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A New English Translation of the Septuagint Hardcover – November 2, 2007

by Albert Pietersma (Editor), Benjamin G. Wright (Editor)

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The Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of Jewish sacred writings) is of great importance in the history of both Judaism and Christianity. The first translation of the books of the Hebrew Bible (plus additions) into the common language of the ancient Mediterranean world made the Jewish scriptures accessible to many outside Judaism. Not
only did the Septuagint become Holy Writ to Greek speaking Jews but it was also the Bible of the early Christian communities: the scripture they cited and the textual foundation of the early Christian movement.

Translated from Hebrew (and Aramaic) originals in the two centuries before Jesus, the Septuagint provides important information about the history of the text of the Bible. For centuries, scholars have looked to the Septuagint for information about the nature of the text and of how passages and specific words were understood.

For students of the Bible, the New Testament in particular, the study of the Septuagint's influence is a vital part of the history of interpretation. But until now, the Septuagint has not been available to English readers in a modern and accurate translation. The New English Translation of the Septuagint fills this gap.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A fresh and timely translation of the Septuagint. I enthusiasticall endorse this new translation. All those involved in this admirable project are to be congratulated for their contribution to raising Septuagint studies to the level of intensity and interest achieved by its sister fields of the Hebrew OT and the Greek NT." --Radu Gheorghita, Journal of the Evangelical Theology Society

About the Author

Albert Pietersma is Professor of Septuagint and Hellenistic Greek at The University of Toronto.

Benjamin G. Wright is University Distinguished Professor of Religion Studies, Bible, Early Judaism, Christianity at Lehigh University.

Product details

Publisher : Oxford University Press; 1st edition (November 2, 2007)
Language: : English
Hardcover : 1027 pages
ISBN-10 : 0195289757
ISBN-13 : 978-0195289756
Item Weight : 2.18 pounds
Dimensions : 9.2 x 1.1 x 6.4 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #141,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #255 in Jewish Sacred Writings (Books)
- #811 in History of Christianity (Books)
- #856 in Christian Church History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
170 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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john w. quist

What terrible English!!!

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2019

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My excitement turned to frustration and anger when I started to use the translation! Even with a M.Div. and post-graduate studies, I had to have my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary and my Lewis, et al's Latin Dictionary to decipher the stilted English words of the English translation. I'm waiting for the "Good News for Modern Man" translation, hopefully, in a revised edition!!! For now, Brenton (however "inadequate" and "antiquated" it might be) is just fine for me!! If the Septuagint is essential for biblical studies (and I believe it is), PLEASE hand over the translating to the translators of the "Good News" or the "NIV"!!!!! It needs to be readable!!!

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

A careful, scholarly work

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2019

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The introduction to this book does a great job of laying out the challenges of translating an ancient translation. It is not, however, aimed at people without a significant background in Hebrew, Greek and translation theory.

I give credit to the authors of the introduction, Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, for specifying the nature of the translation and its audience. Taken from Nida and Taber, _The Theory and Practice of Translation_ (Leiden: Brill, 1982), p. 31: "a translation in the present-day literary language, so as to communicate to the well-educated constituency." The translators chose this group "on the assumption that it is most probably this audience that has a more than passing interest in traditions of biblical literature other than their own" (p. xiv). I think they are right about this.

"Translating an ancient text can only be described as a profoundly difficult undertaking....

"The difficulties of the undertaking are certainly not decreased when one attempts to translate an ancient translation into a modern language. If translating is an act of interpreting, as linguists suggest it is, rather than a simple transfer of meaning, a Greek interpretation of a Hebrew original can be expected to reflect what the translator understood the Hebrew text to mean. The end result is therefore inevitably to some degree a commentary written at a specific historical time and place by an individual person, whose understanding of the Hebrew will often have been at variance with our own, though at times perhaps equally viable." (p. xvi)

Indeed, back when I was a linguist- and translator-in-training at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (early 1980s), I was taught the rather simplistic model of translation as a mere transfer of meaning. Experience, though, has taught me that this is virtually impossible. A text of any level of sophistication above that of a stop sign is full of cultural assumptions, lexical polysemy, syntactic ambiguity, and so forth. Any translation is perforce an interpretation. The only way to even begin to compensate for this, if the readers of the translations are not scholars trained in the relevant fields, is to include a massive set of footnotes. The average reader is just not going to take the time to read such a set of notes, even if they are included. The majority of traditional religious readers of a Bible translation are not prepared to deal with the challenges that such footnotes would present to their existing understanding of the text.

The New English Translation of the Septuagint is aimed at those who already have at least some of the relevant scholarly background and are not averse to acquiring more.

17 people found this helpful

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Andrew T.

Really Highly Recommended

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2017

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There are few translations of the Septuigint in English. This one is in my opinion, the best of all of them. It is exhaustive in its study of Greek and also Hebrew to translate the "Model 70" as accurately as possible into English. It really is exhaustive in its introductions to each Book, problem encountered and how they were dealt with. Highly recommended! Nicely printed in high quality thin Bible paper too.

26 people found this helpful

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Mark M.Top Contributor: Photography

NOT a good translation - PC Trash

Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2019

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This is not even close to being an accurate translation of the Septuagint. (see attached photo for a single page example)
It is filled with politically correct language, and watered down words.
It is so bad, that it changes the whole thing.
Stay away from this.
How in the heck did it get so many glowing reviews?????

14 people found this helpful

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Crash jr

Superb Translation and Scholarship.

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2019

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This is a long awaited and long overdue translation of the venerable Septuagint. The scholarship is impeccable. Just the introductions to each book themselves is worth the publication. This is a work of extremely high quality, far more so than one encounters with the usual 'cookie cutter' translations of the Hebrew Scriptures that have flooded the market. If you're surprised at the variations from your usual translation it's because the Septuagint, the bible used by the Apostles and early Christians varied also. And that the original translators made the usual mistakes and diversions common to humans. It's a translation of the ancient Greek which was translated from a very old Hebrew text.
I read the Septuagint (and the New Testament) in the original Greek and these translators did incredible work, both in establishing the text and its idiosyncracies and in rendering difficult turns of phrases in the Greek. Brenton's work, along with Thompson/Muses were great works in their time, but this edition is far superior in almost every way possible. New translation of the Bible come out regularly and one wonders why, in most cases, they were even published outside of the obvious, to sell a book. NOT SO with this monumental work. Buy it. Read it. And where it differs from what you're used to seeing investigate why and enjoy the journey.

11 people found this helpful

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SallyKay

I can’t wait to tell you how great this book is!

Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2020

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The text is clear and easy to read for even for elderly or someone that’s not a bible scholar.
The old Greek words are in each chapters previews and forewords. Not in chapters of the books.
I’ve tried to show you this is not a super large book.
And maybe from the size of my hand you can see the text is NOT large. But it is readable. Some of the names will have a different spelling,Noe for Noah. Moyses for Moses. Easy to understand! I love knowing I have one of the oldest pure translation from original Greek into English, with out changes, found in newer bibles.

8 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

TRA

Good, but ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 15, 2016

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I am writing this after having read approximately 60% of the text of the canonical books in Rahlfs’ edition of the Septuagint, comparing that text with the NETS translation. I think that this is a more-than-reasonable representative sample of the book and prefer to submit a review now, rather than possibly waiting a year or more until I have read 100% of the text. If subsequent reading reveals the need to revise my comments or grading, I will do so if possible.

People who have looked for “The New English Translation of the Septuagint” are likely to know that the Septuagint is the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, made by Jews in Alexandria approximately 250 years before the time of Christ. Readers who have a knowledge of New Testament (Koiné) Greek and have read some of the New Testament in Greek will find that large parts of the Septuagint are not difficult to understand, although it does also contain a lot of vocabulary that is not in the New Testament, and it is of course a much longer book.

In the 19th century, Launcelot C L Brenton translated the Septuagint into English, and his book is available on Amazon. However, for the modern reader it has two disadvantages:
a) the Greek text that he used was not as reliable as the text in Alfred Rahlfs’ Septuagint;
b) presumably influenced by the attitudes of the 19th century, Brenton translated the Septuagint into a style of English that imitated that of the early-17th-century Authorised (King James) Version of the Bible.

The NETS translation is therefore a substantial advance on Brenton’s text, though it must be pointed out that NETS’ text does not include the Greek; Brenton’s does.

The availability of NETS will encourage some readers with limited Greek to tackle the reading of the Greek text of the Septuagint, with NETS open beside it to help with difficult words or passages. For those with little or no Greek, it will give a good indication, within the limits mentioned below, of the content of the Septuagint. It is therefore recommended for both groups of potential readers. Albert Pietersma and his team of translators are to be congratulated on undertaking and completing this massive task.

There is a short general introduction to NETS, and each book has an introduction by its translator. These introductions contain a lot of interesting information. Some knowledge of Greek and Hebrew is needed to gain maximum benefit from these introductions, but those with only Greek will also be able to appreciate most of what is written in the introductions.

The text is also available, free of charge, in electronic format, at the upenn.edu website, here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/edition/ However, it would cost a lot more to print out one’s own copy (not to mention the time involved!) than to buy the printed version, which has a very reasonable (low!) price.

What are my misgivings?

1) The translator of the book of Joshua, Leonard J Greenspoon, writes in his introduction, “The easier accessibility of the Rahlfs version makes it prudent to give it precedence in NETS.” (p. 174) In my opinion, he is absolutely right. However, some translators have chosen to work from other editions of the text (principally, that of Joseph Ziegler, but also, for some books, texts from other editors). When the translation departs from the Rahlfs text, it is impossible to know whether this is a peculiarity introduced by the translator or whether the Greek text he or she is working from is different from Rahlfs.

2) For a reason that I find unjustifiable, NETS “bases” (?) its translation on the NRSV English translation. Surely, the text of NETS should be based on the Greek text, not on an English text that is in any case not a translation from the Greek but from the Hebrew Masoretic text.

3) I have the (first) 2007 edition and there are what appear to me to be hundreds of errors in the translation. As indicated above, this may in some (or even many) cases be due to the use of a Greek text that is different from the text edited by Rahlfs. However, the above website does list the corrections and emendations introduced with the second printing in 2009. Nevertheless, there appear to have been hundreds of further corrections, dated 2014 and also available on the same website, from which they can easily be downloaded.

4) Most of the translators have opted to stay as close as possible to the Greek text, even when this is tortuous or repetitive. I consider that this is the right approach, even though it is in conflict with the production of a text somehow “based” on the NRSV English text. Potential readers should be aware that the resultant text frequently does not flow well in English and is not suitable for reading aloud (for instance, in a church or synagogue service). I do not view this as a defect: the purpose of the translation is to show what the Greek text says, and how it says it. NETS is a translation for use in study, not for public reading; for that purpose, many excellent translations already exist.

5) The editors of the NETS text have tried to impose a certain degree of uniformity across the whole of the publication. However, it is clear that there are variations in the approach and the style of the individual translators (as, indeed, was the case with the original translators who produced the Greek text!). NETS has, however, managed to get most translators to render σκήνωμα [skēnōma, “tents”] as “coverts”, although some translators have insisted (rightly, in my opinion) on using the word “tents”. English is my mother tongue, but I occasionally came across words that I did not know (for instance, “purulent”, in Lev. 26:16 or “recurvation” in Deut 32:24), or words that I did know but did not consider the best-possible choice (e.g., “satiety” in Lev 26:5) or fake “old English” as in “of yore” for ἀρχῆς [archēs, “old” or “ancient”] in Deut. 33:15).

As indicated above, NETS is an improvement on Brenton and will help many people who wish to study the Greek text. However, I hope that it will soon be possible to produce a third printing, incorporating the further corrections on the website and, I hope, some others that are desirable.

28 people found this helpful

Dave Kinsella

A Non-Technical Review

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2010

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I would like to give a non-technical review for those perhaps interested in the Septuagint for non-scholarly reasons.
The book itself is a beautiful hardback. The pages are very fine quality, with a silky smooth feel. The type is easy to read and look at.

The downside for me is that the book appears to be written for scholars or scholarly types. The introduction was hard to get through, as I found it to be a technical breakdown of the translation processes used and why.

The personal and places names have been retained from the Greek and are hard to pronounce sometimes and it's hard to remember who exactly it is. You sometimes find yourself stopping to think, and then saying "Oh, yeah that's Joseph" etc.

I also get the impression that the translation is a slightly liberal one, which I personally do not like. I do not like that the translator of Genesis chose divine wind over Holy Spirit in Genesis 1.

I would also like to see this edition of the Septuagint OT bound with the NRSV NT in a fairly economical edition.

Overall, I like this book as there is a sparsity on translations of the Septuagint; the Bible that Jesus (probably the Hebrew parent version and not the Masoretic which is another text family), the Apostles and the Early Church quoted from.

Update 20th September 2012: I also read the Early Church Fathers. Currently I am reading Justin Martyr's 2nd Apology, his dialogue with Tryhpo the Jew. Justin quotes a lot of the OT to this Jew, but what is interesting is he quotes almost exclusively from the LXX. There was one quote I just read the other day I couldn't put anywhere. It was quite an unusual reading, and it was in the context of a messianic passage. The version he read was far more messianic I believe than the versions we have today. Anyway, at one point he read Psalm 19 (it's Psalm 18 in the LXX), and as I read his version of it I thought I had never read it quite like that before. It seemed that this Psalm was messianic in nature too. But I had never heard any Bible scholar or apologist pull this one out. So I read it in my Orthodox Study Bible which also utilizes a version of the LXX, but that didn't seem messianic. So I read from my NETS translation, and lo and behold there it was! It reads just like Justin Martyrs version from 160AD. A few other texts that Justing read from were just the same; NETS was the closest and the most messianic in nature. I'll leave it up to you to buy a copy of the book and read it for yourself. I would also counsel you to buy the Ante Nicene Fathers: 10 Volumes (Early Church Fathers) .

But there was one thing I noticed that bugged me again. The first line goes "The heavens are telling of divine glory". It is my understanding that even Hellenistic Jews would not have meant it to be understood this way. The heavens are telling of God's glory, I believe, is more faithful to the text and to the people of the text. Both Jews and Christians. One reviewer on the US site, said the reason the translators said "divine wind" in Genesis 1 was because there were Jews on the translation committee, but surely no Jew would reject "God's glory" over "divine glory" in this psalm? I stand by my original assertion that this is a liberal translation by liberal scholars. Still very useful though as has just been shown, and worthy or every interested layperson's library.

15 people found this helpful

Daughter of Ab Yahuah

Satisfied

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 8, 2020

Verified Purchase

I am satisfied with this. I already have another Septuagint though like to compare and contrast. As I noted that at the time of my purchase that the price had been reduced, I consider it a worthwhile buy.