The Septuagint: Some Current Research

There is a brief, but interesting article on The Bible and Interpretation website, by Jennifer Dines, University of Cambridge, on The Septuagint: Greek Scriptures for Greek-speaking Jews and Christians: Some Current Research. It is specifically relevant for students of Philo and other diasora-jewish works as she sets out to focus on the Septuagint in relationship to Hellenistic Judaism. She introduces here article thus: In her lucid introductory presentation on this website (Excerpts from “Invitation to the Septuagint”), Karen Jobes highlights the importance of the Septuagint for contemporary biblical studies and lists several areas of current research. These are (1) “establishing the original text of the Septuagint and its relationship to the surviving Hebrew text”; (2) “using the Septuagint for textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible”; (3) “determining the meaning of Greek words found in the Septuagint”; (4) “reconstructing the development of the extant Greek texts from the original translation”; and (5) “understanding the development of Jewish theology in the Hellenistic age” (p.6). Areas (1) to (4) are chiefly concerned with textual criticism. They cover highly technical enterprises which are absolutely essential: we need to know how far the texts we use correspond to the original translations, and this is a work that will never be finished. But there are other areas to be researched as well, and in this essay, I would like to say something more about item (5): the Septuagint in relationship to Hellenistic Judaism (raising historical as well as theological questions). In addition, I want to touch briefly on another area of increasing interest: the influence of the Septuagint on the language and thought of early Christianity (especially the New Testament and patristic writings) and the part it plays in the history of biblical interpretation. The rest of her article can be read here.