Ephesians 6:10-11 says, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God….”
This “of” is perhaps best understood to mean, “the armor that God himself wears, that is also available to you.” Isaiah 59:17 talks about the Lord (“Yahweh”) putting on righteousness like a breastplate and a helmet of salvation. Ephesians 6 mentions these same items.
The “armor” we are called to put on, then, is God’s own armor. We “put on” the attributes and characteristics of God. Because of his righteousness, we are called righteous. Because he is a God of peace, we can be at peace and make peace with others. Because of the faithfulness of Jesus, we can have faith.
And, what is more, God-as-Warrior is going on ahead of each of us, wearing that “armor,” fighting spiritual battles before us. As we follow him, we are given his same armor to wear.
Though it was a quiet month in the Septuagint blogosphere, J.K. Gayle turned up the heat with some top-notch posts. Gayle looked at the phrase “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” (a “Greek frozen phrase”) in “Aristotle,” “Moses,” and Paul. Gayle writes:
As my son and my daughters grow into adulthood more in this world, I long for English counterpart terms like the Greek ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ and the Hebrew זכר ונקבה. These phrases do not have a default sex for the sex, the gender, of adult human beings the way our English “men and women” and “male and female” do. So I do tend to try to use “boys and girls” even when referring to adults, even though I always have to explain what I mean since the term applies to children not grown ups. I also like “masculine and feminine” since the phrase includes equal counterparts that does not place one over the other.
A section titled, “The Reception of ‘ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ’ in Contemporary Sexist Theology” concludes the post. Read it all here.
When I read Psalm 34 in the Greek (aka the Septuagint’s Psalm 33), I have lots of questions. For example, does the psalmist have a possibly-pregnant female soul?
Brian Davidson reviewed some Hermeneia volumes, including the one on 2 Maccabees by Robert Doran. Michael Bird reviewed T.M. Law’s When God Spoke Greek at Patheos.
And this beauty is now available:
Jim West took a picture of it here. I reviewed it here.
To help alleviate October’s LXX lacunae–the dearth of Septuagint mirth–you could check out the Greek Isaiah in a Year group. We’re on Facebook here. It’s not too late to join! We’re just 60 chapters in.
Did I miss anything? (It seems I checked at least 70 or 72 blogs.) Feel free to leave more October 2013 LXX links of interest in the comments. And in case you didn’t see it, the first Septuagint Studies Soirée is here; the second one is here.
The text will be, as usual, from R.R. Ottley’s Book of Isaiah According to the Septuagint(pictured above). Ottley is here in Logos (reviewed here) and here as a free, downloadable pdf in the public domain. The full reading plan for our group is here (pdf).
See here for more resources and links to texts for Greek Isaiah.
This week’s Gospel lectionary reading is Luke 18:1-8. Quite a few commentaries have noted the (possible) connection between themes in Sirach 35 and Jesus’ parable. The two texts are below (NRSV):
Luke 18:1-8
Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Sirach 35:17-22a
He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan,
or the widow when she pours out her complaint.
Do not the tears of the widow run down her cheek
as she cries out against the one who causes them to fall?
The one whose service is pleasing to the Lord will be accepted,
and his prayer will reach to the clouds.
The prayer of the humble pierces the clouds,
and it will not rest until it reaches its goal;
it will not desist until the Most High responds
and does justice for the righteous, and executes judgment.
The overlap of themes, of course, does not prove that either had/has impact on the other, but it is interesting to think about whether Jesus/Luke had the Sirach passage in mind when telling the parable in Luke.
We are getting close to the end of Greek Isaiah in a Year. This week and next week cover Isaiah 55:7-Isaiah 58:9.
Below is the text from R.R. Ottley’s Book of Isaiah According to the Septuagint. Ottley is also here in Logos (reviewed here) and here as a free, downloadable pdf in the public domain. The full reading plan for our group is here (pdf).
See here for more resources and links to texts for Greek Isaiah.
It’s the September Septuagint Studies Soirée! Come on in–you won’t have to stay long. It was a quiet month in the Septuagint blogosphere, at least as far as I could find. Everyone is back to school, it seems. But there are still some noteworthy posts.
Suzanne at BLT (Bible*Literature*Translation) wrote about “several curious matters in the vocabulary of Amos 6:1 in Hebrew, in Greek and in English.” It was an early September post, but that verse was included in the OT lectionary reading for today, incidentally.
James Dowden also posted about the vocabulary and translation of a single verse (or part of a verse): Lamentations 3:35a. This one compares Hebrew, Greek, English, and Welsh.
CBD says this beauty is in stock now
“Where is the center of gravity for LXX studies?” asked T. Michael Law. It’s a spot that may still be “for the taking,” in his analysis. TML also announced a new series on the history of interpretation of the Apocrypha, by Oxford University Press. He and David Lincicum are editing it together.
John Meade posted two parts of a response to Law’s When God Spoke Greek. In part the first he inquires as to just what kind of a book it is. Part the second focuses on the vexing question of canonization and seeks to “interact with a crucial part of chapter three [of Law’s book]: Was there a Bible before the Bible?” Meade promises future posts on the book.
A Septuagint symposium called “Looking Ahead for Dialogue. A Multiplicity of Approaches in Septuagint Studies” will be taking place in Belgium in October. (This via Jim Aitken on the FB, who will be presenting.)
Did I miss anything? Feel free to leave more September 2013 LXX links of interest in the comments. And in case you didn’t see it, the first Septuagint Studies Soirée is here.
Below is the text from R.R. Ottley’s Book of Isaiah According to the Septuagint. Ottley is also here in Logos (reviewed here) and here as a free, downloadable pdf in the public domain. The full reading plan for our group is here (pdf).
See here for more resources and links to texts for Greek Isaiah.
As soon as I announced the first-ever Septuagint Studies Soirée (and here it is!), J.K. Gayle responded with “Breast God: women in the male literary imagination of Genesis 49.” Find his post here. In it he writes about how the Greek translators of Genesis 49 rendered God’s Hebrew title Shaddai… or, rather, didn’t:
Then I recall what the Septuagint translators did with Shaddai in Genesis 49. They were men, weren’t they? Yes, breasts are mentioned, and womb. These motherly wifely womanly female images are in the Hebraic Hellene. And absence, margin, lack is there.
James Dowden offered further lexical analysis (I loved the detail) with a response here. These two gents are fine thinkers. And they are, indeed, gents. Gayle makes a point to recognize this in his WOMBman’s Bible blog, with a post in which he asks whether the Septuagint itself might not be some sort of soirée. I always need to spend some time with Gayle to really plumb the depths of his insights, but it’s time well spent. A sampling:
In many fascinating ways, this act of translating into Hellene opens up the text. It opens the text up into the debates over how Greek males (such as Alexander’s teacher Aristotle) may control the Greek language for elite educated men of the Academy. The language control was to exclude not only women but also sophists, rhetoricians, ancient epic poets, more contemporary poets, colonists such as those in Soli who committed “solecisms” in writing, and BarBarians who spoke in foreign barbarisms.
Along similar lexical lines, Suzanne McCarthy (Gayle blogs with her at BLT) tackled “another pesky Hebrew gender question” via Hebrew, Latin, English, and, of course, Greek. McCarthy also wrote about Adam’s nose (rendered “face,” but should it be?) here.
LXX Leviticus. Source: The Schøyen Collection
Jim West complained about Septuagint-o-mania (has he read the New Testament? has he read BLT blog???) but then posted a bunch of LXX-related links not long after (phew–he has read his NT, at least).
In two of the more substantive Septuagint posts this month, Nijay Gupta (who has impeccable taste in seminaries) wrote about the importance of the Septuagint (with an eye to pastors, among others). Part 1 is here. His Part 2 looks more closely at the Apocrypha. (“There is ample evidence to show that Jesus, Paul, James, and others certainly were acquainted with the Apocrypha and probably positively influenced by texts like Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach.”) His part 2 concludes with the promise of more to come.
Speaking of which, Jessica Parks was posting some great stuff on LXX Susanna earlier in the summer, so keep an eye out for anything LXX-related she may post in the future. She is now posting on Cataclysmic blog.
Brian LePort posted a good bit on the Septuagint in August (and before). He wrote about exegeting the Septuagint (with attention to its literary context) and even theologizing from it!
This pre-dates August, but Blog of the Twelve posted a few LXX-related resources for consideration. And while we’re still dipping (but only briefly) back into July, Brian Davidson wrote about Matthew as a new Genesis.
Larry Hurtado mentioned that a book he co-edited with Paul L. Owen is now in (affordable) paperback. It’s called “Who Is This Son of Man?” The Latest Scholarship on a Puzzling Expression of the Historical Jesus, found here.
These are not blogs proper, and not terribly active of late, but still worth checking out are this B-Greek forum (link malfunctioning at time of posting) and this Yahoo! group for LXX. The IOSCS (mentioned above) has a great page with some news and announcements here.
Feel free to leave more August 2013 LXX links of interest in the comments.
The headline is not in error. BibleWorks does not make an app for iPad, still, but Parallels has just released an app called Parallels Access that allows you to use an iPad to access any computer–PC or Mac, desktop and laptop alike. They write:
Parallels Access ‘applifies’ your Windows and Mac applications, letting you remotely access and experience them as if they were made for iPad. Tap, swipe, pinch and scroll any Mac or PC software application – even if they were not optimized for the iPad – and get more done on-the-go!
More about the Parallels Access app is here. It’s free in the App Store, and you get a two-week free trial. After that it’s a fairy expensive (as apps go) subscription rate of $80/year. I hope to offer further insights about the app in the future on this blog, but for now, I’m pretty impressed that you can use your desktop and laptop programs as if they were (more or less) native to the iPad.
And more to the interests of this particular blog, here is what BibleWorks (using Mac Public Preview) on iPad (!) looks like, via Parallels Access (click to enlarge):
Here are the sentence diagrams. Click to enlarge, and notice how crisp everything looks. (This is on an iPad mini.)
Most remarkable to me is that the Use Tab feature works–in the desktop/laptop version of the program, this works by hovering over a word. In the Parallels Access version of BibleWorks, a single click on a word in the Browse Window activates the feature.
Astounding. As my friend and long-time college roommate would say: We’re in the future.
Ephesians 6:10-11 says, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God….”
Words on the Word 