Welcome to the Septuagint Studies Soirée #7, covering February in the Septuagintablogosphere.
There is now a Septuagint podcast. Check it out here.
Via Jim West: There will be a Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint (HTLS), which you can read more about here and here. You can even read a sample article (pdf)!
Do you want to contribute to a Septuagint Dictionary? Then check this one out.
This is a review of the Joshua volume of the Septuagint Commentary Series (Brill).
Here’s Lawrence Shiffman on Isaiah and the Greek Septuagint.
Brian Davidson posted a rockin’ interview with the editors of the Lexham English Septuagint.
It’s the International Septuaginta Summer School 2014. It sounds incredible, and it’s on Greek Isaiah. If you have a benefactor, go (and then introduce him or her to me, and I’ll meet you there).
Into prizes? Submit an LXX paper here for a prize of $350.
UPDATE 3/3/14: Wayne Coppins writes about Dietrich-Alex Koch’s analysis of Paul’s use of the Septuagint.
Finally, here and here you can find more interaction with T. Michael Law’s When God Spoke Greek.
Did I miss anything? Feel free to leave more February 2014 LXX links of interest in the comments.
One good monograph to read on the Septuagint is First Bible of the Church. And if you want to get in-depth with the critical edition of the LXX, I have offered reviews of the Göttingen Septuagint in Logos and Accordance softwares. And, perhaps as important, I suggest how one might actually make sense of that critical edition, noted here and here, with an ever-elusive third part of the primer still to come.
But right now, I’m going to go play outside in the snow with my kids. Happy LXX Day!
Suzanne at BLT has been writing about childshippe. I haven’t been able to fully digest it all, but given the preponderance of the word “son”/υἱός in the New Testament, I want to spend more time thinking through why so many translations opt for “son” when both male and female “children” seem to be in view. She writes more here and here.
Jim promises a review of de Gruyter’s Die Göttinger Septuaginta. And check out the Dust blog for a post called, “How much we take for granted, the publishing process and the Septuagint,” here.
Also, it wasn’t updated in January, but I just found out about what looks like a good LXX-related blog.
Did I miss anything? Feel free to leave more January 2014 LXX links of interest in the comments. And Happy (almost) International Septuagint Day!
It’s the first day of a new month (and new year), which means that the Septuagint Studies Soirée has arrived. Here is a collection of what the LXX-blogosphere had to offer in December 2013.
Old School Script has an interesting post (with some good questions to think about) regarding lexicography and instincts. (E.g., “How much do we trust our (next-to-nothing?) intuitive powers?”)
J.K. Gayle asks the provocative question, “Was David a virgin when his soul was pregnant?” to “bring some attention to the way in Bible reading and translation we highlight gender and sex and motherliness so dogmatically.” Gayle seems to “know” a bit about the Bible’s “sex verbs,” as he discusses ἐγίνωσκεν in Matthew 1 here. One other post of his worth reading (all his posts are worth reading) says, “The Greek / Hebrew names here for the baby Jesus are rather political in contrast to the Empire of Alexander and the Empire of the Caesar.”
T. Michael Law’s book about the Septuagint made #2 on Near Emmaus’s year-end books list.
Though it wasn’t on a blog, per se, James K. Aitken posted a chapter on LXX neologisms (thanks, Jim, for the tip). He writes, “There is a need for more descriptors of so-called new words, identifying them as semantic extensions, unattested compounds, morphological extensions, foreign loans, and so on.” One other non-blog, LXX-related url, if you want a daily LXX fix via the Twitter, is here.
Brian Davidson at LXXI made a couple of short videos about using Logos for a sort of MT-LXX Two-way Index.
Speaking of Brian, he’s taking over Greek Isaiah in a Year (which just finished) and leading a group through Isaiah again in 2014! Join them here.
Did I miss anything? As prevalent as women are in Septuagint studies, I didn’t find any LXX blog posts by women in December, but I might have missed one! Feel free to leave more December 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 third one is here; the fourth one is here.
Here are a few blog posts from November, regarding the Septuagint, that are worth taking a look at:
J.K. Gayle considers the question of whether the Septuagint translator of the Hebrew Song of Songs might have been a woman, then raises some challenges inherent to that view, at least as it is presented by the NETS (see image at left). J.K. also offered insight into the possible motherliness of God and the patriarch Joseph. Suzanne responded here, preferring to talk about “wombly feelings” instead of “motherly” ones. Kurk writes back again, noting some “maternal” language (with help from Greek Isaiah) in the “Our Father.”
I’ve just this month learned of a blog called Old School Script, which focuses on linguistics and biblical languages. Check out as much as you can of that site, starting with an October post that I missed last month, “Word Order in Septuagint Judges.” Note also some extended exploration this past month about Paul’s use of the LXX. Said blog also pointed this month to Randall Buth’s thinking about an SBL session on the Greek perfect.
Also, this month Logos Bible Software released (for free) Codex Sinaiticus, includingits Septuagint portions.
Did I miss anything? Feel free to leave more November 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 third one is here.
One other thing to note–a reading group of nearly 200 folks on Facebook (and more who are not on Facebook) finished a reading plan last Friday through Greek Isaiah.
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.
Amazon’s Kindle Matchbook program launches today. If you buy (or bought in the past) a book new from Amazon, the Kindle version is available at a discount–either $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free.
This would be advantageous, as I see it, in the following situations:
You lost a book you once purchased
It’s in storage but you want to read it again without going through seven boxes to find it
You want to easily keyword search a book on any device
You like it so much (or you like the author so much) you want to buy it again
Okay, so the last one is a stretch–I doubt this is raking in royalties for authors, but it’s a cool idea on Amazon’s part. All the available books are here.
Words on the Word 