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Invitation to the SeptuagintScholarly enquiryINVITATION TO THE SEPTUAGINT Not, to be frank, an invitation I will take any further than I have gone already! Like most who know it at all, I am acquainted with the Septuagint first as the source of many New Testament quotations of the Old, and secondly as the ostensible (frequently tendentious) reason offered by some commentators for 'emending' the Hebrew (Massoretic) Text. The impeccable scholarship of these authors has at least blown the latter out of the water. They show that the Septuagint is not a unitary work but a fortuitous amalgam of unknown translations of the books of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, the work of unknown authors over a considerable period of time, and apparently subscribing to (but not stating) a variety of approaches to the translator's art - from wooden literalism to loosely exercised 'dynamic equivalence'. Consequently, it is impossible to reconstruct the Hebrew text any given translator(s) used and highly unsafe to make their work a means of 'correcting' the Hebrew text we have inherited and prize. Their treatment of the history, use and current study of the Septuagint is always readable, sometimes fascinating, a sound contribution to scholarly enquiry. But it leaves the Septuagint where it always was - a very ancient, often insecure, translation, and an unsafe interpretation of the Old Testament. Alec Motyer© Evangelicals Now - October 2001 |