Back Cover Blurb1
- Septuaginta: A Reader’s Edition offers the complete text of the Greek Old Testament as it appears in the Rahlfs-Hanhart revised Septuaginta, laid out in a clear and readable format.
- All deuterocanonical books are included, as well as all double-texts, which are presented on facing pages for easy textual comparison.
- In order to facilitate natural and seamless reading of the text, every word occurring 100 times or fewer in the Rahlfs-Hanhart text (excluding proper names) ― as well as every word that occurs more than 100 times in the Rahlfs-Hanhart text but fewer than 30 times in the Greek New Testament ― is accompanied by a footnote that provides a contextual gloss for the word and (for verbs only) full parsing.
- Additionally, an appendix provides a complete alphabetized list of common vocabulary (namely, all the words that are not accompanied by a footnote), with glosses and (as applicable) comparison of a word’s usage in the Septuagint to its usage in the New Testament.
- All poetry is distinguished typographically from prose and divided into individual lines for ease of reading.
- All of these combined features will make Septuaginta: A Reader’s Edition an indispensable resource for biblical scholars and an excellent tool for improving one’s comprehension of the Greek language. In addition to the attractive and high-quality binding, each volume will include two ribbon markers.
Amazon Customer Review
- The font is excellent. The paper is first class and thick, like a book, not shear like some Bibles. The authors left more than adequate room in the margin for notes.
- The authors' schema for which words to identify is good. They add a short glossary at the end for more frequently used words.
- For books like Jeremiah, it would have helped to have a code to the more general text since there are considerable variances in chapter and verse numbering and comparison is difficult.
- Both volumes are over 2" thick so they are large books.
- The topic titles, "Israel's Unfaithfulness Punished," "God's Response," "False Prophets Condemned," and so forth are in English, which is largely a matter of preference.
- What is seriously missing is in the Reader's Section. Nouns are given without definite articles or genitive endings, which is standard in Greek texts and extremely useful to most readers. In order to save space, a single definition, often a single word, is given. There is much white space on the pages so it would not have increased the size of the book to be more helpful here. It is not just about reading Greek but about understanding what is intended and there usually is not a single-word transference between Koine Greek and modern English.
Notes
- As of May 2021 I’ve made a start on reading though the LXX in Greek and have found the font in "Bagster (Publisher), Brenton (Launcelot Lee) - The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament" rather small and scratchy, so decided that for such a mammoth task, a decent copy was worth the investment.
- This book is very legible and basically ideal. A quibble would be – as a reviewer notes in a different context – that there’s a lot of wasted space. A footnoted word has its blurb repeated in full if it appears in different verses on the same page. This gets rather silly on occasion.
- As another Amazon reviewer pointed out, while Amazon says this is a “bilingual edition”, it’s basically just Greek, with a lexicon. I’m finding that this is about the right level – enough of a help with the language but not too distracting. I can always read the Launcelot Lee Brenton translation in parallel if I get lost, but I’ve not found this to be necessary (at least as far as Joshua).
- I can see what the Amazon blurb means by “double-texts” and the Reviewer by “the more general text”. It seems that Rahlfs-Hanhart prints both Codex Alexandrinus (A) and Codex Vaticanus (B) for some books (eg. Joshua and Judges) where there’s significant variation in the text. This adds a bit of overhead to the reading, though so far it seems to be lists of place-names. I’ve not compared either text yet to the Hebrew as my aim is simply to get familiar with reading the text in Greek, as well as to see what’s there. I’d like to study this in detail sometime – how these variations came about. Presumably, the scribes for these Christian Greek Bibles used whatever manuscripts they had to hand, which may have been translated from the Hebrew at different times, and with different approaches to transliterating the place names (or otherwise rendering them in Greek) when the Hebrew text may have differed (the lists are not always the same).
- See The Septuagint (LXX): Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America for the full Greek text on-line, a non-critical working text proposed by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. This has just their chosen text in Greek, with no notes or translation. From a quick look, it seems to approximate to Codex Alexandrinus.
- Having “topic titles” in English is the style of "Metzger (Bruce) - The Greek New Testament", though there the reason is for the use of Bible translators. Only Greek Orthodox would be using the LXX, one supposes, though not in this readers’ edition. It suits me.
In-Page Footnotes ("Lanier (Gregory R.) & Ros (William A.) - Septuaginta: A Reader's Edition - Volume 1")
Footnote 1:
- Actually taken from the Amazon Book Description, bulleted by me as per the blurb.
- Not exactly the same – there’s an extra bullet at the end on Amazon, and sundry stylistic differences.
- Also, the bullet on poetry was missing on Amazon.
Book Comment
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)