From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 16 1997 - 06:23:58 EST
At 10:00 PM -0600 12/15/97, Andrew Kulikovsky wrote:
>Hi All!
>
>I realise that the quality of the LXX translation of the Hebrew OT
>varies substantially from book to book, so I was wondering how good and
>accurate is the LXX translation of Genesis?
>
>Does it accurately convey the Hebrew structure, idiom and rhetorical
>features?
>
>Is it overly literal? or very paraphrastic?
I hope you realize that this is no small question! ;-)
It raises all the perhaps innumerable questions about what translation
really is, so many of which have entered into many a discussion on this
list about translations into English especially. It also raises particular
questions about the nature of Hebrew and the nature of the Greek into which
the then Hebrew text of Genesis was conveyed.
I don't think there would be an easy consensus on this question. Perhaps
the first thing I'd want to say in response is that translating the Hebrew
into Greek was a great risk, comparable in its own very different
dimensionality to the "translation" of deity into humanity in the
incarnation, concerning which I've always been profoundly impressed by one
of Robert Frost's last poems:
But God's own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiation.
The problem is always whether the Hebrew that got translated meant the same
thing to the Hebrew writer and reader that the Greek into which it was
translated meant to the Greek writer and reader. That's a truism, I
suppose, but it's nonetheless a problem that is no little one.
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