Saturday 8 February 2014

LXX Day

Jesuit scholar and Oxford lecturer Nicholas King
News via James McGrath that today (February 8) has been designated - completely unofficially I gather - International Septuagint Day, continuing a tradition begun in 2006. If you really think you need to know more, here's the real oil.

Which makes it timely to put in another plug for the most readable, contemporary English translation of the LXX available on the planet, Nicholas King's amazing four-volume study bible opus, which has now appeared (since November last year) in a single volume, published in the UK by Kevin Mayhew. In his great book, When God Spoke Greek, Timothy Michael Law wrote:
Although NETS has usefully been published in a single volume and is now indispensable for the scholarly study of the Septuagint (and is therefore highly recommended for students and academics), we must continue to wait for a translation of the Septuagint that would appeal to nonspecialist readers of the Bible. (p.8)
 And now we have it.

2 comments:

  1. The OT was written in a language that no one could even read except for a select, and elite, temple priesthood and scribes. The common man couldn't read it and didn't even speak that language and was probably intended to be that way. After Alexander though, there were many people who could read Greek and when the dead language of the Hebrew OT was translated (badly) into Greek - all hell broke loose, including Christianity.

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  2. Thanks for posting about King's LXX translation. I knew there was a new translation out there, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was called or find it through Google searches.

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