The Letter of Aristeas

The Letter of Aristeas PDF Author: Benjamin G. Wright III
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110431353
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
In modern scholarship, there has been no fully fledged commentary written on the Letter of Aristeas, an important work of Hellenistic Judaism in Alexandria, which contains the earliest version of the translation of the Septuagint. This volume fills that gap. The book will be of relevance to anyone interested in Hellenistic Judaism, the Septuagint, the ancient Jewish community in Alexandria or ancient Jewish paideia.

The Letter of Aristeas

The Letter of Aristeas PDF Author: Benjamin G. Wright III
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110431353
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
In modern scholarship, there has been no fully fledged commentary written on the Letter of Aristeas, an important work of Hellenistic Judaism in Alexandria, which contains the earliest version of the translation of the Septuagint. This volume fills that gap. The book will be of relevance to anyone interested in Hellenistic Judaism, the Septuagint, the ancient Jewish community in Alexandria or ancient Jewish paideia.

Aristeas to Philocrates

Aristeas to Philocrates PDF Author: Moses Hadas
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1556355068
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The work commonly known as the Letter of Aristeas presents an account of the genesis of the Septuagint, and incidentally reflects currents of religious thought at a significant period of history. The book is a work of conscious literary art, composed according to the canons of the Greek schools, and the exaggerations and inaccuracies that have marred its credit in the past are marks not of the author's ignorance or bad faith but of the genre to which it belongs. Considered against its historical and intellectual background, Aristeas to Philocrates is a document of first-class importance and a unique specimen of its kind in the literature of the period. Professor Hadas's edition studies the book from the point of view of its literary as well as religious affinities and significance. His introduction fixes the place of the book in the history of Greek literature as well as of the religious development of the Jews, and his running commentary similarly illustrates the text from both points of view. The translation is in straightforward English. The Greek text is that of H. St. J. Thackeray and the brief critical notes that accompany it are by Professor Hadas.

The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria

The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria PDF Author: Sylvie Honigman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134462948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
The Letter of Aristeas tells the story of how Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt commissioned seventy scholars to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Long accepted as a straightforward historical account of a cultural enterprise in Ptolemaic Alexandria, the Letter nevertheless poses serious interpretative problems. Sylvie Honigman argues that the Letter should not be regarded as history, but as a charter myth for diaspora Judaism. She expounds its generic affinities with other works on Jewish history from Ptolemaic Alexandria, and argues that the process of translation was simultaneously a process of establishing an authoritative text, comparable to the work on the text of Homer being carried out by contemporary Greek scholars. The Letter of Aristeas is among the most intriguing literary productions of Ptolemaic Alexandria, and this is the first book-length study to be devoted to it.

The Meaning of the Letter of Aristeas

The Meaning of the Letter of Aristeas PDF Author: Ekaterina Matusova
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3647540439
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Ekaterin Matusova offers a new approach to the old problems of interpretation of the "Letter of Aristeas".Chapter 1 deals with the question of the structure of the narrative. Matusova argues that at the time of Aristeas compositions of the kind of the Reworked Pentateuch, or Rewritten Bible were circulating in Egypt in parallel with the LXX and were a source of interpretations of the Hebrew text different from the LXX and of specific combinations of subjects popular in Second Temple Judaism. In particular, Matusova further argues that the leading principle of the composition of the Letter is that of the Reworked Deuteronomy, where subjects referring to the idea of following the Law among the gentiles were grouped together. The analysis is based on a broad circle of Jewish sources, including Philo of Alexandria and documents from the Qumran library. The principle of the composition discovered in this part of the study is referred to as the Jewish paradigm.Chapter 2 offers a new interpretation of the frame story in the narrative, i.e. of the story of the translation in the strict sense. Matusova shows that two paradigms are skilfully combined in this split story: the Jewish one, based on the Bible, and the Greek one, which involves Greek grammatical theory. She further argues that the story, when read in terms of Greek grammar, turns out to be a consistent story not of the translation, but of the correction of the LXX, which is important for our understanding of the early history of the translation. The analysis involves extensive excurses into Greek grammatical theory, including a discussion of Aristotle, Dionysius Thrax and other Hellenistic grammarians.In Chapter 3 Matusova tries to find the reason for the combination of these two paradigms, namely the Jewish biblical paradigm and the Greek grammatical ones, and to interpret their interconnected meaning, by placing it in the broad historical context of the Ptolemaic state

The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism

The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110375559
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

The Formation of the Jewish Canon

The Formation of the Jewish Canon PDF Author: Timothy H. Lim
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300164343
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
DIVThe discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provides unprecedented insight into the nature of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament before its fixation. Timothy Lim here presents a complete account of the formation of the canon in Ancient Judaism from the emergence of the Torah in the Persian period to the final acceptance of the list of twenty-two/twenty-four books in the Rabbinic period./divDIV /divDIVUsing the Hebrew Bible, the Scrolls, the Apocrypha, the Letter of Aristeas, the writings of Philo, Josephus, the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature as primary evidence he argues that throughout the post-exilic period up to around 100 CE there was not one official “canon” accepted by all Jews; rather, there existed a plurality of collections of scriptures that were authoritative for different communities. Examining the literary sources and historical circumstances that led to the emergence of authoritative scriptures in ancient Judaism, Lim proposes a theory of the majority canon that posits that the Pharisaic canon became the canon of Rabbinic Judaism in the centuries after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple./div

Translation and Survival

Translation and Survival PDF Author: Tessa Rajak
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191609684
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was the first major translation in Western culture. Its significance was far-reaching. Without a Greek Bible, European history would have been entirely different - no Western Jewish diaspora and no Christianity. Translation and Survival is a literary and social study of the ancient creators and receivers of the translations, and about their impact. The Greek Bible served Jews who spoke Greek, and made the survival of the first Jewish diaspora possible; indeed, the translators invented the term 'diaspora'. It was a tool for the preservation of group identity and for the expression of resistance. It invented a new kind of language and many new terms. The Greek Bible translations ended up as the Christian Septuagint, taken over along with the entire heritage of Hellenistic Judaism, during the process of the Church's long-drawn-out parting from the Synagogue. Here, a brilliant creation is restored to its original context and to its first owners.

When God Spoke Greek

When God Spoke Greek PDF Author: Timothy Michael Law
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199781729
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Most readers do not know about the Bible used almost universally by early Christians, or about how that Bible was birthed, how it grew to prominence, and how it differs from the one used as the basis for most modern translations. Although it was one of the most important events in the history of our civilization, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the third century BCE is an event almost unknown outside of academia. Timothy Michael Law offers the first book to make this topic accessible to a wider audience. Retrospectively, we can hardly imagine the history of Christian thought, and the history of Christianity itself, without the Old Testament. When the Emperor Constantine adopted the Christian faith, his fusion of the Church and the State ensured that the Christian worldview (which by this time had absorbed Jewish ideals that had come to them through the Greek translation) would leave an imprint on subsequent history. This book narrates in a fresh and exciting way the story of the Septuagint, the Greek Scriptures of the ancient Jewish Diaspora that became the first Christian Old Testament.

The Legend of the Septuagint

The Legend of the Septuagint PDF Author: Abraham Wasserstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113945501X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The Septuagint is the most influential of the Greek versions of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. The exact circumstances of its creation are uncertain, but different versions of a legend about the miraculous nature of the translation have existed since antiquity. Beginning in the Letter of Aristeas, the legend describes how Ptolemy Philadelphus commissioned seventy-two Jewish scribes to translate the sacred Hebrew scriptures for his famous library in Alexandria. Subsequent variations on the story recount how the scribes, working independently, produced word-for-word, identical Greek versions. In the course of the following centuries, to our own time, the story has been adapted and changed by Jews, Christians, Muslims and pagans for many different reasons: to tell a story, to explain historical events and to lend authority to the Greek text for the institutions that used it. This book offers the first account of all of these versions over the last two millennia, providing a history of the uses and abuses of the legend in various cultures around the Mediterranean.

Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginnings of Christian Epistolography

Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginnings of Christian Epistolography PDF Author: Lutz Doering
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161522369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
The author provides the most extensive analysis available of ancient Jewish letter writing from the Persian period until the early rabbinic literature. In addition, he demonstrates the significance of Jewish letters for the development of early Christian letter writing.