Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint2019

"The Hebrew Bible has played an important part in the development of Western culture. Its central ideas – such as monotheism, the demythologization of nature, or the linearity of time – needed to be taken out of the national and linguistic milieu in which they had developed, however, if they were to become comprehensible in the Graeco-Roman culture. They also needed to be rendered palatable to a mentality that had experienced the scientific, rationalist revolution prepared by the Greeks. As the oldest Greek translation of the Jewish Bible, composed during the third and second centuries B.C.E., the Septuagint represents the first important step in this process of acculturation. Over the past twenty years, the Septuagint has come out of the shadows of its Hebrew source. Historians of...