Jewish Greek in the Septuagint: On εὐλογέω ‘to praise’ with Dative

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As John Lee has shown in his celebrated Lexical Study, the Septuagint provides excellent testimony to the fact that Jews in Egypt at the beginning of the Hellenistic period expressed themselves in idiomatic Greek paralleled in contemporary sources, first and foremost the documentary papyri.The Greek of the Septuagint is no Jewish-Greek Creole, nor is it deficient in a way that would suggest imperfect or non-native competence. Although the translators obviously had enough Hebrew to translate such complex literary texts as the Hebrew scriptures, and almost certainly knew Aramaic as well, their Greek, wherever it is not overly faithful to the source text, is authentic. “Biblical Greek” is not a distinct language, it is simply Hellenistic Greek as used in the Septuagint and, later, the New Testament.

Authors: Joosten, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Peeters Publishers
• Host title: Biblical Greek in Context. Essays in Honour of John A.L. Lee
• Pages: 137-144
• Series: Biblical Tools and Studies 22
• Publication date: 2015-01-01
• ISBN: 9789042933170