Muraoka - A greek-english lexicon of the Septuagint

The Septuagint can be approached from a variety of angles, and this is true even when one's interests are basically those of a lexicographer. Focusing for the moment on those parts of the Septuagint which are a translation from a Semitic original - and they form the bulk of the Septuagint - a Septuagint lexicographer must ask himself a series of questions: what does he understand by the meaning or usage of a given Septuagint Greek word or form?,

what significance is to be attached to the Semitic text behind the translation?, what is he going to do when the Greek text reads rather oddly or makes no good sense at all?, and so on. These are some of the complexities arising from the fact that here we are dealing with a translated text, which adds a third dimension, that of translator in addition to the author of the original text and the reader of the resultant translation.

There is now hardly any need to justify the compiling of a Septuagint lexicon. The need of a modern scientific Septuagint lexicon was justly recognised by many leading scholars and by the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. Since one could hardly disagree with Schlirer, who says: "Die Grundlage aller judisch-hellenistischen Bildung ist die alte anonyme griechische Ubersetzung der heiligen Schriften, die unter dem Namen der Septuaginta .. bekannt und durch die Uberlieferung der christlichen Kirche uns vollstandig erhalten ist. Ohne sie ist das hellenistische Judentum ebenso wenig denkbar, wie die evangelische Kirche Deutschlands ohne Luthers deutsche Bibelubersetzung," one wonders how much longer the serious scientific study of this document could be contemplated without the proper tools of the trade such as a dictionary and a grammar. Whatever merits one may still accord to Schleusner's justly famous Lexicon? there is not a shadow of doubt that it needs to be superseded. Apart from the fundamental fact that his dictionary is not a dictionary in the usual sense of the term, but rather a collection of philological notes made from the perspective of the Hebrew word or words which a given Greek word translates in the Septuagint, the lexicon was published decades before the discovery of Greek papyri and inscriptions, which revolutionized our perception of the nature of the language of the Greek Bible.

 

The importance of the Septuagint does not lie merely in its value for historians of Early Judaism, but also in the fact that it embodies quite a sizeable amount of texts witnessing to Hellenistic, Koine Greek. Some of the current lexica such as Liddell, Scott and Jones, and Bauer do make fairly frequent references to the Septuagint, but their treatment, by universal agreement, leaves much to be desired.5 Furthermore, the last several decades have witnessed remarkable revived interests in the Septuagint, not only on the part of scholars interested in the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible, but also those who study the Septuagint as a Greek text with its own interests and perspectives, not necessarily as a translated text. All these considerations make it imperative that we should have an up-to-date and scientific dictionary of the Septuagint. It was against this backgroud that in the mid eighties I set out, together with Dr J.A.L. Lee, of Sydney University, in the compiling of a lexicon of the Septuagint of the Twelve Prophets.