Sofia 2024 Call for Papers
For the 2024 Annual Conference, the research unit The Greek Bible Between Judaism and Christianity seeks proposals on the topic of The Greek Bible in Judaism. This session will attempt to trace the history of Jewish engagement with Greek biblical traditions from antiquity until the early modern period.
In earlier scholarship, it was often assumed that Jews responded to the Christian adoption of the Septuagint with a general rejection of biblical traditions in Greek. In the course of the 20th century, however, it has become clear that Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean continued to engage with the Bible in Greek, albeit in different contexts and in different ways. This is clear from wide-ranging (though often fragmentary) evidence, including ancient Jewish readings, revisions and retranslations of the Septuagint, echoes of Greek-language exegesis in Rabbinic literature, textual finds from late antiquity in the Cairo Genizah, and various texts and fragments from the Byzantine age. Chronologically, the source material to be discussed in this session ranges from the earliest revisions and retranslations of the Septuagint, primarily the so-called “Kaige group” and the versions of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, over Jewish sources from late antiquity and the medieval period to the publication of the Constantinople Pentateuch in 1547.
Jewish use of the Greek Bible is an important but oft-neglected field of study. While Biblical scholars readily acknowledge the importance of the Septuagint as an object of study, many are not (sufficiently) aware of the wide-ranging and intriguing afterlife of the Greek Bible in ancient, late antique and medieval Judaism. This session intends to stimulate scholarly interest in the reception of the Greek Bible in Jewish contexts.
Possible research questions include but are not limited to:
1. Under what conditions and circumstances did Jewish readers, scholars and translators engage with the Greek Bible? How did Jewish readers interpret the Septuagint? What can we learn from the available evidence about the identity, the sources and the modus operandi of these readers, scholars and translators?
2. How did the position of the Greek biblical tradition within Judaism change over time? How is this reflected in the evidence at our disposal? How did cultural transformations, such as the emergence of Christianity and the gradual ‘parting of the ways’, or the dominance of Greek Christianity in the Byzantine Empire, affect the reception of the Greek Bible within Judaism?
3. How do instances of Greek Bible use by Jews relate to questions of identity? Is there anything specifically “Jewish” about the texts under scrutiny? Is the use of Greek accepted or problematised? Or is the Greek language itself transformed as a means of expression, e.g. through transliteration in Hebrew script? How do these texts relate to the wider use of Greek language and literature in ancient and medieval Judaism, and to its rich and multilingual heritage?
We look forward to proposals that either (a) study in detail specific source material within the purview of this call; or (b) adopt a diachronic perspective on the source material and/or one or more of the research questions. Papers on one of the following topics are especially welcome:
- the nature and extent of the “Kaige group” and its position within ancient Judaism
- the Jewish Minor Versions (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion and others)
- Philo and Josephus as readers and interpreters of the Septuagint
- evidence for the use of Greek-language exegesis in Rabbinic sources
- citations of the Greek Bible in Jewish inscriptions
- medieval Jewish-Greek translations of Biblical texts
- the Constantinople Pentateuch
