INVITATION TO THE SEPTUAGINT
By Karen Jobes and Moises Silva
Paternoster Press. 351 pages. £17.99
ISBN 1 84227 061 3
Not, to be frank, an invitation I will take any further than I have gone already!
Like most who know it at all, I am acquainted with the Septuagint first as the source of many New Testament quotations of the Old, and secondly as the ostensible (frequently tendentious) reason offered by some commentators for 'emending' the Hebrew (Massoretic) Text. The impeccable scholarship of these authors has at least blown the latter out of the water. They show that the Septuagint is not a unitary work but a fortuitous amalgam of unknown translations of the books of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, the work of unknown authors over a considerable period of time, and apparently subscribing to (but not stating) a variety of approaches to the translator's art - from wooden literalism to loosely exercised 'dynamic equivalence'.
