Non­fic­tion

Trans­la­tion and Sur­vival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jew­ish Diaspora

Tes­sa Rajak
  • Review
By – September 8, 2011
This sophis­ti­cat­ed dis­cus­sion of the ori­gins and influ­ence of the Sep­tu­agint, the Greek ver­sion of the Tanakh, devel­ops this esteemed professor’s Grin­field lec­tures at Oxford. The author focus­es the dis­cus­sion not sim­ply on the texts and their his­to­ry, but on the Jews of the Greek-speak­ing world who devel­oped and used these texts in the ever-chang­ing world from the 3rd cen­tu­ry BCE to the mid-2nd cen­tu­ry CE. They would nat­u­ral­ly be thus expect­ed to change what they found in these texts to guide and enrich their lives. Sim­i­lar­ly, Rajak shows her read­er many new ways to under­stand these texts and the peo­ple who read them. Per­haps the inter­est­ed read­er can best grasp the scope of this vol­ume from this list of a few of the chap­ter titles: The Let­ter of Aris­teas between His­to­ry and Myth; Going Greek: Cul­ture and Pow­er in Ptole­ma­ic Alexan­dria; The Jew­ish Dias­po­ra in Grae­co-Roman Antiq­ui­ty; Stay­ing Jew­ish: Lan­guage and Iden­ti­ty in the Greek Bible; Rep­re­sent­ing the Sub­vert­ing Pow­er; The Uses of Scrip­ture in Hel­lenis­tic Judaism; Par­al­lels and Mod­els; The Bible among Greeks and Romans; The Sep­tu­agint between Jews and Chris­tians. Bib­li­og­ra­phy, index.
Mark D. Nanos, Ph.D., Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas, is the author of Mys­tery­of Romans, win­ner of the 1996 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award, Charles H. Revson­Award in Jew­ish-Chris­t­ian Relations.

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