Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 63:1 (NA 2012)
Article: Lexical Dependence And Intertextual Allusion In The Septuagint Of The Twelve Prophets Studies In Hosea, Amos And Micah
Author: Myrto Theocharous

---

TynBull 63:1 (2012) p. 153

Lexical Dependence And Intertextual Allusion In The Septuagint Of The Twelve Prophets
Studies In Hosea, Amos And Micah1

Myrto Theocharous

As the Septuagint is becoming increasingly important in studies of Second Temple Judaism, the interest of scholars is shifting away from the mere use of the version as an adjunct to the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. The process of sifting secondary readings in order to arrive at the ‘pure’ form of the Hebrew text has been the main preoccupation of textual critics for centuries. LXX readings were commonly retroverted into Hebrew in order to offer more pristine readings than have survived in the MT. Other ways of explaining deviations (e.g. translational factors, influence of late Hebrew/ Aramaic) were generally neglected and a different Hebrew Vorlage behind the LXX was commonly assumed.

The study of intertextuality is offering another angle of approach to the LXX version, attempting to explain deviations and peculiar renderings where other methods have been inadequate. The interests of an intertextual study are not directed towards restoring the Hebrew text. Instead, the translator, his literary competence and hermeneutical processes, conscious or unconscious, become the central foci. Consequently, through a better understanding of the translator and his intertextual matrix, some conclusions may be drawn regarding the interpretation of the biblical text in the circles inhabited by the LXX translator. This study examines a broad spectrum of intertextuality (i.e. various types of intertextuality) in the LXX Twelve Prophets (TP), with a special emphasis on the books of Hosea, Amos and Micah.

TynBull 63:1 (2012) p. 154

While most of the chapters have been limited to these three books, my findings may have some validity for the rest of the LXX TP, given that a single translator was probably responsible for all twelve books. At the same time, not every book of the TP necessarily triggered intertextual connections for the translator in the same way as the others. Only an examination of the rest of the LXX TP would reveal the extent of the intertextual element in each case.

The aim of chapter 2 was to ascertain whether LXX TP used the LXX Pentateuch as a kind of lexicon, since this has been argued by various scholars. It was shown that similarities between LXX Pentateuch and LXX TP could be explained otherwise, since the translators of both corpora had access to the same readily available Greek equivalents within their common Hellenistic milieu. Greek vocabulary peculiar to both corpora (e.g. neologisms, words with ‘forced’ meaning) had quite conceivably arisen in the Jewish community prior to the writi...

visitor : : uid: ()