Word: septuagint
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...authority for the text of the Old Testament than had been available. The Old Testament is based on the so-called Masoretic text (from masora, tradition) developed in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries A.D. by the schools of Babylonia and Palestine. Older than the Masoretic Bible is the Septuagint, a pre-Christian Greek translation which has been thought to be less authoritative than the Masoretic because of the difficulties of translating Hebrew terms into Greek. The Biblical manuscripts from Cave 4, yielding some texts far earlier than either, have considerably raised the prestige of the Septuagint...
Such corrections and additions, Dr. Cross hints, are only the beginning. When the Qumran fragments are finally edited, scholars will have for the first time a roughly contemporary Hebrew check on the Greek Septuagint, for centuries the bulwark of Old Testament translators. They will also have some important revisions to make in the work of those scholars who had a habit of trying to solve a corrupted Biblical text by speculation on the translator's sociological background. The entire job of editing the Qumran texts, now being done jointly by the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem...