Old Testament Studies

Discounted T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint

I am excited to draw more attention to a great new resource for Septuagintalists, the T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint, edited by James K. Aitken. This volume is a wonderful addition to the growing number of tools available to scholars of the (Greek) Old Testament and, as as John J. Collins rightly puts it, “Nothing like this has hitherto existed.”

Now, as is often the case with academic tomes, the publisher has conveniently priced this volume at a price point that would require one to sacrifice groceries for a week. That is why I was excited to hear about T&T Clark’s decision to make the Companion the “book of the month” and offer it for 35% off. Just go to the book’s webpage and use the coupon code SEPTUA35, which brings the book to about £58.

An Interview with Editor Jim Aitken

Some helpful reviews of this volume have already been posted (see Jim West’s and Greg Lanier’s). In time I will be putting together a review of the book for Bulletin for Biblical Research. But better than all that is the interview done with Jim Aitken about the book, and about his work in Septuagint in general. It is highly recommended listening.

http://tandtclark.podomatic.com/entry/2015-05-06T02_17_40-07_00

Review of the BHS Reader’s Edition

When the opportunity to review the new BHS: A Reader’s Edition came along, I grabbed it. One of the reasons being that I for some reason decided to leave my copy of the Zondervan Reader back in the United States and I have been kicking myself ever since. I have been using the Olivetree Bible Study app on my tablet for reading instead, but I was eager to get my hands on a real book again to study the original languages.

That being said, click here for my full review of the Reader’s Edition, which will eventually be published in BBR.

Of course, a project of this scale should always dissuade a mere reviewer from overly harsh critique. The number of hours required to create the apparatus and indices involved in this volume alone deserves high praise. Furthermore, considering the extent of the information that had to be corralled into a user-friendly format, it should be unsurprising to find the occasional typographical error. These sorts of things detract very little from the overall value of the Reader’s Edition. If you want to keep up your languages, at about $60 this volume is an investment worth making.

A Slight Grumble or Two

Nevertheless, I do have some complaints. As you’ll read about in my review, I find the notation system to be slightly ill-advised. Essentially, whatever words get a footnote and gloss in a given verse are marked with a superscripted letter, starting with ‘a’ in each verse. This basically means that when you hit a word you don’t know, you check the letter tagging it, and then glance at the bottom of the page to get the gloss … the catch being that you also have to know what number verse you are on at the moment.

Of course, if you are absorbed in your reading (as you should be), you have no idea what verse you are on. That means that, for me at least, I usually have to reroute back to the word I don’t know, scan back or forward to find what verse I’m on, then go to the apparatus and try again to find the gloss. This can be a significant distraction and slow down the reading process. Far easier, in my view, to use consecutive numerals for every gloss and start over on each page.

Parsing Headaches

Another slight grumble is the parsing system. At first glance it looks like a new coding language, and personally I was a bit daunted initially. And in fact, it took about a month to get used to it, which does not mean I totally understand it yet (nor do I care to, since I do my own parsing, thank you very much).

Part of my frustration also stems from the fact that apparently some early editions of the Reader’s Edition did not receive their bookmark insert, which contains a handy reference to the whole coded parsing system. Fortunately, there is a remedy. One of the editors, George Athas, has provided it via his website for personal printing. You can also find it by clicking here:

BHS Reader’s Edition Insert

LXX Commentary Series: Part I – Brill

A while back I began a series of posts to overview the major contemporary translation projects of the Septuagint. Thus far I have dealt with the recent English translation, known as NETS (see here). Before moving on to the French translation project, La Bible d’Alexandrie (BdA), however, it makes sense to discuss one of the commentary series that is associated with English projects in the Septuagint. Note that there are two Septuagint commentary series (that I know of), distinguished below.

Septuagint Commentaries

15723755As I have been thinking about preparing a post for BdA, it struck me that I will need to discuss the fact that it is not merely a translation into French, but also a commentary. So when it is time for that post I will most likely make it two parts, one treating the translational approach into French, the other dealing with principles underlying the commentary, although they are of course inseparable.

And if I am going to talk about the commentary in BdA, then I also need to mention the similar efforts in the ongoing in English. So that is what I will start here, to be completed in two parts. For one, there is the  IOSCS Septuagint Commentary Series (SBLCS), which I will treat at a later point, and which is associated with the NETS project and interlinearity as a method. In this post I discuss the Brill Septuagint Commentary series (BSC), which is under the general editorship of (who else?) Stan Porter. The first volume on Joshua came out over a decade ago, and since then a number of other installments have appeared, even though completion is in the remote future.

(As an aside, one of the contributors to the BSC, W. Edward Glenny, will be the subject of one of my future LXX Scholar Interviews)

Brill Commentary Series (BCS) Methodology

One of the major ways in which the BSC differs from the work of BdA and SBLCS is in terms of the text used. As I will discuss in more detail in other posts, BdA employs Rahlfs’s Septuaginta as its base text, while the SBLCS uses critical editions such as Göttingen or the Cambridge Larger Septuagint (for details on which see here). The BSC on the other hand uses one of three main uncial codices – Vaticanus (B), Alexandrinus (A), and Sinaiticus (א). For example, the Genesis commentary is based upon Alexandrinus, as the other two uncials are defective in much of the book.

The rationale here is the aim of BSC to be a “literary commentary” on the Septuagint, which is thus treated – rightly so in many respects – as itself an early commentary on the Hebrew Bible and a source for New Testament study. As such, the LXX represents the reception of the Old Testament in a given community, Jewish or Christian, in the Greco-Roman world.

To this end, the BSC aims to provide “a commentary on the Septuagint in its own right,” and therefore makes reference to the Hebrew text “only when necessary” (Brayford 2007, 25). As far as I can tell, making reference is “necessary” in order to discuss features of the Hebrew that agree with the Greek version to provide coherence, and also to understand occasional differences. While there are points at which the BSC deals with text critical issues, commentators never claim one text tradition is “better” than another. Rather, “the Commentary examines the text as it is and interprets it in its own right from literary, historical, social, and theological points of view” (ibid, 26). One of the primary stated goals of the BSC series in this sense is to determine how that Greek text of the Septuagint functioned in its literary and religious community, although drawing such conclusions is often quite speculative since it is difficult to know the details of a given textual community.

In any case, the BSC approach is motivated by the conviction that it is impossible to discern the intention of the author or translator (not to mention the readers) of the Greek version of the Old Testament, which by contrast is the distinct aim of the SBLCS. Instead of the text-as-produced by the translator, the BSC focuses on the text-as-received by a community, or the Greek version as it could have been read and interpreted, according to a given text tradition. In that way, while presuming for the most part that the Hebrew Vorlage of the Septuagint was a proto-MT, the actual relationship between the Hebrew and Greek versions is not of primary importance, as the BSC is essentially reception historical in its approach.

Others to Come

As mentioned, I will also outline the approach of the other Septuagint commentary series in due course. Doing so, I hope, will provide a useful primer for the uninitiated to the major contours of contemporary LXX scholarship.

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Brayford, Susan. Genesis. Septuagint Commentary Series (Leiden: Brill, 2007).