LXX Resource Reviews

Part of my purpose for this blog is not only to centralize my own work and interests, but to create a sort of LXX resource site. No doubt this will take some time to do well, and so (hopefully) I will get some assistance along the way. But it seems to be a desideratum in the Septuagint blogosphere. Hence: Resource Reviews.

To help bridge the gap, then, I am on the one hand continuing to build my LXX Resources page with resources as I come by them. I will hopefully one day get around to adding some actual prose to the page, with introductory information to the field. As I mention on the Intro page already, even when LXX studies is not concerned with complex and highly technical issues in linguistic and textual matters (which is rarely), it can still be a lot of insider baseball. As a result, things can get quite confusing.

Sometimes LXX studies make you feel like this.

It is a small field that is only just starting to grow and add new faces, so newcomers often end up parsing seemingly endless disciplinary ellipses that are otherwise unmysterious to those who have been speaking LXX for decades.

However, a page full of lists of resources is no good if you have no idea what to do with the resources. So in addition to the Intro page, I will also be periodically posting reviews of the resources. In good romantic fashion, I hope to help those interested in the field see the apparently foreboding and impassable Septuagint Mountains rather as a landscape whose beauty can be appreciated (not feared), and even provide enjoyment.

That brings us to my blog category “Resource Reviews,” which I will tag posts with wherever appropriate. I also have a sub-page under Intro to LXX that will centralize all the information (here). Perhaps I’ll simply start trolling through the materials already listed on the Intro page, and build from there. However it happens, hopefully this will contribute to the field in some small way, even if only to help newcomers navigate unfamiliar territory.

Don’t look down.

Review of Ngunga on Greek Isaiah

A while back I mentioned that I was reading and reviewing Abi T. Ngunga’s recently published dissertation, Messianism in the Old Greek of Isaiah (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). Well, I was, and I did, and the review is now available in full here, soon to be published in the Westminster Theological Journal (issue tbd).

However, I thought it might be helpful to provide an even briefer overview of my review, and add some extraneous comments that did not make it into the review itself.

All in all, I for one find Ngunga’s enterprise worthwhile. Essentially, his thesis asks “Does the LXX translation of Isaiah reflect a greater sense of messianic expectation than its Hebrew source text?” As I discuss in my review, however, answering this question means you have to determine whether LXX-Isaiah was translated by just one person, otherwise any messianic “flavor” in a given text could be unique to just that text, rather than characteristic of the book as a whole. You also have to make a case that any time the Greek text differs in meaning from the Hebrew, it is not due to factors like the translation process itself, scribal error, damages to the source text that made reading (and thus translating) it difficult, or changes made over its reception history. Rather, you must prove that Greek changes are best attributed to the translator at the level of the text’s production, intentional or not.

These can be difficult issues to navigate, of course. But to make matters more complex, this kind of inquiry as a whole presumes that LXX translators would have had some kind of messianic theology. And it presumes that their theology would differ from (would have developed beyond?) the Hebrew text’s own messianism enough to prompt intentional or unintentional alterations in the Greek text’s meaning. It is here that Ngunga faces his most comprehensive challenge and, I expect, will receive the most critique in broader scholarship.

The reason is that much, even most, of the scholarly consensus does not hold that any developed messianism would have existed in pre-Qumran, Alexandrian Jewish communities. As I mention in my review, Ngunga does a good job of challenging this notion from the root, both historically and academically. The latter by tracing the origins of the scholarly assumption that Diaspora Judaism was non-messianic.

But, again, I find the enterprise worthwhile. From the reading I have done in this topic, it seems to me that question begging is not uncommon. Often, scholars will say something like “there is no literary evidence for messianic theology in the Diaspora community (except for the LXX), therefore we should not expect to find any.” So I say more comprehensive studies of LXX books like Ngunga’s are needed, and could be very useful to determine just whether or not the majority opinion holds up.

Happy International Septuagint Day

You’ll be glad to know that you have not missed it. Today is the eighth celebration of this great day, which was instituted in 2006 by the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies (IOSCS).

The rationale behind the date apparently comes from Robert Kraft’s observation that the date is the only one we have record of being 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.

There are many reasons to love the Septuagint – not least of all the wide variety of options for pronouncing the word itself (sep-TOO-a-jint, sep-TOO-a-gint; SEP-too-jint; SEP-too-gint; SEP-twa-gint; and on and on). It is a greatly under-valued aspect of the heritage of the Christian religion, since it was (and is) an integral part of the formation of the Old Testament as we read it in our ESVs and NIVs. If we really want to access the most original form of Old Testament scriptures, the LXX is critical to that task since it often preserves older readings, as more biblical scholars are realizing. It also paved the way for the New Testament by furnishing an accessible corpus of scripture (and theology?) to draw upon for the apostles and early church. The LXX is an amazing artifact in its own right, too, a monument to the language, religion, and society of Ptolemaic Egypt. Oddly, more than being ignored in much of biblical scholarship, it is ignored by scholarship concerned with Hellenistic Judaism as well.

So, to help turn the tide, and in the spirit of the “most highly approved” Greek translation, consider reading an excerpt from the LXX today. PDFs of the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS) are freely available here. Or, you might consider reading an accessible introductory work such as T. Michael Law’s When God Spoke Greek (reviewed in many places, but currently receiving a “dialogic” review here), or Müller’s The First Bible of the Church: A Plea for the Septuagint.