Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 82:2 (Fall 2020)
Article: Reviews Of Books
Author: Anonymous

WTJ 82:2 (Fall 2020) p. 365

Reviews Of Books

John A. L. Lee, The Greek of the Pentateuch: Grinfield Lectures on the Septuagint, 2011–2012. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 384. $99.00, cloth.

John A. Lee is likely the foremost living LXX and NT lexicographer. As a retired professor of Greek who taught at the University of Sydney for almost 30 years, he is currently affiliated with Macquarie University and is part of spearheading the effort to produce A Greek-English Lexicon of the Zenon Papyri. His volume A History of New Testament Lexicography (New York: Peter Lang, 2003) is certainly the most important monograph on the topic to date.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Gustav Adolf Deissmann overturned the widely held idea that the Greek of the NT (and LXX) was a unique form of Jewish Greek. He showed, instead, that it was the widely spoken colloquial Greek of that time. Around the middle of the century, some scholars attempted to revivify the idea of a Jewish Greek. In 1970, however, John A. Lee wrote his Cambridge PhD thesis (published in 1983), A Lexical Study of the Septuagint Version of the Pentateuch, reaffirming Deissmann’s conclusions by giving strong arguments that the Pentateuch primarily consists of a popular colloquial form of ancient Greek. In the volume currently under review, which grew out of his material from the 2011–2012 Grinfield Lectures at the University of Oxford, Lee sets his sights on the nature of the Pentateuch as a translated text.

With regard to the nature of the Pentateuch as a translated text, Lee sees two main and opposing views prevailing in the field of LXX studies. The first typically thinks that “the translators simply followed the Hebrew as closely as possible,” and the result was “a mixture of aberrant and acceptable at the dictate of the original” (p. 211). Thus, the translation reflects “incompetence, either in adhering to the chosen translation method or in knowledge of the languages” (p. 211). The second view, however, portrays the translators as choosing to follow “a method that entailed some degree of interference from the original, leading to a mixture of natural and unnatural Greek which was, even so, meant to be intelligible to a Greek speaker” (p. 211). Lee’s aim with this volume is to move the field toward the second view. The goals of the volume are (1) to show that the text of the Pentateuch is fundamentally Greek (even with interference from the source text), (2) to demonstrate thereby that the translators were intimate with the Greek of their time (and its translational usage), and (3) to thus improve our knowledge of who the translators were. Lee’s controlling (and acknowledged) presupposition is that the Greek of the Pentateuch is Greek, and he considers that a...