Abstract
The marked growth of Septuagint studies over the last thirty years is reflected in the increasing size of the congress volumes that appear every four years. The present one runs to over 700 pages, whereas that from 1979 was a mere 200. And yet the quality of the research remains the same or has even improved, its methodology having developed considerably over this period (in many cases aided by technology such as digitized texts and manuscripts).
The fifty papers in this volume reflect the main contemporary trends in Septuagint studies. Three of the most senior figures in the field speculate on the possible original milieu of the Greek Pentateuch. Other scholars describe current major collaborations such as the SBL Commentary on the Septuagint, the Oxford Hebrew Bible project, the Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint, and the Wuppertal research project on early Christian reception of the LXX. There are several essays on the patristic use of the LXX and the later Jewish Greek versions (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion), and on citations of the Old Testament in the New Testament. Although many books of the LXX have now been edited for the Göttingen series, work has only commenced fairly recently on Samuel and Kings (LXX 1–4 Kingdoms). The textual history of these books is extremely complex: particularly debated is the relative priority of the different Greek recensions reflected in Codex Vaticanus, the Lucianic or Antiochene recension (used in the region of Syria), and the so-called Kaige revisional recension. Other, and so far intractable, problems in the Books of Kingdoms relate to the existence of different or additional material in Greek compared with the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text. Inevitably, all such questions are bound up with the issue of how far the Hebrew texts used by the original translators and later revisers resembled our familiar MT. Eight essays in this volume therefore discuss different aspects of these contentious areas in the study of Greek Kingdoms. Other contributions deal with the translation technique of particular books, or with the lexicography of the LXX. The Hellenistic Jewish background of the Septuagint is also illuminated by studies of Judith, 2 Maccabees, and the documentary papyri.