used throughout. It is based on LaSor’s system, and takes some getting used to. Ideally, you can parse everything yourself anyway so you won’t need it much!

You can read my review here.

Adams and Socio-Economics of Second Temple Judaism

A lot of my research includes reading about Judaism. That may sound surprising if you know I work in Septuagint studies. But believe it or not, the Septuagint was produced by Jews. Ta-da! Although I tend to read a great deal more about Jewish life in Ptolemaic Egypt, where most of the translation work likely occurred, I am also interested in other diaspora communities and, of course, Palestinian Judaism.

That’s why I picked up Adams’ volume Social and Economic Life in Second Temple Judea to review. I was astounded to read that there is no other volume specifically focused upon this subject-matter, something I am still somewhat inclined to doubt (although I have yet to find proof otherwise). Naturally many of the other tomes on Second Temple Judaism treat socioeconomics in passing or so some extent, but it is not the main focus.

A variety of topics are covered: family and the household, the lives of women and children, the marketplace, the state, and the ethics of wealth and poverty. There is the natural challenge of lack of sources in many parts of this study (especially women and children), so Adams makes up for it by contemporary anthropological studies. This can be problematic, as you can read in my review. More so, however, is his use of almost the entire Old Testament as “evidence” of life in the Second Temple period. If you’re not aware of higher critical assumptions, they more or less allow Adams to presume that most/all of the OT was written or finalized in the Second-Temple period, thus allowing him to use it as a primary source. I find this approach specious, but it’s a different kettle of fish for a different day.

You can read my review here.

Some Reviews in the Pipeline

I have a few reviews that will be coming out soon, and some I’m looking forward to producing. I have two reviews coming out in the Westminster Theological Journal that I will post here in time. I’m more interested in reading these three volumes, however: