Classroom Snippets: Septuagint

One of the things that you either love or hate about my classes are the tangents. I consider them relevant most of the time--they are often on the checklist of things I want to have covered by the end of the class. And I almost always return to the official outline or overhead when the tangent is over--I could outline what I have said after the class and it would make sense.

But I imagine my tangents are a nightmare as far as taking notes. Frankly I doubt most students take notes on my tangents.

So I thought I would for today's intertestamental lit. class. I'll email this post to the class.

1. The difference between evangelical and non-evangelical reconstructions of OT history do not get stuck on every point. For example, I don't see people getting fired over the dating of Job. Similarly, I can't imagine why someone would argue over the idea that some person other than Hosea may have edited his prophecies into their current form even after he was dead. I have no horse in that race as an evangelical.

2. There are some flash points, however. Many evangelicals would get hot over the idea that the narrative framework of the Pentateuch might have come from some epic produced in the period of the monarchy. This doesn't seem as big an issue to me for the reasons I mentioned in the last post, but this is a flash point for perhaps most evangelicals.

However, the non-evangelical sense that some of the distinct parts of the book of Deuteronomy date from the days of Josiah is a major sticking point probably for almost all evangelicals. For example, this would include the idea that it was perfectly appropriate before Josiah to worship Yahweh in places other than Jerusalem. As evangelicals, we would much rather say that Gideon, Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha were simply unaware of the rule only to sacrifice in the place where Yahweh would put his name. Also, we have great difficulty with the idea that the "prophet like me" of Deuteronomy is a reference to Josiah.

All of that was part of the outline of the class to give background to the intertestamental period both in traditional and secular mainstream versions.

3. The main tangent today was sparked by the simple words 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings. The tangent was that these books were only Samuel and Kings until they were translated into Greek in the late 200's or early 100's BC. Hebrew has few vowels that are written, so translation into Greek doubles the length. Scrolls were not infinite in length, so double the length on this scale requires a second scroll.

This of course led into relevant tangents about the Septuagint. It is apparently the first Scripture translated from one language to another. Why?

• Because religions largely were not centered around writings at that time. The Hindu Upanishads may date from the 700's. There is Homer and the Enuma Elish and so forth. But these are not really normative texts in the way the Tanakh, the Bible, and the Koran are for the "peoples of the book." Indeed, as we saw above, the OT was not the center of Israelite religious life at all prior to the exile, whether by ignorance (evangelical) or because they didn't really exist at that time (mainstream).
• Because prior to Alexander the Great, religions tended to be local. In terms of the sharing of culture and ideas, we surely must divide all of human history into the time before Alexander and the time after. It is the spreading of ideas and religion beyond local language that begins to call for the translation of Scriptures.
• Of course the Jews in Egypt had been there since the 500's. They didn't know Hebrew any more. The Jews would not be able to read their own Scriptures unless they were translated.

I might add in closing that many purists only use the word Septuagint to refer to the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek as related in the Letter of Aristeas, a document we will read in the class (http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/). Purists refer to the rest of the Greek Old Testament as the Old Greek translation.