Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 48

The LXX is special in two respects: first, the fact that translation was made into Greek, and second the way the translation was made. To reach a Greek audience, non-Greeks also wrote in Greek (Manetho, Berossus, Josephus), or texts were translated from Greek. Generally, Greek was the original language.³² The Romans translated from Greek to Latin. »However, by today’s standards one would not call these texts translations but free revisions.«³³ In this type of »translation,« Latin language and culture sought to connect with the superior Greek, and to some extent entered into competition with it (the keyword is aemulatio).

But this is precisely what the LXX translators do not do. The Greek idiom into which they translated was not the language of literature but the non-literary colloquial, Koine. This allows us to pinpoint the target group. This was not the literary world of the Alexandrian schools but that of the Jewish communities of Alexandria, who generally did not speak Hebrew, but were offered something like an »imitation« of the Hebrew. That is why the LXX is a very literal translation. The character of this literal translation is evident in comparison with Josephus’s revisions and renderings of biblical history in his Antiquities.