Journal: Southeastern Theological Review
Volume: STR 10:2 (Fall 2019)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

STR 10:2 (Fall 2019) p. 101

Book Reviews

Marieke Dhont. Style and Context of Old Greek Job. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 183. Leiden: Brill, 2017. x + 409 pp. Hardback. ISBN 978–9004358485. $159.00.

In her study of Old Greek Job (GJ), Marieke Dhont approaches this translation as “an artefact of Hellenistic Jewish literature, and a product of an intercultural context in which Jews did not simply adopt elements commonly associated with Hellenism, but in which Hellenism, in turn, is approached as a culturally diverse environment that includes Judaism and that undergoes change as Judaism evolves” (p. 4).

Dhont’s argument in Style and Context of Old Greek Job unfolds across nine chapters: 1 through 3 devoted to method and theory, 4 through 8 to a demonstration of GJ’s style and rhetoric, and the final chapter to situating GJ in its literary environment. This book is not a study in translation technique containing, for example, an exhaustive analysis of the Hebrew infinitive construct into Greek, though Dhont touches on the subject (pp. 18–33). Rather, Dhont applies Polysystem Theory (PST) to show where GJ fits on the literary landscape.

Within PST, literature, like any socio-semiotic system, is an integral part of society. Through PST, Dhont imagines literary texts as artefacts of a polysystem, which is conceptualized by oppositions (center/periphery, primary/secondary repertoires, canonized/non-canonized, pp. 61–63) and includes translations as an integral part (p. 64). All polysystems have hierarchies with various strata. Thus, Dhont envisions Job as part of the Jewish-Greek literary polysystem, a subsystem of the Hellenistic Greek literary polysystem containing overlapping categories of literature and translated texts (p. 73). This polysystem developed from the third century BCE to the second century CE with the Greek Pentateuch for its fount, and from this source, Jews rendered other scriptural texts into Greek and composed original works in Greek also (p. 74). In short, the repertoire expanded. Furthermore, translation technique developed (p. 81) as also did style (p. 83) within the Jewish-Greek polysystem, as Greek Proverbs, Job, and Isaiah show.

Moving on from method and theory, Dhont’s work demonstrates linguistic and stylistic features with a view to showing GJ’s place in the Jewish-Greek polysystem. In chapter 4, she shows how the translator employed both Septuagintal and natural Greek language by analyzing (1)

STR 10:2 (Fall 2019) p. 102

word order (e.g., the position of the genitive be...