Hot Off the LXX Presses: The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research (New Edition)

Emanuel Tov’s Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research is a key text in Septuagint studies. But it’s been out of print… until now. Eisenbrauns has just published a “Completely Revised and Expanded” third edition of the book.

Here’s the publisher’s write-up:

This handbook on the Septuagint (LXX) provides a practical guide for the student and scholar alike in the perusal of that translation in the text-critical analysis of the Hebrew Bible. It does not serve as another theoretical introduction to the LXX, but it provides all the practical background information needed for the integration of the LXX in biblical studies. The LXX remains the most significant source of information for the study of ancient Scripture together with the Masoretic Text and several Qumran scrolls, but this translation is written in Greek and many technical details need to be taken into consideration when using this tool. The author presents this handbook after half a century of study of the Septuagint, four decades of specialized teaching experience in that area, and involvement in several research projects focusing on the relation between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles.

The first two editions of this handbook, published by Simor of Jerusalem (Jerusalem Biblical Studies 3 [1981] and 8 [1997]), received much praise but have been out of print for a considerable period. This, the third, edition presents a completely revised version of the previous editions based on the many developments that took place in the analysis of the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible and the Qumran Scrolls.

I’d link to the book on Amazon, but you really should just buy directly through Eisenbrauns. They are good folk, make great resources, and have put this book on sale now. Get it here. You can also find a PDF info sheet (with Table of Contents) here.

Book Note: Mark Strauss’s New Commentary on Mark (ZECNT)

I really dig Zondervan’s Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, as you can see by the multiple volumes I’ve reviewed here. The series continues production, with 10 volumes now available. Recent additions are Karen H. Jobes’s 1, 2, and 3 John and Mark L. Strauss’s Mark.

Here’s how the series is laid out:

The Greek text of the book of the Bible, verse by verse, or split up phrase by phrase
The author’s original English translation
- First, showing up in the graphical layout preceding each passage
- Second, verse by verse, together with the Greek

Mark ZECNT Graphical Layout — Author’s graphical layout of Mark 1:1-8

The book’s broader Literary Context for each passage
An outline of the passage in its immediate context
The Main Idea (perhaps they had preachers in mind?)
Structure and literary form
An Exegetical Outline of the passage under consideration
Explanation of the Text, which includes the Greek and English mentioned above–this is the bulk of the commentary
The concluding Theology in Application section (i.e., what does the passage mean for us, what are its themes, and so on)

As I’ve said before: This sounds like a lot, but the result is not a cluttered commentary. Rather, as one gets accustomed to the series format, it becomes easy to quickly find specific information about a passage. The section headings are in large, bold font.

Here’s Strauss on Jesus in Mark 3, who asks, “Who are my brothers and mother?”

At one point, [Jesus] refused to see his family, saying that his true mother and brothers were those who did God’s will (Mark 3:31–35, par.). Jesus is not repudiating his family but rather is affirming deeper spiritual bonds. It is not surprising that the early believers referred to each other as “brothers and sisters” (adelphoi). As Jewish followers of Jesus were increasingly expelled from the synagogues and Jewish families were divided, this emphasis on spiritual kinship became extremely important.

And:

In the context of the Beelzebub controversy, the point is clear: kinship in the kingdom of God is based not on ethnic identity or family background but on a relationship with God through Jesus.

I’m following the lectionary through parts of early Mark right now, and though there are already a host of great commentaries on book (not the least of which is this gem), Strauss’s volume has been a welcome addition to my sermon preparation process!

Find the book here at Zondervan’s product page or here on Amazon.

The NIV’s 50th Anniversary

Whether it was for summer camp or Bible quizzing, I grew up memorizing the (1984) New International Version. And, yes, I’m still quite fond of the unfortunately discontinued TNIV. Now Zondervan no longer publishes the 1984 NIV, nor the TNIV–instead, the 2011 update to the NIV is the current version.

You might not realize that the NIV is 50 years old this year. Here’s a recent press release:

In 1965, the Committee on Bible Translation took on the most massive translation project of modern times: to prepare a contemporary English translation of the Bible from the best available original manuscripts. Since its release in 1978, the NIV has become the world’s most read and most trusted modern-English Bible translation with over 450 million copies distributed worldwide. Upon the 1978 release of the NIV, readers were ecstatic that they could finally understand the Word of God in contemporary language.

This anniversary got onto my radar screen when I came across the new NIV 50th anniversary app. What I didn’t know till the other day is that the NIV Study Bible is the best-selling study Bible in the last 30 years.

Here’s a video with some recognizable names discussing the work of the Committee on Bible Translation, who produced the NIV:

You can read more about the NIV here.

Disclosure of Material Connection: A Zondervan rep approached me with an invitation/encouragement to post about the NIV, and offered to send an NIV Study Bible. I plan to post about that in due course, too, once I receive it. While I do appreciate the 2011 NIV over the 1984 NIV in a number of ways, said “Material Connection” has not diminished the place in my heart that the TNIV will always have.

Read Matthew and Mark in Six Languages at Once

Much as I am grateful to be able to see the text of the Bible in multiple languages at one time on a computer, sometimes you just want to curl up with a good, printed edition of a 6-language polyglot.

Fredrick J. Long and T. Michael W. Halcomb have begun such a series, with the recent publishing of Matthew and Mark in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, English, German, and French. It’s obvious that an English-speaking Bible reader would want access to biblical texts in Greek and Hebrew and Latin. German and French, as major research languages for biblical and theological studies, complete the languages of this almost-500-page polyglot.

It’s a pretty sweet work, and an awesome way to practice multiple languages at once. Here’s what it looks like:

The layout of the polyglot is clean and easy to follow. It would not be all that difficult to read through all of Matthew and/or Mark in a single language, if one so desired. The fonts are quite legible, although the Hebrew font for Mark differs from the Hebrew font for Matthew. (Also, the vowels are not properly centered under the Hebrew consonants in Mark. This doesn’t make reading it impossible, but I found it distracting.)

There is no critical apparatus, but this is no problem–Long and Halcomb intend simply to provide multiple texts for reading. (Text-critical notes on six languages would make this volume unwieldy, indeed!) The versions used are largely ones in the public domain. The Greek text, for example, is the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine edition. I have a Greek reader’s Bible I used to use with this same edition. At first I worried that I wasn’t using the academic version of the NA28, but after using that reader’s Bible for a few weeks, I realized it really didn’t matter, if the goal was just to get better at reading Greek. So, too, here: not having the NA28 text included is no loss.

The English translation in Matthew is an authors’ revision of the 1901 American Standard Version (ASV). In Mark the authors use their own translation. They aim to be “fairly literal” in translating the Greek, I’ve never really agreed with such translations’ taking the Greek’s historical present, for example, and keeping it in the present tense in English.

For example, Mark 10:35 begins, “And they come near to him…,” which follows a Greek present participle, but then the two verses later in English has “they said to them” (my emphasis). Though this translates a Greek aorist in the expected way, I would have smoothed out the tenses for the purposes of readability in English translation–even while seeking to be close to the Greek text. Even somewhat literal translations of Greek ought to put its historical present into English past tense, in my opinion. But this perhaps just amounts to a difference in translation philosophy. And a benefit of the authors’ translating Mark this way is you can easily tell, if your Greek parsing is rusty, which Greek verbs are present and which are aorist, since Greek historical present is rendered as present in English.

Those concerns aside, this modern-day “Hexapla” is hard to beat as a way of learning (and keeping active) multiple languages at once. A resource like this would be essential for someone preparing for a Ph.D. program in biblical studies or theology. Pastors, such as yours truly, who want to keep their Greek and Hebrew alive can do so with just this single book.

GlossaHouse offers a wide selection of creative resources for language learning and retention. Check out their site here to see the Hexapla and more.

Thanks to the good folks at GlossaHouse for the review copy! Find it here on Amazon.

Book Review: Jesus, the Temple and the Coming Son of Man

Mark 13 is one of the most difficult chapters of the Bible to interpret and understand. From the “abomination of desolation” to the claim of Jesus that “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place,” the chapter is full of statements that could refer either to the near (historical) or far (apocalyptic) future.

Robert H. Stein’s goal in writing Jesus, the Temple and the Coming Son of Man: A Commentary on Mark 13 is to finish the sentence, “I, Mark (the author), have written Mark 13:1-37, because…”. Stein, author of the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament volume on Mark, is one of the best commentators one could hope to read on such a challenging and important chapter.

Here is Stein’s outline of Mark 13, in his words (p. 49):

13:1-4: Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the temple (and Jerusalem) (chapter 3 of this book)
13:5-23: The coming destruction of the temple (and Jerusalem) and the sign preceding it (ch. 4)
13:24-27: The coming of the Son of Man (ch. 5)
13:28-31: The parable of the fig tree and the coming destruction of the temple (and Jerusalem) (ch. 6)
13:32-37: The parable of the watchman and the exhortation to be alert for the coming of the Son of Man (ch. 7)

The majority of the book (chapters 3-7) is taken up with Stein’s exposition of each verse in Mark 13. Chapter 1 defines the goal of the book: “to understand what the author of the Gospel we call Mark meant and sought to convey by the present text of Mark 13” (39). Stein focuses especially on what Mark meant to “teach his readers by the Jesus traditions that he chose to include in this chapter, his arrangement of these traditions and his editorial work in the recording of this material” (45). Chapter 2 is “Key Issues Involved in Interpreting Mark 13.”

Chapter 8 is a really nice add-on, which consists of Stein’s “interpretive translation” of Mark 13. What a great idea! You can read the chapter in one sitting and see right away how Stein interprets it. This could be a really good starting point for the reader, as could the excellent and detailed “Outline” starting on p. 9 (basically an annotated table of contents).

Stein offers at the outset a nice tour of the so-called quests for the historical Jesus, and how that relates to reading Mark. But Stein doesn’t seem to think the authorship (Mark) or genre (historical narrative) of Mark matters much to the purpose of this short commentary. I find his views here less than compelling, but that didn’t keep me from being convinced by the rest of the book.

Two key points the book makes will give a sense of Stein’s approach:

Stein differentiates between three settings we need to keep in mind: “the first involving the teaching of the historical Jesus to his disciples, the second involving the situation of the early church between the death and resurrection of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels, and the third involving the situation in which and for which the Evangelist Mark wrote his Gospel” (47).
Because of the above point, Stein can tease out different settings and time-frames that different portions of Mark 13 refer to. He says, for example, “Mark does not see the coming of the Son of Man [AKJ: the apocalyptic imagery in 13:24-27] as part of Jesus’ answer (13:5-23) to the disciples’ twofold question (13:4) concerning the destruction of the temple” (72).

Throughout the book Stein keeps in view the distinction between the soon-to-come, 1st century future (destruction of the temple) and the distant, unknown day of the coming of the Son of Man. Stein acknowledges that it is “easy to intermix these two horizons [two settings in time] of the text, and the result is confusion and lack of clarity in understanding either setting in time” (100). Much of the chapter, Stein argues (but not all), anticipates the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70.

You don’t need to know Greek to make good use of this text, but Stein does keep (transliterated) Greek in front of him so he can analyze the text at the word and phrase level. He is really good, too, at using a broader biblical context to help explain specific parts of Mark 13.

I read the book cover-to-cover in a few sittings—it was that intriguing! As detailed and in-depth as Stein’s reasoning is, it reads really nicely: his tone is conversational, which makes it easy to try to sort through some tough hermeneutical issues. Stein’s is certainly not the only possible interpretation of Mark 13, but it’s a persuasive one.

Thanks to the fine folks at IVP Academic for the review copy. Find the book here at IVP’s site, or here on Amazon.

Two New Greek-Related Books Coming from Baker Academic

December 1 is a long way away. But it’s the release date for two Baker Academic books I’m looking forward to checking out. (HT: Cliff Kvidahl.)

1. Going Deeper with Biblical Greek: Reading the New Testament with Fluency and Devotion, by Rodney A. Whitacre

From what I can tell, Whitacre explains lectio divina… using the Greek text. I had never even considered the possibility, but it sounds amazing.

2. Invitation to the Septuagint (Second Edition), by Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva

Jobes and Silva update and revise their classic work in Septuagint studies.

I’ll do what I can to report more on each of these books when they arrive. They are both volumes to eagerly await.

Book Notice: The T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint

I8 months ago I learned about the T & T Clark Companion to the Septuagint. It has now been released as an ebook in pdf form, available here, with the hard copy to be published very soon. You can pre-order through Bloomsbury here or through Amazon here.

The Companion is unique in Septuagint studies in that it offers a “handy summary of features for each of the Septuagint books” of the Bible. Here’s part of the publisher’s description of the book:

This Companion provides a cutting-edge survey of scholarly opinion on the Septuagint text of each biblical book. It covers the characteristics of each Septuagint book, its translation features, origins, text-critical problems and history. As such it provides a comprehensive companion to the Septuagint, featuring contributions from experts in the field.

And here’s a snippet from Genesis, via the Google Book preview:

I’m looking forward to checking it out–it looks like it will be a welcome contribution for those of us who want to learn more about the Septuagint.

A Seven-Syllable, Emphatic Word of Praise

One thing that continually impresses me about Greek is its preponderance of multisyllabic words.

Much of this has to do with how its verbs are conjugated. The four-syllable verb μεγαλυνω, for example, when inflected in Psalm 19:8 (Psalm 20:7 in English Bibles), becomes a majestic seven-syllable ending to an already beautiful verse:

ουτοι εν αρμασιν και ουτοι εν ιπποις,
ημεις δε εν ονοματι κυριου θεου ημων μεγαλυνθησομεθα.

Here is an English translation:

These ones take pride in chariots, and these ones in horses,
But as for us, we will find glory in the name of the Lord!

Though I’m a week behind on the reading plan, little gems like this make reading the Greek Psalms in a Year well worth the effort.

Feb. 8: Happy International Septuagint Day!

Happy International Septuagint Day!

Read some Septuagint on Sunday, Februrary 8, if you can, in Greek or English. Here’s why I think you need the Septuagint. And here are some more “rarely cited reasons” why the LXX is important, given by James Aitken and noted on Jim West’s blog.

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.

I have very recently reviewed the Genesis volume of the Göttingen Septuagint, found here.

Happy LXX Day!

(The above is a slightly modified re-post of my 2014 Happy LXX Day post.)

Greek Psalms: Some Standout Verses So Far

Greek Psalms in a Year is almost through its first month. Here are some verses that have really stuck with me, both in the Greek and with the NETS (New English Translation of the Septuagint) translation. All references below are according to the Septuagint versification:

Psalm 3:4

συ δε, κυριε, αντιλημπτωρ μου ει,

δοξα μου και υψων την κεφαλην μου.

But you, O Lord, you are my supporter,

my glory, and one who lifts up my head.

Psalm 9:10-12

και εγενετο κυριος καταφυγη τω πενητι,

βοηθος εν ευκαιριαις εν θλιψει·

και ελπισατωσαν επι σε οι γινωσκοντες το ονομα σου,

οτι ουκ εγκατελιπες τους εκζητουντας σε, κυριε.

ψαλατε τω κυριω τω κατοικουντι εν Σιων,

αναγγειλατε εν τοις εθνεσιν τα επιτηδευματα αυτου,

And the Lord became a refuge for the needy,

a helper at opportune times in affliction.

And let those who know your name hope in you,

because you did not forsake those who seek you, O Lord.

Make music to the Lord, who resides in Sion.

Declare his practices among the nations,

Psalm 9:19

οτι ουκ εις τελος επιλησθησεται ο πτωχος,

η υπομονη των πενητων ουκ απολειται εις τον αιωνα.

Because the poor shall not be completely forgotten,

the endurance of the needy shall not perish forever.

There are others, too, but Psalm 9 especially—with its focus on God’s compassion for the poor—struck me as important… and convicting.

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