Translation and Survival

Abstract

The first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was a major translation in Western culture. This literary and social study is about the ancient creators and receivers of the translations and about their impact. The book shows how the Greek Bible served the Jewish diaspora for over half a millennium, providing the foundations of life for a highly text-centred ethnic and religious minority as they fell under the pressures of the powerful imperial cultures of Greece and Rome, and of a dominant, ‘colonial’ language, Greek. Those large communities of the eastern Mediterranean, with their converts and sympathizers, determined the pattern of Jewish existence outside Palestine for centuries. Far from being isolated and inward-looking, they were, we now know, active members of their city environments. Yet they were not wholly assimilated. The book asks exactly how the translations operated as tools for the preservation of group identity and how, even in their language, they offered a quiet cultural resistance. The Greek Bible translations ended up as the Christian Septuagint, taken over along with the entire heritage of the remarkable hybrid culture of Hellenistic Judaism, during the process of the Church's long drawn-out parting from the Synagogue. That transference allowed the recipients to sideline Christianity's original Jewishness and history to be re-written. In this book, history is recovered and a great cultural artifact is restored to its proper place.