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!
“Have you ever been Baptized?” the preacher asked. “What’s that?” he murmured. “If I Baptize you,” the preacher said, “you’ll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You’ll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you’ll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that?” “Yes,” the child said, and thought, I won’t go back to the apartment then, I’ll go under the river. “You won’t be the same again,” the preacher said. “You’ll count.”
–Flannery O’Connor, “The River,” quoted in Richard Vinson’s Luke
When I preached through parts of Luke this past fall, one of my favorite commentaries to consult–and the one that always felt the freshest–was Richard Vinson’s Luke in the Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary series. Here is how the series preface describes the series:
The Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary is a visually stimulating and user-friendly series that is as close to multimedia in print as possible. Written by accomplished scholars with all students of Scripture in mind, the primary goal of the Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary is to make available serious, credible biblical scholarship in an accessible and less intimidating format.
What stands out to me most about Luke is that it’s not only accessible but creative in its literary read of Scripture. Vinson knows Luke and its background well; he also knows modern history, culture, literature, and art in a way that allows him to explain the biblical text in a really fresh and engaging way. His primary audience is “pastors and other Bible teachers.”
The introduction is a concise 20-some pages, covering essentials like authorship, dating, sources, structure, and themes found in Luke. (This for me was the highlight of his introduction, as he discussed gospel sources, yet with his target audience in view–“So I will content myself with the occasional ‘if Q really exists’ and worry about more important issues.”)
There are times when reading the commentary is like reading a sermon–a good sermon. To take an example, the passage on Luke 18:1-8 (about prayer, the apathetic judge, and the persistent widow) begins like this:
The title of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education caught my attention: “Study of Prayer’s Healing Power on Surgery Patients Finds No Effect.” The article described an experiment in having people pray, by name, for persons recovering from heart bypass surgery. [Does Prayer Work? sidebar] None of the pray-ers knew the pray-ees; some of the pray- ees knew they were being prayed for, while others were told only that it might be true for them. Would the prayers have a statistically measurable effect—would the persons prayed for suffer fewer complications than those who were not prayed for? In this test, under these conditions, not so much…. I find I have mixed reactions to the finding that prayer does not always bring the desired results: (a) surely that’s not news to anyone who prays regularly; (b) at least now I know that I’m not the only one, and that God isn’t singling out my prayers to ignore; (c) maybe the experiment proves that there is no God who can be controlled by specific human behaviors, even if the desired outcome is unobjectionable.
The study itself (detailed in a sidebar) is a little silly. But it’s a nice entry into the question that such texts raise: Will God answer my prayers? And if the outcomes I’m praying for don’t obtain, what is going on?
Art from the commentary
From there it moves into exposition of the passage. Exegesis in the commentary is passage-by-passage, rather than verse-by-verse. There’s not always a lot of technical detail, but I still felt like Vinson did justice to whatever passage was under consideration. He gives the Old Testament “job description” of the judge in the passage mentioned above, as well as the larger biblical context for the importance of widows. Comparisons to other Gospel accounts, as well as the occasional word studies for important words (with reference to Greek), make this as good a starting point as any.
And yet what commentary will also reference Flannery O’Connor, Hank Williams, and Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front? Vinson’s creativity and honesty as he seeks to make sense of a text are refreshing, and often set me at ease when facing the prospect of preaching on a challenging passage.
The commentary comes with a CD-ROM that has a pdf of the entire book, with Table of Contents and easy navigation (as pdfs go). You can keyword search it and make annotations. This is a step in the direction of my dream that one could own both print and digital with one purchase. And the print edition is quite nicely constructed, too–sewn binding and all (so it lays flat), which seems to be increasingly rare these days.
I had not heard of this series until recently, but for any book I preach out of (there are both OT and NT volumes), I’m going to try to get a hold of the corresponding Smyth & Helwys volume from here on out.
I am grateful to Smyth & Helwys for the gratis review copy of this commentary, which was sent to me for this review. You can find the book on Amazon here. The publisher’s product page is here. All the published volumes in the series are here.
Which Bible software program should I buy? As 2014 begins, my answer to that question is still by far the most-visited post at Words on the Word.
Olive Tree is another popular Bible software option, running on just about any platform and device, whether iOS, Mac, Windows, or Android. I began to review their Bible Study App (for Mac desktop/laptop) here, with the Greek NA28 New Testament in view. In this post I look more in-depth at the NA28 in Olive Tree, with screenshots from their iPad (mini) app.
The Bible Study App for iOS
The Bible Study App is smooth, visually appealing, and easy to learn and use.
Here are a few things I especially like about the app:
You can use “flick scrolling” (as in iBooks) or “page scrolling” (as in Kindle). This accommodates just about any user. I prefer the flick scrolling, so that the books move as a Webpage on my computer would move.
You can search any resource, and view both the results-in-context and individual hits together. As in this screenshot:
The app allows for you to view one or two resources at a time. This is the same as the iOS apps in Accordance and Logos. What I like about this app is that you can choose whether you want to sync the two windows or not. You can also choose which of the two windows “leads” the other, if you tie them together. Or you can set it up so that whichever one you move (top or bottom/left or right) causes the other to move:
There is a whole host of “Gestures/Shortcuts” preferences in the “Advanced Settings” menu. You can assign shortcuts to various gestures. I don’t know of any other iOS Bible app that is this versatile. My two favorites:
Two finger swipe left and right takes you through your viewing history, which makes navigation through various passages all the easier. This even works across modules, so that I can swipe between the NA28 and the iPad User Guide I might have just had open. No need to go through menus.
Two finger tap takes you from any screen right to your library so you can quickly get at your resources.
NA28 in Olive Tree
There are a few purchase options for the NA28 in Olive Tree. I’ll look here at the “NA28 with Critical Apparatus, Mounce Parsings, and Concise Dictionary,” which you can find here. At the time of this blog post, it’s on sale for 50% off, so $45 instead of $90. You won’t find it cheaper elsewhere, in any format. The text and apparatus are what you’d get if you bought a print version; the parsings give morphological information, and the dictionary gives lexical detail.
There are some distinct differences between the NA28 and the NA27. If you go about halfway down this post, you can see more detail (as well as click through to some good links) as to what the changes are.
Here I have the text and apparatus open, and have simply tapped once on a Greek word to bring up a pop-up window with a gloss and parsing:
Another possible arrangement would be to use one window for the Greek text, and a second window for an English translation. In that case, one can click on the sigla in the NA28 text for a pop-up with the apparatus. (And still get parsing popups from the surface text, when needed.) This is a good way to economize space:
I appreciate that just a short tap is all that’s required to bring up details about a word or information on a text-critical sign. I find the app overall to be quite intuitive and aesthetically pleasing. It’s fast on word searches, too.
One critique of the NA28 apparatus is that the text-critical sigla are not hyperlinked to their meanings. In the Accordance version of NA28, for example, when you hover/click/tap on sigla and abbreviations from the apparatus, you instantaneously see (in a popup window or instant details window) what they represent or stand for. In Olive Tree, there is a workaround (described here: bookmark the relevant section of the introduction for quick reference), but this is not an improvement on what one would have to do with a print text anyway. It’s not unmanageable, but also not what one might hope for in this medium. So one will need to regularly consult the NA28 introduction, which is included with the text.
Olive Tree has one of the more active and better Bible software blogs I’ve seen. I’ve learned a good deal from it. Check it out here, especially this post that shows how to use a dictionary in the iOS app.
Since Olive Tree is new to me, and since I already use other Bible softwares, I’m still trying to figure out how it will make its way into my overall workflow. But its smooth interface, speed, and snazzy iOS app will have me coming back for further exploration.
Thanks to Olive Tree for the NA28 with Critical Apparatus, Mounce Parsings, and Concise Dictionary for the purposes of this blog review, offered without any expectations as to the content of the review.You can find the product here.
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.
On November 30 the group Greek Isaiah in a Year read the last verses of Isaiah 66. And what a rewarding experience it was to read slowly–over the course of a (church) calendar year–through Isaiah.
Blogger Brian Davidson wants to do it again. I’m going to be following the Facebook group (here, where all the action will be), but am not sure I can do the whole thing again in a year. We’ll see.
But if you started last time and didn’t finish, or are looking for a way to sharpen your Greek this coming calendar year, check it out.
This book offers a fresh understanding of how Isaiah was translated into Greek, by considering the impact of the translator’s Alexandrian milieu on his work. Whereas most studies over the past fifty years have regarded the book’s free translation style as betraying the translator’s conviction that Isaiah’s oracles were being fulfilled in his day, this study argues that he was primarily interested in offering his Greek-speaking co-religionists a cohesive representation of Isaiah’s ideas. Comparison of the translator’s interpretative tacks with those employed by the grammatikoi in their study of Homer offers a convincing picture of his work as an Alexandrian Jew and clarifies how this translation should be assessed in reconstructing early textual forms of Hebrew Isaiah.
Aileen Guilding was Professor of Biblical History and Literature in the University of Sheffield from 1959 to 1965, and was known especially for her monograph The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship: A Study of the Relation of St. John’s Gospel to the Ancient Jewish Lectionary System (Oxford, 1960), which enjoyed a succès d’estime in its day as an exceptionally fascinating and learned book. She is celebrated in Sheffield as the first female professor in the University; she was also the first woman to hold a chair in theology or religion in the United Kingdom. After her death at the age of 94 a conference on themes relevant to her special interests was held in Sheffield as part of a meeting of the Society for Old Testament Study, and the papers read there are presented in this volume, published in the 101st year after her birth.
Abi T. Ngunga explores the theme of messianism in the entire corpus of the Old Greek of Isaiah (LXX-Isaiah). This is done through the lens of an intertextual hermeneutic employed by the Isaiah translator as a mode of reading this text.
Its introductory chapter looks at the need in scholarship to investigate the topic of messianism in the Greek Bible in general, and in the whole of the LXX-Isaiah in particular. After dealing with a few issues related to the LXX-Isaiah as a translation, Ngunga also surveys thoroughly the topic of intertextuality from its inception to its use in biblical studies including LXX research. Particular attention is given to its application in research done, to date, on the Greek text of Isaiah.
Chapter two re-examines a few arguments pertinent to the scholarly opinion that messianic hopes were not prominent among the Alexandrian Jews in comparison to their co-religionists in Palestine. It also explores the relationships between the non-Jewish citizens of the Ptolemaic kingdom and the Alexandrian Jews, with the aim to ascertain the legitimacy of investigating the theme of messianism in a piece of Jewish literature such as the LXX-Isaiah authored in the Hellenistic period. Chapter three analyses in-depth nine selected messianic passages within the LXX-Isaiah (7:10–17; 9:1–7 (8:23–9:6); 11:1–10; 16:1–5; 19:16–25; 31:9b–32:8; 42:1–4; 52:13–53:12; and 61:1–3a). The study concludes by highlighting the detected particular messianic imprints left on the LXX-Isaiah. Given the results, the study dismisses any doubt concerning the contention that there is a dynamic messianic thought running through the whole of the Greek Isaiah. It also sheds some light on the understanding of some of the messianic beliefs later echoed in early Christianity.
From The International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies (IOSCS):
The Göttingen Septuaginta-Unternehmen, home of the Göttingen editions of the Septuagint, has announced two initiatives of interest to those dealing with textual criticism of the Septuagint.
Follow the link above to the Unternehmen’s home page. There’s a lot to check out there, including what I would consider the vacation/retreat of a lifetime. (Time with family tops everything, but this school would come in second.)
Back to the “free” part:
Several of the older volumes that have appeared in the series “Mitteilungen des Septuaginta-Unternehmens” are no longer available in print. To meet the wishes of the scholarly community to maintain access to these publications (among them, Rahlfs’ Verzeichnis), the Septuaginta-Unternehmen has published a free PDF scan of the first four volumes on its website.
These resources are available in the Septuaginta-Unternehmen’s new website, which is available in both German and English.
The link noted above (this one) includes, among other things, free downloads of the valuable and difficult to find Text History of the Greek… books by John William Wevers. You can download:
Text History of the Greek Genesis (1974)
Text History of the Greek Exodus (1992)
Text History of the Greek Leviticus (1986)
Text History of the Greek Numbers (1982)
Text History of the Greek Deuteronomy (1978)
They are large files, but I’m grateful to be able to have them.
Accordance Bible has just released the Esther module in its Göttingen Septuagint. More volumes are on the way and scheduled for this month: Psalms with Odes, Jeremiah, the 12 Prophets, and Sirach. The Göttingen Septuagint is a text criticism workout. I’ve posted here and here about how to understand and use its apparatuses.
When I reviewed Göttingen in Logos earlier this year, I compared Isaiah modules between Logos and Accordance. At that time I wrote that the Logos text was more accurate to the print edition than the Accordance text, because it initially was. I was surprised, and saw this as a fluke for Accordance, whose texts–especially their original language ones–generally are the “research-grade” quality they seek to produce.
There’s been a recent update to Göttingen Isaiah in Accordance, so that it is now quite accurate in relation to the print edition. Accordance has also since dropped the price on its Isaiah module.
Search fields for Göttingen Isaiah Apparatus I
Where Accordance really excels in its presentation of Göttingen is the multiple ways it offers to search an apparatus. (See image at right.) The most helpful search field is “Manuscripts,” and one can also search by “Greek Content,” which greatly facilitates searching for a given text variant. Searching an apparatus in Logos doesn’t have nearly the options, and manipulating what search results one can get is more difficult.
The “List Text Differences” feature in Accordance is one I’ve used often, to see where Göttingen and Rahlfs differ on Isaiah, for example. Logos has a “Text Comparison” tool, similar to the “Compare” feature in Accordance, but “List Text Differences” is unique to Accordance.
One remaining fix in the Accordance apparatus (at least for the Isaiah module I’ve examined) is a symbol rendering issue. When the apparatus notes a case of homoioteleuton, what appears in print as 1°◠2° shows up in the apparatus as 1° 2°. (UPDATE: See Rick’s comment below; update is planned. UPDATE 12/14/13: This has now been corrected in Accordance.) This renders correctly in Logos.
Logos still doesn’t have the Kopfleiste (Source List) for the Göttingen volumes that have one in print, while Accordance does include it. On the one hand, the Kopfleiste makes most sense in a print edition, but one can imagine that serious students of the Septuagint may still want to be able to access it. Accordance’s Esther includes it, for example.
All the Göttingen volumes that have been published in print are in Logos already, but Accordance seems to be making fast progress of late in completing their own offering. Göttingen is more affordable in Logos (especially if you have their academic discount), but there are more advanced search options available in Accordance (both in the text and the apparatuses) that may make the user want to consider the latter software instead. If one wants just a single volume in Göttingen, that option is currently only available in Accordance.
Speaking of the Septuagint, I’ve just finished Greek Isaiah in a Year with a group of folks, and so will take recommendations for what to read next!
For the New Testament authors, the original text, that is, the text they drew on, was primarily the Septuagint. To make up the first part of the Bible which has the New Testament as the other part, the Old Testament in the shape it has in the Septuagint would therefore seem the obvious choice.
—First Bible of the Church: A Plea for the Septuagint, by Mogens Müller (p. 144)
Mogens Müller provocatively asks, “What caused the displacement of the Septuagint? …Today it is an open question whether the Septuagint should be reinstalled as the Old Testament of the Church” (p. 7). First Bible of the Church is part reception history, part biblical theology, and part apologetic work that suggests the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible should be brought (back) into canonical status. It should be “at least part of a canon” (p. 122), if not the better choice than Biblia Hebraica for today’s “original text” of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.
What follows is a brief summary of the book’s contents, followed by some evaluative comments.
Müller’s Plea
Chapter 1 is the introduction to the book. In it Müller raises the question of just what should qualify as “the original text” of the Old Testament. If we see “what the early church regarded as its Bible” (p. 23), already one has to take the Septuagint seriously. This is not a question Müller addresses exclusively on textual grounds; for him the issue is also a theological one. To wit: In Isaiah 7:14/Matthew 1:23, “the ‘wrong’ text gains a significance of its own by being used” (p. 23).
Chapter 2, “The Jewish Bible at the Time of the New Testament,” looks at the canonization and textual history of the Jewish Bible, including various Greek recensions. Müller makes a key (and helpful) distinction in canonization between “the recognition of a writing as sacred” and “the final fixing of its wording” (p. 32). Evaluating various source materials, and dismissing the idea of an Urtext, the author notes the (accepted) fluidity of the process of textual transmission, where the actual wording in the sacred books only became important some centuries after the books themselves had become part of a canon. The implications of this, of course, are that New Testament writers may not have cared–in the way modernists do–about making sure they were using “the original” Hebrew text when quoting Scripture–if such a thing even ever existed as such.
Nonetheless, as chapter 3 points out, there was a very early historical concern about the authority of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Would the former be on par with the latter? Müller examines various defenses of the Septuagint (the Law books, specifically): Aristeas, Aristobulus, Philo, and Josephus. Chapter 4, “The Reception of the Septuagint Legend into the Church up to and Including Augustine” continues the historical inquiry into attitudes toward the Septuagint, especially when compared to the Hebrew text it was said to have translated. Justin and Irenaeus (among others) are given as examples of early interpreters who saw the Septuagint translation as inspired. Jerome, Müller suggests:
saw the Biblia Hebraica as the basic text as far as the Old Testament was concerned, and thus he contributed, at least for the Latin-speaking part of Christianity, to bring about the final abandonment of the Septuagint, which had very early come to be acknowledged as the Bible of the Gentile, Christian Church. (p. 86)
Biblia Graeca
Chapters 5 (“Hebraica sive Graeca Veritas?“) calls the Septuagint “a witness to the process of transmitting tradition” (p. 99), a process which Müller sees in ancient Judaism as having “a very creative character” (p. 104). Translation in antiquity included a measure of interpretation. The author’s foray into translation theory gives refreshing context to a world that valued lexical equivalency in translation less than many do today.
Chapter 6 (“Vetus Testamentum in Novo Receptum“) provides a short biblical theology, in which the New Testament is seen primarily as the story of Jesus, who himself fulfills what is written in the Old Testament. Müller notes that it is for this reason that the Hebrew Bible became the Old Testament, and yet its use by New Testament writers solidified its importance and sacredness for Christians. The Old Testament is necessary–“it remains the Holy Writ of the Christian community.” But it is not sufficient–“the Old Testament per se represents a limited epoch in salvation history” (p. 135).
The conclusion calls for the Septuagint to (re-)take its canonical place alongside the New Testament.
Is Müller’s Plea Worth Paying Heed To?
Yes. Readers of this blog and its Septuagint posts will not be surprised by my saying so. Müller makes a good case and generally succeeds in making a compelling plea for the LXX. If readers don’t accept his call to (re-)canonize the Greek OT, they will at least take seriously his petition to take it more seriously (as the NT writers did).
The book is short (some 150 pages) but dense. There is untranslated German and Latin in the footnotes, as one would expect in a scholarly monograph, but the writing is no less engaging for its density. The Greek font used throughout is easy to read, and the Greek is often translated into English.
Müller’s brief biblical theology at the end of the book is excellent. It left me wanting to read more. His notion of fulfillment as a motif that links together the OT and NT was convincing and well-articulated.
I found some typographical errors, as well as a number of sentences that just seemed to have wanted closer editing. This could be in part due to the book’s translation from a Danish manuscript. I was distracted in a few places as a result, but not consistently.
Evangelicals will find a few things they disagree with. For example, Müller cites Wellhausen approvingly to note that “the prophets were not reformers anxious to lead the people back to an original Mosaic religion.” The Law, then, “is not the starting-point but the result of Israel’s spiritual development” (p. 102). This line of reasoning is not essential to following the rest of Müller’s arguments, but his “redactional-critical attitude” (p. 100) does lead to a few assertions that some (including myself) don’t agree with.
Müller’s logic and historical inquiry is generally careful and robust, not to mention more readable than one might expect from a work of this nature. Perhaps it is due to the short length of the book, but there are still some unanswered questions. If “the Septuagint” is to comprise the Old Testament in Christian Bibles (as Müller suggests on p. 144, among other places), which Septuagint should we use? On which codex or codices should we base it? And given that Septuagint manuscripts vary on which books are included, how would we decide which books to place in a reconstituted OT? Simply those books that are now in the Hebrew OT, but in their Greek iterations? What about the Apocrypha?
And yet it appears that Müller’s aim is more to address “whether the Septuagint should be reinstalled as the Old Testament of the Church” (p. 7, my emphasis), not how and by what methodology such a reinstallation would take place. With this aim in mind, Müller’s short yet substantive book offers a compelling plea that deserves the reader’s careful consideration.
You can find First Bible of the Church: A Plea for the Septuaginthere at Amazon. Its publisher’s product page is here. Thanks to Bloomsbury for the review copy, given with no expectation as to the content of the review.
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.
Words on the Word 