Invitation to the Septuagint.

• Author: Gentry, Peter J.
• Position: Book Review

By KAREN H. JOBES and MOISES SILVA. Grand Rapids, Mich.: BAKER ACADEMIC PRESS, 2000. Pp. 351. $29.99.

Not many introductions to the Greek version(s) of the Hebrew Scriptures / Old Testament have appeared in the last century of scholarship. For English there is only H. B. Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge, 1902), and S. Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford, 1968). In French we have M. Harl, G. Dorival, and O. Munnich, La Bible grecque des Septante (Pads, 1988); in Italian M. Cimosa, Guida allo studio della Bibbia Greca: (LXX) (Rome, 1995); and in Spanish N. Fernandez Marcus, Introduccion a las versiones griegas de la Biblia, 2nd ed. (Madrid, 1998), now (2000) available in English from Brill. Thus the appearance of "a comprehensive, accessible primer to the Septuagint" (DJ) by Jobes and Silva is a milestone for the field of Septuagint studies, and especially significant when the introduction is a good one. Septuagint is a burgeoning discipline--the number of scholars attending the 11th Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies in Basel (2001) was coincidentally seventy-two! Many major projects have been initiated just in the last decade, and the amount of research from Jellicoe's time to the present has doubled, even though the time elapsed is only half the period from Swete to Jellicoe.

The book is particularly well organized, structured in three logical sections. The first part introduces the reader to the history of the Septuagint with one chapter devoted to origins, one to the history of transmission up to the invention of printing, and one to the history of printed texts focusing on modern times. The section concludes by considering the character of the Septuagint as a translation. This first section requires no knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, and here the authors take pains to help readers with no special training in the areas covered.

The second section, entitled "The Septuagint in Biblical Studies," is addressed to readers with some knowledge of biblical languages and seeks to bring the reader to an intermediate level of proficiency in using the Greek Bible. These chapters deal with the language of the Septuagint, the methodology, principles, and task of establishing the text of the Septuagint, the use of the Septuagint in textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, the relationship between issues in the field of Septuagint and questions raised by the discovery...