Staying Jewish: Language and Identity in the Greek Bible

Abstract

This chapter analyses the very particular language of the Bible translation and accounts for it in social terms. In Alexandria it was desirable to be Greek, not Egyptian. But the Jewish community adapted to the colonial language in a very particular way: koine Greek was shaped by the translators so as to make it possible both to ‘go Greek’ and to ‘stay Jewish’. They had to serve both the requirements of public reading in the synagogue and the needs of education. Their seemingly artless and ‘literal’ translation technique, oriented more towards the source than the target language, made a connection for readers, and above all for hearers, with the traditional language of the Jewish ethnos, Biblical Hebrew. It is shown how many of the distinctive linguistic features of the translations achieved this end. The auditory impact of the Greek versions plays an important part. With limited variation and development, this translation language continued in operation through successive waves of translation activity, and it was also deployed in original works that were written by Jews during the Hellenistic and Roman periods which are now part of the Christian Septuagint corpus. Semantic innovation, the coinage of new word and expressions or of new meanings for familiar words, is a hallmark of this Septuagint language. Far from being a mere series of solutions to challenges of translation, this vocabulary represents the translators' intensely creative way of melding and contemporizing their different thought worlds.