Edited by Eberhard Bons and Jan Joosten (Université de Strasbourg)
This large-scale collective and interdisciplinary project aims to produce a new research tool: a multi-volume dictionary providing an article of between two and ten pages (around 600 articles in all) for each important word or word group of the Septuagint. Filling an important gap in the fields of ancient philology and religious studies, the dictionary will be based on original research of the highest scientific level.
This project has benefitted from funding from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (French Research National Agency), the Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme – Alsace (Strasbourg), the Melanchthon-Stiftung (Tübingen), and the Armin Schmitt Stiftung (Regensburg).
The first volume is projected to be published in 2018.
You can check out a lengthy PDF sample here, with a “Wordlist of the First Volume,” as well as some sample articles.
Today is February 8, which can only mean one thing: International Septuagint Day. Happy LXX Day! Take some time to read part of the Septuagint today, in Greek or English.
A review of Karen Jobes’s guided Septuagint reader
If you’re flush with cash and/or need to refinance your loans for advanced textbooks (just kidding, DON’T GO THAT FAR), T. Muraoka’s new LXX Syntax looks excellent
There won’t be flying cars, but the next best thing: today at 1:00 p.m. (EST) I’ll be leading a free Accordance Webinar covering basic Greek word study and setting up Workspaces. You can sign up here to join in. See the rest of Accordance’s upcoming Webinars here.
Ever wonder how to do intermediate and advanced Greek searches and set up some high-octane Greek Workspaces in Accordance? Yesterday I led a Webinar on that very topic.
Here is the .pdf handout of what I covered, which includes some links to helpful resources. And Accordance allows you to share Workspaces with others, so if you want any of the Workspaces mentioned in the .pdf (notation is WS), just let me know in the comments or reach me here and I’ll set you up!
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.)
Many Greek Septuagint manuscripts do not contain them, but the Odes are a fascinating collection of texts appended to the end of the Greek Psalter in Codex Alexandrinus and a few other manuscripts.
The Odes compile some beautiful prayers from Scripture. A few of them are in the Book of Common Prayer’s Morning Prayer canticles.
Good information on the Odes is hard to come by, though. In part this is because they are generally not accorded the same status as, say, the Psalms. The NETS introduction to the Psalms, for instance, has:
One “book” not included in NETS, however, is Odes since it has dubious integrity as a literary unit, and, in any case, almost all of the individual Septuagint odes have already been included in their native setting in other books. The sole exception is Ode 12 in Rahlfs’ edition, the Prayer of Manasses, which for that reason has been separately appended to the Psalter.
I’ve just discovered, however, that David Lincicum has a nice rundown of the Odes, their numbering, and their contents. He also includes a bibliography for further reading. Check it out here.
*HT to a member of the Yahoo! LXX email group for the idea of the Odes as a sort of “little hymnal.”
The Septuagint Studies Soirée is back. You can find all previous months gathered here, where I post links to what I find around the blogosphere in Septuagint studies. This soirée covers two months: April and May.
T. Michael Law continues to dominate the Septuagintablogosphere with his Septuagint Sessions podcast. Since the last soirée he posted episode 4 (on Greek Isaiah’s style), episode 5 (“Your BHS is safe with me!”), and episode 6 (“about a problem in research on the LXX that stems from a canonical bias”).
Suzanne McCarthy at BLT asks whether Judith was originally written in Greek or Hebrew. She also looked at our two “prototypical parents” in Greek Genesis 3 and 4. Her co-blogger J.K. Gayle examined the use of “baptism” in Plato and the LXX. BLT is one of the more substantive biblioblogs I read. You would do well to bookmark BLT’s Septuagint tag page, which includes even more recent LXX-related posts. (Also, add this one to your slate of BLT posts to read.)
Linguae Antiquitatum posted a nice review (with some interesting pedagogical musings) of a book about teaching beginning Greek and Latin. The same blog posted the first ever “Ancient Languages Carnival.”
William Ross posted about papyri.info, and offered this and this post as to how to use it for LXX research.
Summer beach reading?
Brian Davidson at LXXI suggests some summer reading. If you have made it this far in reading this post, you might even consider his recommendations to be good beach reading.
Here is Ed Gallagher on “The Greek Bible among the Jews.” And here he is with an illuminating post on the word “deuterocanonical.”
We’ve been in Easter season. And the LXX may have had “an increasing awareness of resurrection theology.” Read a short but fascinating post about it here.
Finally, check out Jacob Cerone’s post of a Greek exam given in the late 19th century by John Broadus and A. T. Robertson (pictured at the top of this post). He even takes part of it and posts his answers. Nice work, Jacob!
T. Michael Law posted two more installments of his Septuagint Sessions podcast, here and here.
BLT blog wrote about God’s first Greek puns (brought to you largely by the letters γ and ν).
William Ross promises upcoming LXX Resource Reviews. You can see a resource page he has up now, here. Also, in the last soiree I missed his February review of Abi T. Ngunga’s Messianism in the Old Greek of Isaiah. (It’s on my shelf, too, and I’ve worked with it a little.) Here it is, in excerpted form.
Daniel Streett uses the LXX to venture an answer to the question: Did Enoch Die? He also mentions a couple options for a bound LXX-Greek NT combo.
Mosissimus Mose continues a review of T. Michael Law’s When God Spoke Greekin dialogic form. The fourth part posted in March.
Here’s a post on “ditching flashcards” (via here).
Jacob Cerone has been posting his way through LXX Jonah. See here, here, and here.
Did I miss anything? Feel free to post an LXX-related link in the comments.
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.
Words on the Word 