Abstract
This veritable tome of 46 papers delivered at the 2013 conference of the IOSCS is generally a good representation of where the main areas of Septuagint (LXX) study lie in the twenty first century. Unfortunately, funding for the highly esteemed Septuaginta Unternehmen in Göttingen may not be renewed. This would be a serious threat to the completion of editions of the most complex books in the corpus, including 1–4 Kingdoms, Joshua and Psalms. Some university research groups (for instance, in Helsinki and Madrid) as well as individual scholars continue to study aspects of the textual development of these particular books, in which layers of literary editing of the Hebrew are entangled with later revisions of the earliest Greek text-form. Their work is well represented in this volume. Other studies investigate the interaction of the Septuagint translators and their rendering with the culture of their Hellenistic Egyptian environment. This may be reflected in the translators’ use of literary features, or where they employ terms pertaining to the judiciary and paedagogy paralleled in contemporary sources such as papyri and inscriptions. There are also several studies on syntactic and morphological issues in the LXX books. Only two papers relate to New Testament matters (LXX Minor Prophets in Matthew; semantics of desire in 4 Maccabees and Romans 7:7), though one on the use of pneuma in LXX Isaiah is also relevant to the New Testament. Several essays address the ‘daughter’ versions of the LXX for specific books, including the Syrohexapla, Armenian, Georgian, Sahidic, and Old Latin versions. The nature of the Hexapla, Origen’s lost six-columned scriptural synopsis, and its considerable influence on textual transmission is represented by two papers. The area of patristic use of the Septuagint text is also very important. While recent studies have begun to focus on aspects of reception of the LXX by early Christian authors, the establishment of reliable editions of patristic commentaries for the production of a critical LXX text continues to be a desideratum.