Greek Bible

Call For Papers: For any open sessions, Greek Bible invites proposals that focus on how later writers use the Septuagint (see section description above). Our themed session in 2017 welcomes papers on Septuagint lexicology, including semantics, lexical innovation in the Septuagint, such as "unconventional," or "inventive" use of the Greek language in ancient Hebrew-Greek translation literature (Greek Bible) and its subsequent adoption (or non-adoption) by later authors (Jewish, Christian or pagan). Cameron Boyd-Taylor offers the following clarification: Attention may be paid, not only to calques, loan-words and neologisms, but subtler phenomena as well which departed from current lexical convention, such as novel (or at least hitherto unattested) collocations, distributions, associations, register of use, extensions, tropes etc. For instance some of the divine epithets in the Septuagint are unexpected, but are not simply translation phenomena, as they make their way into the Sibylline literature. This topic lends itself to the "pre-Barr post-Barr" divide as well, since it speaks to the debate between Barr and Hill over semantic transfer. Readers of the Septuagint have long noted its quirky use of language. The trick is to account for its origin and trace its impact on later authors. This of course requires the sort of methodological strictures that Barr argued for. Yet it also involves the investigator in more recent approaches to lexical semantics and language contact. The tendency recently has been to re-affirm Deismann's work, stressing the affinities between Septuagint usage and the evidence of the papyri etc. But there is a place for Hatch as well, which is to say, there is authentic transformation in our literature, and some of it would be of lasting significance. Moreover such phenomena undoubtedly open up a window on the times.

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