Abstract
While all agree that the language of the Septuagint does not represent a Jewish dialect, scholarship has nevertheless struggled to find ways of discussing the language of the Septuagint without implying a similar idea. Just as the notions of “biblical Greek” and “Jewish Greek” have rightly come under scrutiny, so also must scholars carefully reconsider “Septuagint Greek” and similar sobriquets. While admittedly helpful shorthand, such terminology may unintentionally license—or surreptitiously import—prescriptivist approaches to language that are now widely abandoned in linguistic scholarship. This article presents the ancient historical background to such approaches and surveys problematic terminology common within contemporary scholarship to illustrate its links (or lack thereof) with developments in general linguistics. More up-to-date frameworks, particularly from sociolinguistics, provide better concepts and terminology for discussing the language of the Septuagint. Attention is also given to evaluating the absence of external evidence and matters of style.
The language in the Septuagint corpus is distinctive and difficult to describe.1 Scholars face something of a conundrum when it comes to talking about the Septuagint, both in terms of the extent of the corpus and the qualities of its language. Put simply, it is difficult to discuss what is in some ways indefinite and variegated without making it sound overly definite and uniform. Although it is now thoroughly debunked, at one time there was general agreement that the Septuagint preserved a discrete Greek dialect unique to Egyptian Jews. Somewhat ironically, that theory provided a unifying conceptual framework for the language of the Septuagint insofar as it distinguished the corpus from its linguistic context. But since that framework has been discarded, scholars have had to find new ways to talk about the Septuagint corpus as a whole without overemphasizing its distinctness from the language of its time on the one hand, or underemphasizing either its apparent idiosyncrasies or internal linguistic variety on the other. This challenge has led to a tendency to generalize about a diverse corpus as if both it and its language were a stable and unified phenomenon while knowing that neither is precisely true. To be sure, scholars often draw attention to the problems with—if not outright impossibility of—talking about the language of the Septuagint as a whole.2 Yet eventually one has to call it something. Hence the expressions “Septuagint Greek,” “translation Greek,” and similar labels have become increasingly common in recent years. To some extent, using such designations is a matter of expediency or economy of expression, trusting that fellow scholars will understand the necessary qualifications (even if they are left unsaid). Yet this tendency and the kinds of descriptive terminology that come with it also indicate that the ghost of earlier, even ancient, ways of talking about the language of the Septuagint still linger, even though all would at least ostensibly agree that they are long dead.
In this connection, just as the notions of biblical, Jewish, and Christian Greek have rightly come under scrutiny and been largely discarded, so scholars must carefully reconsider “Septuagint Greek” and similar sobriquets. As to the dismissal of the former set of ideas, much discussion and debate has occurred over the past half century and more that need not be rehearsed here.3 Suffice it to say that the notions of biblical, Jewish, and Christian Greek arose, and to some extent endure, owing to the intersection of several related factors. These factors include preconceived and value-laden expectations for particular qualities of the language of scripture, lack of sufficient primary evidence appropriate for comparison (or, as such evidence has accumulated, its disregard), and an unfortunate amount of what might charitably be described as confused thinking about ethnicity, social class, and language standards that stretch all the way back to antiquity.4 Although thankfully not all the same problems appear, some of the points of criticism of the notions of biblical, Jewish, and Christian Greek must also be levied against “Septuagint Greek” and “translation Greek,” at least as they are sometimes used. In particular, when the crucial distinction between corpus and language is obscured or forgotten, such terminology may unintentionally license—or surreptitiously import—prescriptivist approaches that are now widely abandoned in linguistic scholarship.5 Ever since the earlier, flawed hypotheses about the nature of the language of the Septuagint were abandoned, the efforts of scholars to find appropriate terminology for and ways of thinking about that language manifest two related problems: the inheritance and acceptance of overly vague terminology and a lack of acquaintance with developments in descriptive linguistics, particularly the area of sociolinguistics. Scholarship must grapple with the historical background of the contemporary discussion to understand the problematic aspects of value-based ways of talking about “Septuagint Greek.”6
Insights from sociolinguistics, particularly in relation to language variation and stylistics, provide a better terminological and conceptual framework for discussing the language of the Septuagint within the history of Greek. This approach focuses on language in use and entails basic neutrality towards so-called standard or normative forms. Such a posture is most appropriate in view of the limitations of the extant primary evidence for postclassical Greek and the still very limited degree to which that evidence has been sufficiently analyzed and incorporated into biblical scholarship. When analyzing the language of the Septuagint, these considerations call for more caution in particular when evaluating the absence of external evidence for a given linguistic feature, as well as a more narrowly defined idea of what exactly constitutes “Hebraism” or “interference” and how these concepts differ, if at all, from the question of style.
1 Historical Background for the Contemporary Discussion
The sociopolitical milieu of the Hellenistic and later Roman world saw the development and entrenchment of particular ways of thinking about language that have persisted in various forms ever since. It is only a slight oversimplification to say that formal study of Greek as a language was the child of cultural elitism and linguistic prescriptivism.7 To be sure, the idea of Greekness in the ancient world was not uniform. But it consistently involved the interplay of linguistic and cultural practice as associated with classical Athens, which became central to social identity in the Hellenistic period. In the late fifth century, for example, Isocrates (Paneg. 50) considered being Greek a matter of (specifically Athenian) intelligence (
These grammarians were willing heirs to philosophical traditions pertaining to logic and rhetoric, particularly that of Aristotle (Poetics) and early Stoics like Chrysippus (third century BCE).10 As such, they solidified two main concepts with which to categorize what they saw as defective linguistic use: barbarism (
This linguistic correctness was not only evaluated in terms of adherence to the perceived norms of literary classical Attic. It was for that same reason also linked with social status, often vis-à-vis education.14 In this connection, Diogenes of Babylon (second century BCE) explained the virtues (
In so doing, the ancient grammarians established a tradition of thoroughgoing prescriptivism in that they conceptualized their linguistic preferences as the controlling standard of “good” Greek and elevated social status. Variation from their standards was not necessarily non-Greek. But it was certainly considered less than Greek, as degradation or lowering from a higher (and thus exalted) ideal. The use of spatial location as metaphorical construal of linguistic quality is apparent not only in the philosophical assumptions of the grammarians, but also in some of their chosen terminology that flowed from them. For example, following Aristotle (Poet. 1457a18), the paradigm of lexical inflection for cases was described as a “falling” or declension (
This conceptualization was not necessarily limited to the scholarly guild. Rather, it seems that “a substantial proportion of the educated Greek population embraced the view that certain usages were wrong, and even brought discredit upon those who used them.”19 It was within this context of prescriptive language standards that certain ancient critics inveighed against biblical authors.20 For example, Tatian considered their work “barbarized writings” (
To understand the linguistic context of this period, it is vital to recognize some contours in the ongoing development of the notion of hellenismos and its culmination in the Atticists. Generally speaking, there were two broad tendencies in arguing for grammatical correctness. One approach was to appeal to literary tradition and the principle of analogy (
The preceding points raise the issue of the notion of Koine Greek. The term koine is problematically underspecified in modern scholarship, probably due in part to the ambiguity of the typical English gloss “common” for
The foregoing has only scratched the surface of the relevant primary sources, but three important points follow from this historical background for the study of the language of the Septuagint. The first point is that nonstandard or colloquial varieties of Greek—spoken or written—that were thought to depart somehow from either the Koine
A second point follows. As Lee points out, what the linguistic prescriptivism that produced the Koine
not only as the standard written and spoken language of the upper classes …, but also more abstractly as a superordinate variety standing at the pinnacle of a pyramid comprising an array of lower-register varieties, spoken and occasionally written, which … evolved under its influence and thereafter derived their identity through their subordinate relationship to it.36
Note that the idea of superordinance and subordinance here is not value- based. It does not entail qualitative superiority or inferiority, but rather the perceived degree of adherence by any given variety of Greek to the expectations of the ancient linguistic prescriptivists and the social stratification that adherence reflected. That varieties of postclassical Greek departed in various ways from those expectations does not in itself mean anything qualitative about those varieties from a linguistic perspective.
The third and final point is that the prescriptive standards that were taken to embody good Greek for centuries, indeed millennia, after the ancient grammarians were established and construed according to a normative body of classical texts. In theory, anyone could cultivate “correct” usage, regardless of their personal background, so long as they imitated the socially acceptable forms. It is noteworthy in this connection that several of the ancient grammarians themselves likely learned Greek as a second language. For example, the influential Stoics Zeno and Chrysippus were from Cyprus and Cilicia, respectively, while Diogenes of Babylon was born in Seleucia on the Tigris just one generation after the founding of the successor kingdom.37 In any case, establishing the standards for hellenismos was possible due to the high sociocultural value placed upon a canon of written texts from the bygone classical era whose language provided the model for imitation. So within a social context of diverse varieties of Greek throughout the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, that same textually-based linguistic model exerted an artificial conservatism upon—one might even say interference with—the developing conventions of postclassical Greek in use. While the sociocultural value for the canon of classical texts was certainly widely shared, it was not universally shared. Nor would it have been impossible to hold more than one textually-normed linguistic variety in high esteem, even if it was far less widely shared, as appears to have been the case among Egyptian Jewry. Moreover, neither using nor esteeming a linguistic variety of postclassical Greek that departed from the more broadly accepted Koine
1.1 The Legacy of the Ancient Grammarians
It is difficult to overstate the impact of the linguistic prescriptivism that developed in the Hellenistic scholarly guild and culminated in the Atticist grammarians. Horrocks maintains that the grammarians’ influence “was so profound that they effectively determined the linguistic and literary mind-set of the educated Greek elite for the next eighteen hundred years.”38 Similarly, Colvin has argued that Western classical scholarship in general has not dealt adequately with notions of linguistic diversity and standard language in the ancient world,
no doubt because the glasses through which we look at ancient views on language are inherited from the classical tradition itself … The interpretation of linguistic variety as essence and variation (mostly conceived as corruption) which emerged in the complex sociolinguistic milieu of Hellenistic and Roman Greece was easily translated into a Latin context by Roman grammarians, and spread with equal ease into medieval and modern European thought.39
This legacy is of course extremely extensive and intricate and cannot be treated exhaustively here. But it is worth explaining in brief some of the early steps by which this linguistic tradition came to dominate the understanding of Greek (and through it, language more broadly) in the West.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a major mechanism for the perpetuation of the Greek grammatical tradition was the Roman grammatical tradition. The Greek treatises known to have circulated as early as the first century BCE had Roman analogues on the topic of latinitas, the conceptual equivalent to hellenismos, such as the works De sermone Latino and De lingua Latina by Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE).40 Thus informed by similar concerns, Roman grammatici looked to writers like Cicero and Virgil to establish their own standardized stylistic variety in the face of the developments of the language throughout the Empire.41 In time, the Greek perspective on language became particularly common among and was perpetuated by the Roman social elite, who sought the broader sociopolitical package of prestige that was wrapped up with Greek history and culture. The Second Sophistic period itself had, after all, been precipitated by a “series of positively philhellenic” Roman emperors who helped usher in a “period of strikingly flamboyant Hellenism,” which extended even to matters of language.42 A prime example of this dynamic in the Roman period appears in an essay by Lucian (second century CE) called A Slip of the Tongue during a Greeting, in which he reports uttering an unacceptable and therefore humiliating salutation in Greek to a Roman governor. Upon doing so, he says: “At this I was immediately unsure which way was up or down and I began to sweat and go red” (
Space prohibits any real attempt at recounting the development of Western linguistic theory through the modern period. Still, the connections between the ancient and modern discussions concerning language deserve brief comment. In short, after Donatus (fourth century) and Priscian (sixth century), virtually no development occurred in linguistic theory until the Carolingian Renaissance, by which point Greek was virtually unknown in the West. Although Priscian was rediscovered thereafter and the prescriptivist approach continued in general, the rise of Speculative Grammar brought the study of language under the rubric of logic and metaphysics until the fourteenth century. Afterwards, scholars from the Renaissance through the early Enlightenment “refer lavishly to the ancient grammarians.”46 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw important developments, as ethnicity and its relationship to language became a stronger factor in shaping discussions. A significant influence in this connection was the ascendancy of Romanticism, which coincided with increasing material prosperity in Europe and fueled curiosity about the distant past (including ancient languages such as Greek) and remoter parts of the world. In this period, the French grammatical tradition made major strides towards the development of what many now consider “traditional grammar.” The fountainhead of this tradition was the grammarian, lexicographer, and founding member of the Académie Française, Claude Favre de Vaugelas. Although his Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) purports to offer a descriptive method, in practice what he described were his views on “le bon usage” of the French royal court and respected literary authors of his day, thus carrying on the same basic agenda of the ancient grammarians.47 Later, unfortunate theoretical developments occurred as scholars began to discuss the psychology of language and its relationship to culture. Among these scholars was the highly influential German philosopher-linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who held that language, culture, and thought were mutually determinative in terms of the degree of the “civilization” of the community. Since, in his view, language itself is a kind of living energeia, it acts as a gauge for the human urge towards the aesthetic. Thus, Humboldt believed that the language of a particular ethnic and/or national group was an expression of its
socially and racially determined patterns of thought. All languages conform to a “universal grammar,” with universal categories and rules. Yet, at the same time, languages, or rather their speakers, differ in the way they exploit the possibilities afforded by this universal grammar. Some communities, which excelled in intelligence and creativity, developed sophisticated languages with a great deal of morphological inflection and well-determined categories. Other communities delivered inferior linguistic products, due to their inferior intelligence and culture.48
Thankfully, much has changed and contemporary linguistic scholarship has moved decisively away from this type of thinking. To be sure, it is correct to say that the various connections between grammatical prescriptivism and sociolinguistic prejudice that have appeared throughout history are intricate and should not be painted with too broad a brush. Blessedly few scholars today, if any, would agree with the overt chauvinism involved in Humboldt’s linguistic theory. But contemporary scholarship must nevertheless remain alive to the possibility of (perhaps unwitting) complicity in the less unsavory parts of the broader tradition of linguistic prescriptivism by perpetuating value-laden habits of evaluating or talking about the language of the Septuagint corpus.
2 What We Talk About When We Talk About the Language of the Septuagint
Does a fish know that it is wet? While the preceding linguistic historiography may seem cumbersome or indulgent, there are a good number of fish in the modern scholarly seas for whom the answer to that question is apparently “No.” Much like the previous section, here we can enjoy only a bird’s-eye view of the landscape, given the vast scope of literature that might be investigated. To help bring order to this survey of what scholars talk about when they talk about the language of the Septuagint, focus moves progressively from the broad and general, to the specific, to the specialized in recent secondary literature.49 When it comes to the latter I have concentrated mostly, but not entirely, on more senior or prolific Septuagint scholars since their voices will, for better or worse, continue to be heard the most clearly for the foreseeable future. Note well that this overview is not intended to be polemic, but rather heuristic. The upshot is to indicate how, when talking about the language of the Septuagint in relation to postclassical Greek, scholars tend to use a range of ambiguous and/or (unconsciously?) value-laden terminology, such that their discussion either licenses or imports ideas very similar to the prescriptivist mindset of the ancient grammarians.
2.1 The General: Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
Few of the major dictionaries and encyclopedias address the language of the Septuagint directly, even when an entire entry is devoted to the Septuagint. But typically matters of language arise at least in some way.50 Where that occurs, in most major sources at this general level the prescriptivist linguistic mindset of the ancient grammarians appears. Let us turn to some examples.
In his 1988 article on the biblical languages, Walker waxes eloquent in regard to the Greek language, which he praises as “beautiful, rich, and harmonious,” suggesting that the classical “Greek mind was preoccupied with ideals of beauty.”51 But, we are told, after the conquest of Alexander and subsequent spread of Greek language and culture, the “koine dialect added many vernacular expressions to Attic Greek.” He goes on to tell the sad tale of how consequently the “Greek language lost much of its elegance and finely shaded nuance as a result of its evolution,” resulting in what he calls a “new language, reflecting simple, popular speech.”52 Written just a few decades ago, the unvarnished value judgments involved here are a stunning, if confused, recapitulation of the prescriptivist instincts of the ancient grammarians.53 On top of the conflated categories and errors in this account, Walker goes on to speak without qualification of the “OT dialect of ‘Jewish-Greek,’” despite the fact that this notion had long been disputed and recently debunked at the time his article was published. This encyclopedia entry provides a particularly egregious case study. Still, while less overtly biased than Walker’s view, value-laden and prescriptivist descriptions of the language of the Septuagint also appear in articles written by more contemporary and well-known Septuagint scholars with (one would assume) a much more detailed grasp upon the issues involved.
Speaking of the Greek Pentateuch, Greenspoon reports that there is “lively debate” among scholars pertaining to its language, but that “almost all descriptions of this Greek speak of passages that are unintelligible.” While he goes on to qualify that such judgments could simply reflect modern expectations for what an ancient reader “would have been able to understand,” Greenspoon does not believe it to be realistic to dismiss “all such difficulties” on these grounds.54 This qualification is indeed well made. But as a whole Greenspoon’s comments leave unclear just what unintelligibility might actually mean and the criteria with which it is evaluated. How pervasive or extensive are such passages within the Septuagint corpus? How bad is it? Do they contain total nonsense, as if fay lorkəd id narb atupiš bod? The reader is left to wonder or simply assume what is presented as representative of “almost all” of scholarly opinion. In another encyclopedia article, Greenspoon states that, while the linguistic usage of the translators of the Greek Pentateuch is mostly “sensible and can be comprehended,” they are also guilty of “sometimes bending the Greek too far.”55 While the primary issue here is again ambiguity, the prescriptivist notion of correct or acceptable linguistic use is implicitly licensed and pitted against the language of the Septuagint as unintelligible or somehow unfortunately deformed (i.e., “bent”).
In her article in the New Cambridge History of the Bible, De Troyer accurately describes how the Septuagint has in recent years become an object of scholarly inquiry in its own right, including matters of its language. Citing Léonas, she presents the Septuagint as a “special sort of translation” that arose out of Jewish and Christian cultural contexts. As such, we are told there are certain “issues at stake with regard to ‘translation Greek,’” although they are not explained. The term translation Greek will come up again below, but note at this point how De Troyer places it in quotes, though the reason for doing so is left unclear. Is it a technical term or are we to doubt its existence?56 Immediately after using the phrase, De Troyer states in a footnote that “E. Tov does not consider translation Greek to be a real language,” but gives no citation.57 In just a few brief assertions, then, the reader of this esteemed publication is told that the Septuagint contains translation Greek, which one of the most internationally renowned biblical scholars alive today apparently believes is not real language.58 What precisely is it then? Is it unreal language? Is it a sub-language or a non-language? Is that what makes the Septuagint translation “special,” as De Troyer calls it? The prescriptivist mindset that sets up boundaries to label what is in or out—what is real or unreal, what is normal or special—thus reappears, even if it is entirely unintentional. With no discussion of what “translation Greek” actually means, and with no supporting citations or discussion, the reader is left with little to go on.
In an article broadly introducing the Septuagint with specifically linguistic concerns, Porter maintains that the corpus is “vernacular or Koine Greek, even if it reflects its substratal Hebrew source at various points” and includes “varying genres or text-types and registers.”59 Much more aware of contemporary discussions in linguistics than many biblical scholars, Porter far more carefully nuances his statements than other sources surveyed here. For example, he mentions the matter of standard and nonstandard forms of language, an important concept that is far too infrequently noted in these discussions. At the same time, however, he does not expand upon it (likely for reasons of space). Nor does Porter indicate a difference between the “vernacular or Koine Greek” of which he says the Septuagint is a major corpus. This turn of phrase could easily give the reader the impression that these two entities are actually one and the same. That is, it might be taken to mean that the Septuagint is written in “vernacular” Greek because it is Koine, and all Koine is vernacular. At best this understanding—again even if it represents an unintentional misreading of Porter—would conflate linguistic register with the historical phase of the language. Additionally, in his article Porter commends the taxonomy of translation styles posited at the turn of the twentieth century by Thackeray, one class of which is labelled “indifferent Greek” and another “literal or unintelligent Greek.”60 In response one might ask, indifferent in whose judgment? Or, unintelligent compared to what? Although Porter does not seem to accept them wholesale, these descriptions are plainly value-laden in a way that only a prescriptivist approach to Greek can license. That they are presented with such light qualification only helps such an approach to persist.
As a final example, the Septuagint comes under discussion numerous times throughout the compendious Anchor Bible Dictionary (ABD). In relatively few places, however, is the language of the corpus itself under discussion. Where that does occur, it is typically framed in ways that portray it as something qualitatively other. In one article discussing the Testament of Abraham, Mueller states that the longer extant version of this work was “composed in Septuagintal, or Semitic, Greek.”61 Leaving aside the question of “Septuagintal Greek,” what precisely might “Semitic Greek” be (if these two Greeks are not one and the same, which seems to be the implication)? This kind of terminology has the specter of a Jewish Greek dialect lurking behind it, just a short conceptual step away, if that. Sobriquets like these can easily give the incorrect impression that such a language must be a textually or even ethnically isolated phenomenon rather than part of the broader contemporary Greek linguistic system. At best, such descriptions often leave the manner in which the latter is true completely unaddressed. At worst, they may betray pejorative assumptions about the linguistic competence or legitimacy of those who produced or read the work under discussion. This kind of negative assumption surfaces explicitly in the discussion of the language of Joseph and Aseneth, where Chesnutt states that its “Semitisms” and “strong Septuagintal influence … are no more than should be expected from Greek-speaking Hellenistic Judaism.”62 With what seem like Humboldtian undertones, Chesnutt appears to believe that the reader’s expectations for the language of this work—connected as it is to the Septuagint—need to be lowered to Jewish levels. Elsewhere, specifically addressing the Hellenistic Egyptian context, Borgen similarly claims that the “Greek spoken and written by the Jews reflected their background. The Septuagint (LXX) contains many Hebraisms; and a learned Greek, Cleomedes, gibes at the rude folk dialect used in the synagogues.”63 Here again we find the incorrect assumption of a spoken form of Greek and the implication that the language of the Septuagint is somehow defective. Aside from the anachronism of invoking the context of the synagogue, it is worth noting that this Cleomedes was a Stoic astronomer who lived sometime between the first century BCE and late third century CE, precisely the sort of personality to prescriptively censure linguistic usage that failed to conform to the stylistic standards of the educated elite. So while attempting to contextualize the language of the Septuagint, no attempt is made to contextualize Cleomedes. Rather, his perspective is assumed to be perfectly valid—indeed probably correct—and it is cited in ABD without further comment, as if it we too should sniff at the insipid Greek patois of the Jews. The same bald linguistic prescriptivism and value-laden judgments concerning the language of the Septuagint appear in the ABD entry for “Languages (Greek).” There, even as he explicitly dismisses the notion of a distinct Jewish dialect of Greek, Mussies has no reservations in saying that “the Greek of the Pentateuch is of far better quality than the Greek of other translated books, which is always of a lesser quality and sometimes inferior.” Certain linguistic features of the Septuagint are then called “monotonous” and even “un-Greek.”64 The ancient grammarians would surely agree.65
Examples could easily be multiplied. But this discussion is enough to demonstrate how, at the general level, scholarly discussion of the language of the Septuagint suffers from simplistic, mistaken, or ambiguous use of terminology and the concepts associated with it.66 What is the relationship between “vernacular” and “Koine” Greek? What counts as a language? How does one measure “better” or “inferior” linguistic usage? What does “intelligibility” entail and how do we know? Very frequently the answers to such questions are formulated or assumed within a prescriptivist mindset—implicit or unwitting though it might sometimes be—regarding the nature and requisite qualities of “correct” Greek language. To be sure, space constraints at this general level make addressing such questions difficult. But by the same token, it is to dictionaries and encyclopedias that most students and many scholars turn first, giving them a great deal of shaping influence. Moreover, the way we choose to speak while under constraint tends to be most revealing. The fact that little effort is made in such resources to address the nature of the language of the Septuagint directly or in much of a nuanced way despite space constraints is a perfect illustration of the problem this article is highlighting.
2.2 The Specific: Introductions to Septuagint Research
To a lesser degree, similar issues arise at the more specific level of discussion presented in scholarly introductions to Septuagint research. There is, of course, more space available for clarity and qualification in these sources. In fact, compared with both the general and specialized literature, it is at this level of scholarly detail that the least problematic discussions of the language of the Septuagint appear.67
In their well-known disciplinary introduction, Jobes and Silva provide an accessible and cautious discussion of the language of the Septuagint.68 They draw attention to the textual pluriformity and linguistic heterogeneity too often ignored or obscured by phrases like “biblical Greek.” They suggest that the language of the corpus “may be described as Hellenistic Greek,” a label they use to mean something “more or less equivalent to Koine (Common) Greek.”69 They also suggest that “it would be appropriate to describe the language of the LXX as Jewish Hellenistic Greek—but only for the same reasons that it is appropriate to use such labels as ‘Stoic Greek’ or ‘journalistic English.’” Such terminology is related to linguistic register and appropriately recognizes that the distinctive interests of a certain group or community are sometimes “reflected in its vocabulary (including idioms) and style.”70 There is little to quibble with here as Jobes and Silva go on to discuss linguistic aspects of Semitic influence—a more neutral term than “interference,” as discussed below—in primarily social and stylistic terms. But hints of the prescriptivist mindset do slip into their treatment of translation technique. They suggest that “most of the LXX translators attempted to preserve the linguistic form of the Hebrew. Some of them, apparently, did not much care if this approach violated normal Greek idiom.”71 That last clause exists within a world of assumptions. The idea of linguistic “correctness” is not expressed here in ethical (good/bad), affective (proper/crude), aesthetic (beautiful/ugly), or qualitative (pure/corrupt) terms, as prescriptivism tends to produce. But the clause is nevertheless value-laden in that it implies regulatory expectations for Greek. It assumes that there is, in fact, such a thing as normal Greek that exists somewhere, that it is rule-based, and that it is therefore capable of being “violated,” much like traffic laws. These assumptions imply that the language of the Septuagint corpus breaks those rules and is therefore abnormal or “unruly” to some unspecified degree.72 It is just after this statement that Jobes and Silva use the terminology of “translation Greek.” Although it is connected with the work of a particular analytical method that Jobes and Silva critique, the discussion may still give the misleading impression that there is always a necessary, causal link between the translation process typical of the Septuagint corpus and violation of “normal Greek,” giving way to the production of something else: translation Greek.73
Fernández Marcos also uses the label “translation Greek” in his introduction, although in a different way. Addressing the matter of language literally on the first page of his book, he suggests that the term is representative of “a translation language, the language of the LXX,” and thus provides a better alternative to the term “biblical Greek.”74 Although these comments are somewhat confusing, they appear to be concerned primarily with identifying a stylistic corpus of writings, namely Jewish Greek literature including but not limited to the Septuagint.75 Fernández Marcos’s discussion of language is longer and more technical than that of Jobes and Silva, focused largely on the history of scholarship. In the end, his conclusion provides an excellent discussion of the language of the Septuagint, which he insists must be studied “not on its own but as an integral part of Hellenistic Greek.”76 Drawing attention to the limitations of scholarly understanding of postclassical Greek, Fernández Marcos states that
systematic study of all the documentation of the Hellenistic period is required, popular as well as literary, to be able to place the Greek of the Bible in its correct location … The koiné does not have to be as uniform as the manuals insist … It is also possible that there were greater degrees of dialectal differentiation than we know through the process of linguistic uniformity imposed by a great section of literary koiné and the way of speaking well and writing well spread by the Atticist movement.77
Although the sense in which Fernández Marcos uses “dialect” and speaking or writing “well” would benefit from clarification or qualification, his statements here are in fundamental agreement with the perspective being advocated in this article. The approach and mindset that he commends are not only diametrically opposed to linguistic prescriptivism in general, but also contravene the common assumption in modern scholarship that linguistic prescriptivism is both appropriate and possible for ancient Greek.
In similar fashion, in her introduction Dines too positions the language of the Septuagint squarely within the history of Greek. The Septuagint contains “the ‘Koine’ or ‘common’ (i.e., ‘shared’) Greek of the Hellenistic Age,” as a unifying feature within which “there are many variations in linguistic usage and style.” She goes on to remark that “it is important to situate the LXX within current debates on ‘vernacular’ and ‘literary’ Koine, and to be aware that not all contemporary writers define ‘Koine’ the same way.”78 Dines makes an important distinction in this regard—also noted above—by clarifying that “Koine … must not, however, be equated simply with colloquial, vernacular language. It was also used in a more polished way.” She points out how the often negative and value-based judgments of the language of the Septuagint by scholars in previous generations
demonstrate how much of their own cultural conditioning affected their responses. Immersed from their earliest years in a classical education, and taught to take the fifth-century BCE Greek authors as their benchmark, they could scarcely help being shocked by the LXX, a product of the Hellenistic age which itself was hardly thought worthy of study.79
She is right. Of course, in view of the historical background provided above, it is clearly no coincidence that the ancient Greek grammarians themselves would likely agree on the prescriptive details of this supposed benchmark for the language.
Speaking of classicism, a distinct point of departure at this scholarly level is Rajak’s discussion of the language of the Septuagint. For her, while it is true that the translators were part of the linguistic environment of “the Greek koinē dialektē, the standard post-classical language of their period,” the language they used was not. What they used was “language with a difference,” something “idiosyncratic” and “purpose-built,” such that it has “a most unfamiliar ring.”80 The subjectivity and ambiguity of her description is obvious. Rajak goes on to explain how she does not doubt the competence of the translators to produce a “more-sophisticated Greek idiom, had they wished to.”81 The expectations she harbors for precisely what may be considered linguistically “familiar” or “sophisticated” become clear, however, when she describes how the Septuagint “can be trying to read, sometimes obscure, and occasionally unintelligible to those accustomed to literary Greek, be it classical or Hellenistic.”82 That is, it is “trying” for those accustomed to the preferred linguistic style of the ancient grammarians, which is taken to be normative of the Greek language itself, hence the “difference.” Lest there be any doubt concerning her view on this point, Rajak refuses to believe that anyone “could suggest that we are here dealing with ordinary Greek in any of its registers. Septuagint Greek is unique and altogether more peculiar.”83 It is “Septuagint ‘translation language’” and thus essentially “artificial.”84 What makes Rajak’s discussion so interesting is not merely how freely she issues her negative judgments; it is that she does so while simultaneously affirming several important ideas. Most importantly, Rajak acknowledges the varietal diversity of postclassical Greek in general, points to numerous linguistic features in the Septuagint that are conventional within those varieties, and rejects the notion of a Jewish-Greek dialect. All of which are correct. Yet because Rajak adopts a(n unconsciously?) prescriptivist and value-laden approach to Greek, these other considerations get nullified and Septuagint Greek is nevertheless quarantined as an isolated linguistic phenomenon. As we will see, this kind of isolation is also characteristic of certain specialized scholarly discussions.
2.3 The Specialized: Articles, Conference Proceedings, and Reference Works
Suffice it to say that the views presented by Dines and Fernández Marcos at the introductory level—and their manner of talking about the language of the Septuagint broadly conceived—are not universally shared at more specialized levels of scholarly discussion. Here this survey necessarily becomes selective, as noted above. Discussion will focus on the scholars associated with a fairly recent lexicon of the Septuagint as well as those who worked on producing a major English translation, though a few other sources come into focus towards the end of this section as well.
In 2003 A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (LEH) was published, bringing into one volume two previous smaller installations of the project.85 The theoretical framework for this project belongs primarily to Johan Lust, who articulated his approach one year prior to the publication of the first edition of LEH. Lust denies that the language of the Septuagint is a Jewish-Greek dialect. But at the same time, the presence of “Semitic influence” in the corpus drives Lust to argue that, “[a]lthough it may be based on it, Septuagint Greek cannot simply be characterized as Koine Greek. It is first of all translation Greek.”86 For Lust, then, whatever the language of the Septuagint is, it is a different category than “Koine” Greek, although neither is defined. These two labels—Septuagint Greek and translation Greek—are considered appropriate labels wherever word-for-word correspondence between Hebrew and Greek versions occurs, although again the nature of that correspondence is unspecified.87 To Lust, where that occurs it means that
the syntax of the Septuagint is Hebrew rather than Greek. No classical author and hardly any author using Koine Greek would have written sentences the way they are composed in the first Bible translation … This led to what is [sic] usually called “Hebraisms” or “Semitisms,” which would probably better be called “translationisms” … On other occasions [the translators] chose purely mechanical “translations of embarrassment.”88
Much of this article is included in virtually identical form in the preface to LEH.89 Elsewhere Lust says that “most biblical Greek is translation Greek,” and points to what he calls the “often relatively literal” translation of the Septuagint in general. That “means that it usually tries to render the Hebrew as faithfully as possible, word by word, even when the Greek language hardly allows this.”90 The kind of bare assertion, ambiguity, and prescriptivism here mirrors what appears in many of the sources discussed in section 2.1. Literal relative to what? How often? Faithful in what sense? Notice the depersonalized language too. We are told that “it”—apparently meaning the Septuagint—“tries” to do things and that Greek “allows” this or that, again implying the existence of some numinal set of rules. Similar sentiments about what is “allowed” in the Greek language appear in Lust’s comments on a passage from Ezek 14:7. Lust surmises that the “words and the verb forms of this passage may be good Koine Greek, but not its syntax and style. It is very unlikely that sentences of that sort were ever written in Koine Greek.”91 With this, the language of the Septuagint has been discredited and othered. For Lust, translation Greek is something that manifests “semitizing” syntax, and that is what makes it inferior, a deserving exile from the linguistic in-group. At the same time, however, where this Semitic syntax is not present in the language of the Septuagint, there the blessed possibility exists for “better Greek.”92 What exactly Lust means by either “better” or “Greek” becomes clearer when he claims that it is specifically the “reader, used to classical or koine Greek, [who] is left with the impression that Septuagint Greek is different.”93 The value judgments are overt and the posture somewhat disquieting. For Lust, the language of the Septuagint is neither classical nor Koine. The latter two are of course Greek; but the former is different and inferior because it is Semitic.
One of Lust’s collaborators on the LEH project shares similar views, particularly regarding syntax. Hauspie discusses Septuagint translation and insists that the resulting language was often “contrary to the Greek grammatical rules.”94 Though never stating where precisely they come from, it is on the basis of such rules that Hauspie is able to discern what she calls “correct” Greek constructions.95 To Hauspie, when a Septuagint translator reproduced the word order of the Semitic source text, it “mostly” resulted in “inappropriate” or “incorrect” Greek. But sometimes this can also result in “good, correct Greek.”96 It is the rules of syntax that apparently make all the difference. Again the major factor in this approach is the notion of “Semitism” as a conceptual framework for analyzing the language of the Septuagint. To find a Semitism in the Septuagint—despite the fact that is it written in Greek—is to encounter something non-Greek or sub-Greek, and therefore bad or incorrect. This approach is overtly prescriptivist and value-laden, involving a notion—one might even say an ideology—of “real Greek” that is fundamentally qualitative and neatly rule-based. That Greek is good, appropriate, and correct, and it exists as a discrete, closed system that modern scholarship has completely in hand and is therefore able to detect. Deviations from that system are not only reliably identifiable, whether by comparison or scholarly instinct, they constitute qualitative degradation and thus merit exclusion of the corpus in which they occur from the linguistic category. Whatever might be said about the approach to translation typical of the Septuagint corpus, only the prescriptivist mindset makes it possible to look at a text written in Greek and then declare that it is in fact not Greek, since the linguistic phenomena present in that text are bad and not allowed in the language.
A second major area in recent scholarship that has many similar tendencies when discussing the language of the Septuagint is the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS) project.97 Now, the sophisticated (and much disputed) theoretical model of interlinearity that underlies NETS cannot be discussed in any detail here.98 But the approach to and manner of talking about the language of the Septuagint among those who adhere to the interlinear paradigm have points of overlap with the prescriptivist tendencies so far surveyed. As it was originally developed, interlinearity is meant as an explanatory mechanism for the language of the Septuagint. From the perspective of those who developed the model, explanation is necessary precisely because of “the ‘translationese’ character of Septuagint Greek, with its strict, often rigid, quantitative equivalence to the Hebrew.”99 This approach to translation produces linguistic phenomena that are deemed “deviations from normal, codified practices of the target system—in our case Hellenistic Greek.” At the same time, the approach to translation typical of the Septuagint corpus “scarcely precludes the existence of … perfectly good, normal, intelligible Greek.”100 In its most straightforward articulation, “the interlinear paradigm recognizes that unintelligibility of the Greek text qua text is one of its inherent characteristics,” along with “linguistic strangeness.”101 Some examples of how this is purportedly the case appear in an essay by Boyd-Taylor. Commenting on 1 Kgdms 3:17a, he pronounces that the Greek is “decidedly odd” because it includes constructions that are “entirely nonsensical” or “meaningless.”102 In another essay, Boyd-Taylor argues that the language of the Septuagint is in fact not a language at all: it is an “interlanguage.”103
The point here is not to mount an argument for or against either LEH or NETS in themselves. Rather, it is to point out some of the underlying linguistic assumptions that are implied or required by the terminology used to talk about the language of the Septuagint by scholars involved in even the most specialized levels of research in the discipline. Yet again, the idea of Greek is very often framed prescriptively as a normed and codified system from which linguistic use may deviate to become bad, strange, unintelligible, or even a tertium quid. But if the rules are observed correctly, the results may safely be classified as good, normal, intelligent, and so part of the Greek language after all. The only way to position oneself as a judge qualified to make such claims about the language of the Septuagint—whether at the point of its production or at any time—is to make prescriptivist assumptions similar to those of the ancient grammarians.
Of course, many specialists in the discipline do not approach the language of the Septuagint the same way. Oftentimes the metalanguage involved is more nuanced or informed by more recent descriptivist linguistic theory. But old habits die hard. That becomes apparent in many other specialist publications, including the volumes that contain the proceedings of recent congresses of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies and the volumes produced by the recent meetings of the Internationale Fachtagungen organized by Septuaginta Deutsch. Examples quickly stack up after a kind of randomized sampling of these articles over the last twenty years. Sollamo often associates “freer” translation with “good Greek style.”104 She likewise speaks of “the proper way” to use pronouns that, when found in the Septuagint, would demonstrate a translator’s capacity for “good Greek,” apparently implying one should not expect as much.105 Elsewhere, Sollamo also refers to “Hebraistic Greek” that is characterized by “deviations from Greek norms,” and posits the existence of a “biblical Greek.”106 Hauspie speaks of what is “grammatically correct” or “inappropriate,” of “the rules of the Greek language” and the “better Greek” that arises when they are followed.107 LaMontagne speaks of “LXX Greek” as he looks at “odd aspects” of the translation of Ruth, which he says “is clearly trying to be obtuse” at points and is “occasionally eye-and-ear-twisting.108 Elsewhere LaMontange asserts that textual revision must involve “demonstrable improvement” of the language, but does not explain what that might mean (though one can guess).109 The familiar trope of “Hebraisms” resulting in “translation Greek” appears in Cook, who links these ideas directly to a translator’s linguistic competence.110 Hiebert and Dykstra assume the existence of “translation-Greek” as they articulate the (highly problematic) “principle of linguistic parsimony,” which asserts that “no words or constructions … shall be considered normal Greek, unless attested in non-translation writings.”111 Büchner can detect “excellent Greek.”112 And so on. Examples could no doubt continue, particularly if the scope of literature and chronology were expanded, but this sampling illustrates the point. Perhaps ironically, even one of the blind peer reviewers of this very article could not help but assert in his or her feedback that what the Septuagint contains is “a translation language.”
2.4 Synopsis
To reiterate an essential point, the above survey is not meant to be condemnatory or polemic in any particular way. If nothing else, the degree to which prescriptivist ways of thinking or talking about the language of the Septuagint slip into recent scholarly discourse illustrates how an entrenched kind of metalanguage (and perhaps also its accompanying mindset) has been inherited from older, even ancient, scholarship. In many cases, this conditioning seems unconscious. In this connection, many of the shortcomings of the sources discussed in this section have more to do with terminological ambiguity than flawed thinking per se, though the two are of course related. There are indeed subtle distinctions that should be recognized among the ways that scholars speak about Septuagint Greek, even if they sometimes go unstated. That label in and of itself is mostly neutral when used carefully.113 But that same label—and similar ways of talking about that to which it refers like “translation Greek” or “Semitic Greek”—can easily become non-neutral if used (or misconstrued) in a way that confuses or conflates stylistic corpus with language system. Admittedly, in certain cases from the survey above, it is more difficult to overlook the preconceptions and value judgments concerning what parts of the language of the Septuagint corpus are “in” or “out,” “good” or “bad” in relation to the Greek language itself.114
3 Where Do We Go from Here?
To the extent that the problems with talking about “Septuagint Greek” surveyed above indicate terminological ambiguity, they also point to a general lack of acquaintance with recent developments in linguistic theory. Almost all professional linguists today affirm a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, approach, focusing on actual use of a language rather than on setting down precepts for its use.115
One important, if not particularly new, branch of descriptive linguistics is sociolinguistics, which provides a conceptual and terminological framework that could prove very useful to Septuagint scholarship. Sociolinguistics is broadly concerned with language varieties and language change in society. It is a discipline too vast to encapsulate easily, but certain key ideas are important to note.116 One consistent finding across sociolinguistic studies is that
everyone is in command of multiple forms of speech that are appropriate in different social contexts. Because forms of speech are associated with certain groups and social situations, the form of an utterance conveys social information. Speech patterns may be marked for social status, region, gender, etc. … As a result, speakers can indicate their social relationship to listeners by manipulating linguistic form.117
Put differently, no language exists as a monolithic and uniform system delimited by rules. Rather, there are differing linguistic forms of a language, commonly referred to as varieties (or lects). Sociolinguists often speak of an idealized variety known as a standard language, which is typically codified, non-regional, and used in administrative, commercial, or educational settings, mostly in written form.118 But from a linguistic standpoint (and probably every other standpoint as well), the standard language is not inherently better or more correct—although it may be regarded as such by many users—nor does it somehow invalidate nonstandard varieties of the language.119 It becomes standard, or rather standardized, because it is associated with greater overt social prestige. Nonstandard language varieties may differ at any level: tone, accent, orthography and/or pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax. They manifest differences among speech communities in which they are established, used, and which develop according to shared conventions. The degree and manner of adherence to—or departure from—the standard form of the language is a stylistic expression of a social phenomenon that occurs in the choice and use of (a) linguistic variety(ies).120
Applying the findings and insights of sociolinguistics to (postclassical) Greek is certainly not a new idea.121 While its application within Septuagint scholarship has begun, it is still a minority report by a considerable margin. Important steps have been taken already, and the present volume of essays represents further efforts in the same direction.122 But, as seen throughout this essay, the mindset and terminology to do so require much more development since they depart in significant ways from the prescriptivist habits that tend to surface when it comes to talking about “it.” Aside from the implications of sociolinguistics, several other important limitations need to remain in view in order to reorient language attitudes in the course of analyzing the Septuagint corpus.
First, we must be honest with ourselves that current scholarly understanding of postclassical Greek is an exceptionally long way from comprehensive. As the historical background provided above indicates, the great majority of grammatical and lexicographical study has focused upon classical texts, but also the New Testament writings. The reality is that, to date, there is no complete grammar or lexicon for the postclassical phase of the Greek language in general, nor are they likely to appear during our lifetime.123 This is of course not to say that scholarship suffers from a lack of evidence. Far from it. Rather, it is to point out that the evidence to hand is far from being in hand. Recognizing this simple but daunting fact should prompt a certain sense of humility in the course of linguistic research and consciously qualify all scholarly judgments concerning postclassical Greek of any variety. Extant evidence for postclassical Greek is vast in depth and scope. As digital tools have made research more feasible than ever, scholars have a responsibility to mount exhaustive inquiries in order to avoid the risk of linguistic question-begging.
Second, we must always recognize that, as much primary evidence as there is, even when taken together it nevertheless does not fully represent postclassical Greek as a language system. The evidence has survived either by the accidents of history or by virtue of is perceived cultural value over two millennia. As such, great caution is necessary to avoid argument from silence. To repeat the old maxim: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This observation seriously problematizes the so-called principle of linguistic parsimony noted above and the identification of positive linguistic transfer, which relies on frequency statistics.124 It also proves important to matters of style, as discussed below. It is, after all, more than possible for a lexical unit to have been fully conventional in postclassical Greek but poorly attested in the existing evidence. Moreover, linguistic judgments made from the absence of evidence are literally as firm as shifting sand. New papyrological discoveries continue as ever, not to mention the embarrassing surplus of ancient Greek evidence discovered long ago yet still languishing unexamined in crates on archive shelving across the world.125
Third, and finally, while the concepts of Hebraism and/or Semitism are certainly valid, they must be more carefully defined and distinguished from matters of style. This last point is important in order to avoid the impression that nothing may be said about the distinctive character and qualities of the language of the Septuagint, broadly construed. Groundwork has already been laid here by Lee, who developed a useful taxonomy.126 If, after the evidence for postclassical Greek has been sufficiently sifted, a given Septuagint translation feature follows the Hebrew word-for-word but represents unconventional Greek, it may be classified as Hebrew influence from the source text. Although such cases should be constantly reevaluated against the primary evidence as more becomes available, they represent changes that cannot be accounted for as Greek linguistic development per se. Importantly, however, where word-for-word translation occurs but does not depart from conventional Greek usage, the result is not necessarily a “Hebraism.” Lee points out that the great majority of Septuagint translation would fall into this category. From a sociolinguistic standpoint, this sort of linguistic usage by the Septuagint translators may be understood to manifest covert prestige that was associated the Hebrew source text.127 As such, a nonstandard but otherwise conventional variety of Greek had high prestige due to the positive value ascribed to it as a linguistic style within the Ptolemaic Jewish social context. To modify Lee’s suggested term along these lines, much of the language of the Septuagint might be said to constitute a conventional, written variety of postclassical Greek that intentionally manifests Semitic stylistic enhancement.128
4 The Septuagint within the History of Greek
The Koine
Bibliography
Aejmelaeus, Anneli. “The Septuagint and Oral Translation.” In XIV Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Helsinki 2010, ed. Melvin K.H. Peters (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013), 5–13.
Aitken, James K. “The Language of the Septuagint: Recent Theories, Future Prospects.” Bulletin of Judeo-Greek Studies 24 (1999), 24–33.
Aitken, James K. “The Septuagint and Egyptian Translation Methods.” In XV Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Munich, 2013, ed. Wolfgang Kraus, Michaël N. van der Meer, and Martin Meiser (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 269–293.
Ammon, Ulrich, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier, and Peter Trudgill, eds. Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, vol. 1., 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004).
Aujac, G., ed. Denys d’Halicarnasse, Opuscules Rhétoriques, vol. 5 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1992).
Barr, James. “Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek in the Hellenistic Age.” In The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 2, ed. W.D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 79–114.
Bentein, Klaas, and Mark Janse, eds. Varieties of Post-Classical and Byzantine Greek (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021).
Bentley, Richard. A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris: With an Answer to the Objections of the Hon. C. Boyle (London: Auld, 1817).
Boyd-Taylor, Cameron. “Lexicography and Interlanguage—Gaining Our Bearings.” Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies 37 (2004), 55–72.
Boyd-Taylor, Cameron. “Who’s Afraid of Verlegenheitsübersetzungen?” In Translating a Translation, ed. Hans Ausloos, Johann Cook, Florentino García Martínez, Bénédicte Lemmelijn, and Marc Vervenne (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 197–210.
Boyd-Taylor, Cameron. Reading between the Lines: The Interlinear Paradigm for Septuagint Studies (Leuven: Peeters, 2011).
Brandenburg, Philipp. “Case (Ptôsis), Ancient Theories of.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 124–133.
Brixhe, Claude, and R. Hodot. “A chacun sa koiné?” In La koiné grecque antique, ed. Claude Brixhe (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993), 7–21.
Browning, Robert. Medieval and Modern Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Bubenik, Vit, and Emilio Crespo. “Attitudes to Language.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 203–208.
Büchner, Dirk. “Greek Words in the Domain of Social Relations.” In Die Septuaginta: Themen, Manuskripte, Wirkungen, ed. Eberhard Bons, Michaela Geiger, Frank Überschaer, Marcus Sigismund, and Martin Meiser (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 166–185.
Campbell, Constantine R. Advances in the Study of Greek: New Insights for Reading the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015).
Cartledge, Paul. “Greeks and ‘Barbarians.’” In A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, ed. A.-F. Christidis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 307–313.
Chamberlain, Gary A. The Greek of the Septuagint: A Supplemental Lexicon (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2011).
Colvin, Stephen. “The Greek Koine and the Logic of a Standard Language.” In Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present, ed. Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Silk (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 33–45.
Conybeare, F.C., and St.G. Stock. Grammar of Septuagint Greek with Selected Readings, Vocabularies, and Updated Indexes (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995).
Cook, Johann, “The Provenance of the Old Greek Job.” In XIV Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Helsinki, 2010, ed. Melvin K.H. Peters (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013), 73–92.
Cosani, Carlo. “Ancient Greek Sociolinguistics and Dialectology.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 117–124.
De Lange, Nicholas. “Jewish Greek.” In A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, ed. A.-F. Christidis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 638–654.
De Troyer, Kristin. “The Septuagint.” In The New Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. James Carleton Paget and Joachim Schaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 267–288.
Desbordes, Françoise. “Les débuts de la grammaire à Rome.” Lalies 15 (1995), 125–137.
Dickey, Eleanor. Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Dines, Jennifer M. The Septuagint (London: T&T Clark, 2004).
Evans, Trevor V. “Approaches to the Language of the Septuagint.” Journal of Jewish Studies 56 (2005), 25–33.
Evans, Trevor V. “Standard Koine Greek in Third Century BC Papyri.” In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Congress of Papyrology, Ann Arbor, July 29–August 4, 2007, ed. Traianos Gagos (Ann Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office, The University of Michigan Library, 2010), 197–206.
Fernández Marcos, Natalio. The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Version of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G.E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000).
Fernández Marcos, Natalio. “The Greek Pentateuch and the Scholarly Milieu of Alexandria.” Semitica et Classica 2 (2009), 81–89.
Flashar, M. “Exegetische Studien zum Septuagintapsalter.” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 32 (1912), 81–116, 161–189, 241–268.
Freedman, David N., ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary. 6 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
George, Coulter H. “Jewish and Christian Greek.” In A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, ed. Egbert J. Bakker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 267–280.
Gibson, Richard J., and Constantine R. Campbell. Reading Biblical Greek: A Grammar for Students (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017).
Gignac, Francis T. A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine Periods. 2 vols. (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Cisalpino, 1976–1981).
Greenspoon, Leonard J. “Septuagint.” In The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 5, ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld (Nashville: Abingdon, 2009), 170–177.
Greenspoon, Leonard J., and Geoffrey W. Bromiley, trans. “Septuagint.” In The Encyclopedia of Christianity, ed. Erwin Fahlbusch, Jan Milič Lochman, John Mbiti, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Lukas Vischer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Brill, 2005), 913–916.
Harris, Roy, and Talbot J. Taylor, eds. Landmarks in Linguistic Thought, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1997).
Hatch, Edwin. Essays in Biblical Greek (Oxford: Clarendon, 1889).
Hauspie, Katrin. “Ἐν with Dative Indicating Instrument in the Septuagint of Ezekiel.” In XII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Leiden, 2004, ed. Melvin K.H. Peters (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006), 201–224.
Hauspie, Katrin. “The Idiolect of the Target Language in the Translation Process: A Study of the Calques in the LXX of Ezekiel.” In Die Septuaginta: Texte, Kontexte, Lebenswelten, ed. Martin Karrer, Wolfgang Kraus, and Martin Meiser (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 205–213.
Hengel, Martin. The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: Its Prehistory and the Problem of Its Canon (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002).
Hiebert, Robert J.V., and Nathaniel N. Dykstra. “Designing a New Septuagint Commentary: SBLCS and WATER.” In XIV Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Helsinki, 2010, ed. Melvin K.H. Peters (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013), 515–537.
Holmes, Janet. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2013).
Horrocks, Geoffrey. Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014).
Horsley, G.H.R. “The Fiction of ‘Jewish Greek.’” In New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, vol. 5, ed. Horsley (North Ryde: Ancient History Documentary Research Centre, Macquarie University, 1989), 5–40.
Horsley, G.H.R. “‘Christian’ Greek.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, vol. 1, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 280–283.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (Berlin: Dümmler, 1836).
Janse, Mark. “The Greek of the New Testament.” In A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, ed. A.-F. Christidis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 646–653.
Jellicoe, Sidney. The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).
Jobes, Karen H., and Moisés Silva. Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015).
Kazazis, J.N., and Deborah Kazazis, trans. “Atticism.” In A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, ed. A.-F. Christidis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1200–1217.
Kotzia, Paraskevi, and Maria Chriti. “Ancient Philosophers on Language.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, vol. 1, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 124–133.
Kreuzer, Siegried, ed. Introduction to the Septuagint (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2019).
Kuntz, J. Kenneth. “Septuagint.” In The Dictionary of Bible and Religion, ed. William H. Gentz (Nashville: Abingdon, 1986), 954.
LaMontagne, Nathan. “LXX Ruth: Translation, Interpretation, Characterization.” In XIV Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Helsinki, 2010, ed. Melvin K.H. Peters (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013), 59–71.
LaMontagne, Nathan. “Reconsidering the Relationship of A and B in LXX Judges.” In XV Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. Munich, 2013 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 49–59.
Lassiter, Daniel. “Semantic Externalism, Language Variation, and Sociolinguistic Accommodation.” Mind and Language 23 (2008), 607–633.
Law, Timothy M. When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Law, Vivien. “Roman Evidence on the Authenticity of the Grammar Attributed to Dionysius Thrax.” In History and Historiography of Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS IV), Trier, 24–28 August 1987, ed. Hans-Josef Niederehe and E.F.K. Koerner (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 89–96.
Law, Vivien. The History of Linguistics in Europe: From Plato to 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Lee, John A.L. A Lexical Study of the Septuagint Version of the Pentateuch (Chico: Scholars Press, 1983).
Lee, John A.L. “The Atticist Grammarians.” In The Language of the New Testament: Context, History and Development, ed. S.E. Porter and A.W. Pitts (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 283–308.
Lee, John A.L. The Greek of the Pentateuch: Grinfield Lectures on the Septuagint 2011–2012 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Lee, John A.L. “Back to the Question of Greek Idiom.” In The Legacy of Soisalon-Soininen: Towards a Syntax of Septuagint Greek, ed. Tuukka Kauhanen and Hanna Vanonen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 13–26.
Léonas, Alexis. Recherches sur le langage de la Septante (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2005).
Lust, Johan. “ΕΔΡΑ and the Philistine Plague.” In Septuagint, Scrolls and Cognate Writings: Papers Presented to the International Symposium on the Septuagint and Its Relation to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Writings, ed. George J. Brooke and Barnabas Lindars (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 569–597.
Lust, Johan. “Syntax and Translation Greek.” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 77 (2001), 395–401.
Lust, Johan. “Introduction.” In Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2003), xi–xxiv.
Lust, Johan. “Multiple Translators in LXX-Ezekiel?” In Die Septuaginta—Texte, Kontexte, Lebenswelten, ed. Martin Karrer, Wolfgang Kraus, and Martin Meiser (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 664–669.
Lust, Johan, Erik Eynikel, and Katrin Hauspie. A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1992–1996).
Lust, Johan, Erik Eynikel, and Katrin Hauspie. Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2003).
Matthaios, Stephanos. Untersuchungen zur Grammatik Aristarchs: Texte und Interpretation zur Wortartenlehre (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999).
Matthews, P.H. “Greek and Latin Linguistics.” In History of Linguistics, ed. Giulio Lepschy (London: Routledge, 1994), 1–133.
Matthews, P.H. “The Ancient Grammarians.” In A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, ed. A.-F. Christidis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1193–1199.
Matthews, P.H. What Graeco-Roman Grammar Was About (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Mauersberger, Arno, Christian-Friedrich Collatz, Melsene Gützlaf, Hadwig Helms, Günter Glockmann, Wolf-Peter Funk, Reinhard Schumacher et al., eds. Polybios-Lexicon, 2nd ed. 3 vols. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998–2006).
Mayser, Edwin. Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemäerzeit mit Einschluss der gleichzeitigen Ostraka und der in Ägypten verfassten Inschriften. 6 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1906–1938).
McDougall, J. Iain, ed. Lexicon in Diodorum Siculum. 3 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1983).
McLay, R.T. The Use of the Septuagint in New Testament Research (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
Mesthrie, Rajend, ed. A Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001).
Mesthrie, Rajend, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Morpurgo Davies, Anna. “The Greek Notion of Dialect.” In Greeks and Barbarians, ed. Thomas Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 153–171.
Mullen, Alex, and Patrick James. Multilingualism in the Graeco-Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Müller, Mogens. First Bible of the Church: A Plea for the Septuagint (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
Nelson, G. “Description and Prescription.” In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. Keith Brown (Boston: Elsevier, 2006), 460–465.
Pagani, Lara. “Declension/Conjugation (Klísis), Ancient Theories of.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, vol. 1, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 417–419.
Pagani, Lara. “Linguistic Correctness (Hellēnismós), Ancient Theories of.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, vol. 2, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 360–364.
Pagani, Lara. “Language Correctness (Hellenismos) and Its Criteria.” In Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, 2 vols., ed. Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 2:798–849.
Palmer, Leonard R. A Grammar of the Post-Ptolemaic Papyri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945).
Pietersma, Albert. Translation Manual for “a New English Translation of the Septuagint” ( NETS) (Ada: Uncial, 1996).
Pietersma, Albert. “A New English Translation of the Septuagint.” In IX Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Cambridge, 1995, ed. B.A. Taylor (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 177–187.
Pietersma, Albert. “A New Paradigm for Addressing Old Questions: The Relevance of the Interlinear Model for the Study of the Septuagint.” In Bible and Computer: The Stellenbosch AIBI-6 Conference. Proceedings of the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique “from Alpha to Byte”. University of Stellenbosch 17–21 July, 2000, ed. Johann Cook (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 337–64.
Pietersma, Albert. “A New English Translation of the Septuagint.” In X Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Oslo, 1998, ed. B.A. Taylor (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2001), 217–228.
Pietersma, Albert. “Exegesis in the Septuagint: Possibilities and Limits.” In Septuagint Research: Issues and Challenges in the Study of the Greek Jewish Scriptures, ed. Wolfgang Kraus and R. Glenn Wooden (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006), 33–45.
Pietersma, Albert. “Beyond Literalism: Interlinearity Revisited.” In “Translation Is Required”: The Septuagint in Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Robert J.V. Hiebert (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2010), 3–21.
Pietersma, Albert, and Benjamin G. Wright. A New English Translation of the Septuagint and the Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included under That Title, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Porter, Stanley E. Verbal Aspect in the Greek New Testament, with Reference to Tense and Mood (New York: Lang, 1989).
Porter, Stanley E. “Septuagint.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 287–290.
Porter, Stanley E. Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament: Studies in Tools, Methods, and Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015).
Porter, Stanley E. “Historical Scholarship on the Language of the Septuagint.” In Handbuch zur Septuaginta, ed. Eberhard Bons and Jan Joosten (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2016), 15–38.
Probert, Philomen. “Attic Irregularities: Their Reinterpretation in the Light of Atticism.” in Ancient Scholarship and Grammar: Archetypes, Concepts, and Contexts, ed. Stephanos Matthaios, Franco Montanari, and Antonios Rengakos (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 269–290.
Rafiyenko, Dariya, and Ilja A. Seržant, eds. Postclassical Greek: Contemporary Approaches to Philology and Linguistics (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020).
Rajak, Tessa. Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible and the Jewish Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Sarna, Nahum M. “Biblical Literature: Hebrew Scriptures.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: MacMillan, 1987), 152–173.
Schmidhauser, Andreas U. “The Birth of Grammar in Greece.” In A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, ed. Egbert J. Bakker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 499–511.
Seuren, Pieter A.M. Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
Soderlund, Sven K. “Septuagint.” In The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 400–409.
Sollamo, Raija. “The Place of the Enclitic Personal Pronouns in the Old Greek Psalter.” In XII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Leiden, 2004, ed. Melvin K.H. Peters (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2006), 153–160.
Sollamo, Raija. “Translation Technique and Translation Studies: The Problem of Translation Universals.” In XIII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Ljubljana, 2007, ed. Melvin K.H. Peters (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2008), 343–355.
Sollamo, Raija. “The Study of Translation Technique.” In The Language of the Septuagint, ed. Eberhard Bons and Jan Joosten (Güttersloh: Güttersloher Verlagshaus, 2016), 161–171.
Sollamo, Raija. “Reflexive Pronouns in the Greek Pentateuch.” In XV Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Munich, 2013, ed. Wolfgang Kraus, Michaël N. van der Meer, and Martin Meiser (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 309–326.
Sollamo, Raija. “The Usage of the Article with Nouns Defined by a Nominal or Pronominal Genitive in LXX Genesis.” In The Legacy of Soisalon-Soininen: Towards a Syntax of Septuagint Greek, ed. Tuukka Kauhanen and Hanna Vanonen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 43–53.
Strauss, Mark L. Distorting Scripture? The Challenge of Bible Translation and Gender Accuracy (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1998).
Strobel, Claudia. “Lexica of the Second Sophistic: Safeguarding Atticism.” In Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present, ed. Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Silk (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 93–108.
Swain, Simon. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50–250 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
Swete, Henry Barclay. An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek: With an Appendix Containing the Letter of Aristeas Edited by H. St. J. Thackeray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900).
Thackeray, Henry St. J. A Grammar of the Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint, vol. 1 Introduction, Orthography and Accidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909).
Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1995).
Tov, Emanuel. The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research, 3rd ed. (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2015).
Tribulato, Olga. “Literary Dialects.” In A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, ed. Egbert J. Bakker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 388–400.
Tribulato, Olga. “Dialectology (Diálectos), Ancient Theories of.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, vol. 1, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 457–461.
Trollope, William. A Greek Grammar to the New Testament and to the Common or Hellenic Diction of the Later Greek Writers: Arranged as a Supplement to Dr. Philip Buttmann’s “Intermediate or Larger Greek Grammar” (London: Whittaker & Co., 1842).
Trudgill, Peter. A Glossary of Sociolinguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Valente, Stefano. “Orthography.” In Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, ed. Franco Montanari, Stephanos Matthaios, and Antonios Rengakos (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 949–977.
Van Minnen, Peter. “The Future of Papyrology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, ed. Roger S. Bagnall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 644–660.
Vassilaki, Sofia. “Ἑλληνισµός.” In A History of Ancient Greek: From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, ed. A.F. Christidis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1118–1129.
Versteegh, Kees. “Latinitas, Hellenismos, ‘Arabiyya.” In The History of Linguistics in the Classical Period, ed. Donald J. Taylor (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987), 251–274.
Versteegh, Kees. “Borrowing and Influence: Greek Grammar as a Model.” In Le langage dans l’Antiquité, ed. Pierre Swiggers and Alphons Wouters (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990), 197–212.
Voelz, James W. “The Language of the New Testament.” In Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, ed. Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984).
Walker, Larry Lee. “Biblical Languages.” In Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), 332–339.
Willi, Andreas. “Register Variation.” In A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, ed. Egbert J. Bakker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 297–310.
Wooden, R. Glenn. “Interlinearity in 2 Esdras: A Test Case.” In Septuagint Research: Issues and Challenges in the Study of the Greek Jewish Scriptures, ed. Wolfgang Kraus and R. Glenn Wooden (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 119–144.
Wright III, Benjamin G. “Moving Beyond Translating a Translation: Reflections on a New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS).” In “Translation Is Required”: The Septuagint in Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Robert J.V. Hiebert (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2010), 23–39.
Yule, George. The Study of Language, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Zetzel, James E.G. Critics, Compilers, and Commentators: An Introduction to Roman Philology 200 BCE–800 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
This article has been written within the framework of the research project Edición y estudio de textos bíblicos y parabíblicos (FFI2017-86726-P) funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innnovación y Universidades (Spain).
E.g., Aitken, “Language of Septuagint,” 24; Evans, “Approaches,” 25.
For helpful discussion, see Horsley, “Christian Greek”; Janse, “Greek of New Testament”; De Lange, “Jewish Greek”; George, “Jewish and Christian Greek”; Voelz, “Language of New Testament”; Porter, “Historical Scholarship.”
A modern example of this final factor is Hatch (Essays, 9), who asserts that “Biblical Greek” was spoken “by an alien race.” Trollope (Greek Grammar, 6–7) went so far as to say that the supposed Septuagint dialect would have been “wholly unintelligible to a native Greek.”
On the important distinction between corpus and language in this discussion, see Aitken, “Language of Septuagint,” 30.
Some parallels exist between this essay and Horsley’s “Fiction of Jewish Greek” (see esp. 5–6). Although Septuagint scholarship has come far in this regard since the publication of Horsley’s article, in many respects the substance of his argument has been ignored or forgotten.
To qualify this claim immediately, on the connection between the rise of the study of grammar and textual criticism of classical writings taking place in Alexandria, particularly by Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 257–180 BCE), see Law, History, 52–55. Yet, as argued by Matthews (Graeco-Roman Grammar), the purpose of the ancient Greek grammarians in the Hellenistic period was roundly pedagogical and applied, meant to improve and refine language for the purposes of public speaking for educated males in roles at the upper-echelons of society. Note that prescriptivism, broadly defined, is an approach to language that establishes rules—or prescriptions—of usage, positioning itself as an arbiter of “proper,” “correct,” or “good” grammar that is seen to conform to the norms of standardized language. On the other side of the methodological spectrum is descriptivism, which, instead of attempting to shape the language system, instead describes language in use as far as possible in a nonjudgmental and value-free way. See Nelson, “Description and Prescription.”
See Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 17–42. Some classical writers, such as Heraclitus (B107) also conflated the linguistic and cultural elements with notions of racial superiority, attributing the different conventions (
Vassilaki, “
Matthews, “Ancient Grammarians,” 1194–95; Matthews, “Greek and Latin Linguistics,” 50; Pagani, “Language Correctness,” 801–6. Harris and Taylor (Landmarks, 48) point out that the Stoics seem to have adopted Aristotle’s notion that logic presupposed existence of the Greek language, making the latter “an essential philosophical preliminary.” On the transition from philosophy to grammar, see Law, History, 38–49.
Pagani, “Language Correctness,” 798–99; Pagani, “Linguistic Correctness”; Matthews, Graeco-Roman Grammar, 129–45. On the shift in meaning of
See the edition of Matthaios, Untersuchungen. Hellenismos was often derived from the principle of analogy (
See the edition of Aujac, Denys d’Halicarnasse, 9–41.
It is important to recognize that classical Attic itself was not monolithic or homogenous, but manifested its own internal variety, as is evident in the works of Aristophanes. But the linguistic preferences of the Hellenistic and Roman grammarians were specifically built upon their reception of what Tribulato calls the “literary dialects” (see his essay by that name).
As attested by Diogenes Laertius (7.59).
Vassilaki, “
See Kazazis, “Atticism.”
Colvin, “Greek Koine,” 34. The same can be said of standardized (“correct”) spelling, or
Strobel, “Lexica,” 96. Cf. Lee, “Atticist Grammarians,” 284.
On the relationship between Atticism and the New Testament, see Lee, “Atticist Grammarians.”
Léonas (Recherches, 112) notes that, perhaps ironically, “[l]a simplicité du style vient d’être perçue comme un reflet de la révélation divine.”
See the comparisons by Browning, Medieval and Modern Greek, 47–48 and Horrocks, Greek, 149–50. On Phrynichus, see Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship, 96–97.
See Léonas, Recherches, 112–20, for similar critical remarks by ancient writers.
Further detail in Pagani, “Language Correctness,” 832–39; Probert, “Attic Irregularities,” 270.
Harris and Taylor, Landmarks, 48.
See Vassilaki, “
See Matthews, Graeco-Roman Grammar, 23–25 and Seuren, Western Linguistics, 23–25, who discusses the distinctives of each school, calling the analogists “formalists” and the anomalists “ecologists” in their approach.
Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 19. Barr, “Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek,” 100, points out that in modern scholarship koine is sometimes used to refer to the status of Greek as the general, non-regional lingua franca in the Hellenistic period, but is also used to refer to vernacular or informal use. To cite just two examples of the latter (mistaken) construal, see Strauss, Distorting Scripture?, 94; Gibson and Campbell, Reading, 2. A key essay on this topic is Brixhe and Hodot, “A chacun sa koiné?”
Horrocks, Greek, 96–105. That is,
Versteegh, “Latinitas, hellenismos,” 263–65, who states that “
See Morpurgo Davies, “Greek Notion of Dialect,” 163–64, 168. Versteegh, 257–59 finds more regional associations. Tribulato (“Dialectology,” 460) points out how the grammarians largely construed
Browning, Medieval and Modern Greek, 44. This Atticist notion of
Versteegh (259) states that “[t]he colloquial had no place in their considerations” (cf. 261). Similarly Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 32.
Indeed, this is precisely how Greek was construed in the classical period; Morpurgo Davies, “Greek Notion of Dialect,” 161. On this point, Colvin (“Greek Koine,” 33) invokes Wittgenstein’s famous “game” example in his Philosophical Investigations. Versteegh (257–59) argues that the grammarians actually viewed their standard Koine
Lee, “Atticist Grammarians,” 284.
Horrocks, Greek, 84. Similarly Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 29–30.
Matthews, “Greek and Latin Linguistics,” 50.
Horrocks, Greek, 134. Similarly, Kotzia and Chriti (“Ancient Philosophers,” 132) state that “the views formulated by ancient Greek philosophers from the Pre-Socratics to the Neoplatonists constructed the basis for grammar and rhetoric during the Middle Ages and constituted a key frame for the development of contemporary linguistics.”
Colvin, “Greek Koine,” 34. Tribulato (“Dialectology,” 260) notes that Roman and Byzantine grammarians modified earlier notions of
As noted above, De Lingua Latina provides a key source for the supposed debate between analogists and anomalists and represents the first treatment of syntax as part of linguistic structure; Matthews, “Ancient Grammarians,” 1195; Harris and Taylor, Landmarks, 47.
Matthews, “Greek and Latin Linguistics,” 51. On Latinitas, see Desbordes, “Débuts de la grammaire”; and Versteegh, “Latinitas, hellenismos,” 251–52, who suggests that not only the ancient grammarians of Latin, but also of Arabic operated in similar linguistic contexts and with parallel views of elite language standards.
Horrocks, Greek, 134. In this context, civic life “demanded rhetorical skills, since formal speeches, often with some political content, were routinely given on major public occasions. A successful performance could lead directly to imperial patronage and the channeling of resources towards a particular city or project, while a reputation for eloquence could readily lead to significant personal advancement” (133).
Lucian was a satirist, of course, but satire only works when the reality that it mocks actually exists. See further discussion in Swain, Hellenism and Empire, 33–51. Translation adapted from LCL 430: 173.
Versteegh, “Borrowing and Influence,” 198. For important qualifications on the extent of the influence of Greek grammarians upon their Roman counterparts, see Zetzel, Critics, Compilers, Commentators, 15–30, who concludes that by the time of Varro “we can clearly see a conscious attempt to blend Roman antiquarianism with Greek grammatical and philosophical theory in creating a distinctively Roman philology” (30).
Harris and Taylor, Landmarks, 52; Seuren, Western Linguistics, 22–23; Schmidhauser, “Birth of Grammar,” 500–501. Although traditionally attributed to Dionysius Thrax, Law (“Roman Evidence”) suggests that the Technē more likely originated in the fourth or fifth century CE. Even as early as the sixth century doubts had surfaced among scholiasts about its authenticity. Regardless of who wrote it, however, it is clear from the amount of interaction with it that the text was very well known in antiquity and the Byzantine period.
See Seuren, Western Linguistics, 27–48 (quote on 39) and Law, History, 258–75.
Seuren, Western Linguistics, 63–64. See also Tribulato, “Dialectology,” 458.
Seuren, 109–10. See, e.g., Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit, §7. A central part of this theoretical approach, as Harris and Taylor (Landmarks, 54) observe, is “[t]he longevity of Latin and Greek as the dominant models for linguistic theory,” which, they state, “may be measured by the fact that in the nineteenth century languages like Chinese would still be described as having no grammatical structure.”
By “recent” I mean scholarship at least since the early 80s, at which point Lee’s Lexical Study fundamentally changed the conversation regarding the notion of a supposed Jewish Greek dialect that was previously thought to be preserved in the language of the Septuagint.
Oftentimes discussion of language is limited in such articles to pointing to the differences of approach to translation in the Septuagint corpus (usually presented in a simplistic “literal” versus “free” fashion). Other entries make very brief and typically ambiguous (sometimes derogatory) comments about the qualities of the language itself. For example, in a relatively lengthy encyclopedia article, Soderlund (“Septuagint,” 408) says that “[i]n general, the LXX vocabulary and accidence are those of Hellenistic or Koine Greek, but the syntax of most books is better described as ‘translation’ or Hebraic Greek” (407), which at many points reflects “mediocre” style. A brief but more nuanced discussion is given by Sarna (“Biblical Literature,” 166), who considers the Greek Pentateuch to be a “monument of Hellenistic Greek” that is often “indifferent” to “Greek idiom.” The rest of the Septuagint corpus, however, is said to contain “considerable fluctuations” in quality. Kuntz (“Septuagint”) invokes the oft-repeated, but questionable, inverse proportionality of a translator’s adherence to the word order of his source text to the supposed quality of the Greek language, with lesser adherence supposedly resulting in “far better Greek.”
Walker, “Biblical Languages,” 336.
Walker, 337, emphasis added. Although apparently even this supposedly new language “retained” what Walker calls “its distinguishing characteristics of strength, beauty, clarity, and logical rhetorical power.”
Walker echoes the now risible opinions of certain nineteenth-century scholars, such as Trollope (Greek Grammar, 6), who felt that the conquest threw the classical dialects into “confusion” and produced a “corrupted” and “degenerate progeny.” So also Bentley (Dissertation, 316) maintained that the Greek language of classical antiquity was diluted by the languages it replaced “as by pouring a great quantity of water to a little wine.” With reference to the language of the Septuagint in particular, see the uncannily similar viticultural metaphor of Conybeare and Stock, Grammar, 21.
Greenspoon, “Septuagint,” in New Interpreter’s Dictionary, 174.
Greenspoon and Bromiley, “Septuagint,” 913, also dubiously claimed there were “no precedents” for their work. This claim is frequent throughout the literature. But see Aitken, “Translation Methods.”
While Léonas (Recherches) does speak of “traduction grec,” this term only appears three times in the entire book (29, 165, 169) and does not seem to represent the overall argument.
De Troyer, “Septuagint,” 275 n. 42.
Tov himself affirms that this description of his view is accurate (personal communication).
Porter, “Septuagint,” 289.
Porter, 288; cf. Thackeray, Grammar, 13. See the discussion of Thackeray’s categories by Trevor V. Evans in this volume of essays.
ABD 1:44.
ABD 3:969.
ABD 3:1064.
ABD 4:198, also expresses the view, now widely discredited, that postclassical (“Koine”) Greek formed from classical Attic through a process of creolization.
Note that the “Septuagint” article in ADB 5:1093–1104 by Peters contains no discussion of the Greek language itself, leaving Mussies as the final word on the matter.
Not to mention sometimes even treading hazardously close to anti-Semitic tropes.
Still worth consulting are the discussions by Thackeray (Grammar, 16–55) and Swete (Introduction, 289–314), although the latter cannot resist calling aspects of the language of the Septuagint “clumsy” (20), “a mongrel patois” (292) and “uncouth” (370). Also worthwhile is Jellicoe’s Septuagint and Modern Study, though it is slightly earlier than the period of scholarship surveyed here. Note that there is no significant discussion of the language of the Septuagint per se in Law, When God Spoke Greek; McLay, Use of Septuagint; Müller, First Bible; Hengel, Septuagint; Tov, Text-Critical Use; or Kreuzer, Introduction.
Jobes and Silva, Invitation, 113–27. This discussion is mostly the same as in the first edition of the book, but with minor updates in the literature cited.
Jobes and Silva, 114.
Jobes and Silva, 115, emphasis original.
Jobes and Silva, 122. Note the implied inverse proportionality mentioned in n. 50 above.
It also implies that scholarship has a sufficient grasp upon the Greek language of the historical period in which the Septuagint corpus was produced to know and therefore accurately adjudicate what is “normal” or “abnormal.” But this is simply not the case, as discussed more below.
Jobes and Silva, Invitation, 125. Notably, the term “translation Greek” appears only in one portion of this subsection (125–26), once in the introduction (3), and once in connection with other scholars’ work (317).
Fernández Marcos, Septuagint in Context, 3. Fernández Marcos nevertheless more frequently uses “biblical Greek” anyway, not only in the title of the first chapter itself but throughout the book.
See also Fernández Marcos, “Greek Pentateuch,” 82, 85, 88, where the language of the Septuagint is compared with the comprehensible but specialized scientific prose of Hipparchus, Euclides, and others.
Fernández Marcos, Septuagint in Context, 13.
Fernández Marcos, 14.
Dines, Septuagint, 110. She later notes correctly that the “line between non-literary and literary language is not as clear as has been assumed” (114).
Dines, 112–13.
Rajak, Translation and Survival, 125.
Rajak, 130. Rajak can even bring herself to admit that those who produced it “could even enjoy occasional linguistic flourishes” (126).
Rajak, 127. Note that Dines’ point cited above is thus not limited to late-nineteenth-century scholars.
Rajak, 133–34.
Rajak, 134.
Lust, Eynikel, and Hauspie, Greek-English Lexicon. See also Lust, Eynikel, and Hauspie, Greek-English Lexicon, 1992 and 1996. A revised edition was printed in 2008 and a third edition in 2015.
Lust, “Translation Greek,” 110, citing as support the work that Jobes and Silva critique when the terminology “translation Greek” appears in their introduction, as mentioned above.
Moreover, the correspondence (of whatever degree or kind) is established using texts of MT and the Rahlfs-Hanhart or Göttingen editions.
Lust, “Syntax and Translation Greek,” 110–11, emphasis added. The quotation marks are used with the last phrase not to denote some qualification, but because it is an English translation of the term Verlegenheitsübersetzungen coined by Flashar, “Exegetische.”
Lust, “Introduction,” xvi, xvii–xxi.
Lust, “
Lust, “Syntax and Translation Greek,” 397.
Lust, “Multiple Translators,” 668.
Lust, “Syntax and Translation Greek,” 395.
Hauspie, “Idiolect,” 205.
Hauspie, 206.
Hauspie, 207. It is unclear why Hauspie often uses “incorrect” (and “inappropriate”) in scare quotes—although not always (see 213)—but “correct” without them. Another scholar who was for some time part of the LEH project, Chamberlain, Greek of Septuagint, xiv, speaks of “normal Greek.”
Pietersma and Wright, New English Translation.
See the literature by Pietersma in the bibliography and Boyd-Taylor, Reading Between Lines.
Pietersma and Wright, “To the Reader,” in New English Translation, xiv. See also Pietersma, “Beyond Literalism,” 21.
Pietersma, “Exegesis,” 38. Similar value-based judgments appear in the work of others within the circle of NETS translators such as Wright (“Moving beyond Translating,” 32) and Wooden (“Interlinearity,” 144), who each speak of “sensible Greek.”
Pietersma and Wright, “To the Reader,” in New English Translation, xv.
Boyd-Taylor, “Who’s Afraid,” 198–99.
Boyd-Taylor, “Lexicography and Interlanguage.”
Sollamo, “Place of Enclitic,” 153; similarly “Study of Translation,” 165 and “Usage of Article,” 43.
Sollamo, “Reflexive Pronouns,” 311. See also “grammatically correct” use on p. 319 and linguistic usage that is judged “quite good” on p. 325.
Sollamo, “Translation Technique,” 350, 353, 354.
Hauspie, “
LaMontagne, “LXX Ruth,” 60, 61, 68, 70.
LaMontagne, “Reconsidering,” 50–51.
Cook, “Provenance,” 76, 77.
Hiebert and Dykstra, “Designing,” 516. This principle is associated with the still-forthcoming Society of Biblical Literature Commentary on the Septuagint (SBLCS), the prospectus for which is available online: https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ioscs/commentary/prospectus.html.
Büchner, “Greek Words,” 184.
It is not totally neutral, not only since the corpus is so large and diverse that it risks oversimplification, but also because the literary boundaries of what counts as the Septuagint are debatable.
Evans (“Standard Koine Greek,” 197) has identified and discussed a similar problem that appears within the discipline of papyrology, where “many observations, especially in older editions of papyrus texts, are based on aesthetic judgments, and an unsympathetic view of the post-classical language.” There is reason to think that such judgments by early papyrologists reflect and helped to reinforce similar conclusions about the language of the Septuagint, especially as these two corpora have been increasingly compared.
Nelson, “Description and Prescription,” 463.
Helpful recent volumes include, but are by no means limited to, Mesthrie, Cambridge Handbook; Mesthrie, Concise Encyclopedia; Ammon et al., Sociolinguistics; Holmes, Introduction; Trudgill, Glossary.
Lassiter, “Semantic Externalism,” 620.
Holmes, Introduction, 78–79.
See the insightful essay by Bubenik and Crespo, “Attitudes to Language.”
Yule, Study of Language, 239–62.
See, e.g., Willi, “Register Variation”; Porter, Linguistic Analysis, 113–31; Campbell, Advances, 134–45; and Cosani, “Ancient Greek Sociolinguistics” (esp. 121–23); and the literature cited in them; also Mullen and James, Multilingualism.
See Lee, Greek of Pentateuch; Lee, “Back to Question.” Two recent volumes pursuing this same research agenda for broader postclassical Greek include Rafiyenko and Seržant, Postclassical Greek, and Bentein and Janse, Varieties.
There are reference works for different corpora, such as the papyrological studies of Mayser, Grammatik; Gignac, Grammar; and Palmer, Grammar. But similar studies for literary works or epigraphical sources do not exist. So also are there lexicons for specific literary authors, such as McDougall, Lexicon in Diodorum Siculum or Mauersberger et al., Polybios-Lexikon. But integration of these types of reference works into unified grammatical or lexical studies of postclassical Greek in general has not been attempted.
See Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies, 68 for seminal discussion. In his guidelines for the NETS project, Pietersma (Translation Manual, 37–38) appears to take frequency of attestation as an index of standard language.
Van Minnen (“Future of Papyrology,” 644–45) provides stunning statistics: given the historical rate of publication of papyri over the last century since the discipline emerged, if only half of known unpublished papyri are publishable, it would take scholars a thousand years to finish (assuming for the sake of argument that no more are found). Not all these texts are in Greek, but a significant majority are.
See Lee, “Back to Question.”
Although for reasons of the overt (rather than covert) prestige involved, the classical authors themselves used in their writing the language variety appropriate to the genre, not the one(s) they spoke (e.g., Pindar did not use his native Boeotian dialect for choral poetry); Tribulato, “Literary Dialects,” 388–89. In similar fashion, while it cannot be explored here, the notion of genre in contemporary linguistic theory may also have something to contribute to the present topic.
Borrowing the term “enhancement” from Porter’s discussion of Semitic influence (either Hebrew or Aramaic) in the New Testament in Verbal Aspect, 118–41. Lee and Porter are in basic agreement in their classification of Hebraism/Semitism. Léonas (Recherches, 248) also prefers to speak of “une stylistique particulière,” which he calls “hiératique.” It is important to note that a variety need not be spoken, and indeed in the case of the Greek Pentateuch it seems, following Aitken’s “Translation Methods,” initially to have come into existence by dint of an approach to translation learned in the course of nonreligious professional training in the Ptolemaic administration, and only later come to embody a literary style for socioreligious reasons yet to be fully explored. It is probably also correct to say that the Greek Pentateuch reflects to some degree the conventions of a spoken variety used by the translators within their own socioreligious community, as suggested by Aejmelaeus, “Septuagint and Oral Translation.” One potential way forward for speaking about the stylistic variety of Greek in the Septuagint may be the notion of register variation. While a debated topic in itself, register is often defined as a language variety associated with a shared topic or situational framework.