A Grammar of

The Old Testament in Greek

According to the septuagint

by

HENRY St JOHN THACKERAY, M.A.

sometime scholar of king’s college, cambridge

Vol. I

introduction, orthography and accidence

Cambridge:

at the University Press

1909

To My Wife

Γυναῖκα ἀνδρείαν τίς εὑρήσει;

τιμιωτέρα δέ ἐστιν λίθων πολυτελῶν ἡ τοιαύτη.

PREFACE

THE Grammar, of which the first portion is here published, has during the last eight years been the occupation of the very limited leisure of a civil servant. It owes its origin to the suggestion of Dr Swete, who has throughout its preparation been the writer’s kindly and encouraging ἐργοδιώκτης. It is due to his good offices that this portion now appears in the form of a separate volume, and it is needless to add that it is his edition of the text, together with the Concordance of the late Dr. Redpath, which alone has rendered such a work possible.

It may be asked: What need is there for the work? Why write a Grammar of a translation, in parts a servile translation, into a Greek which is far removed from the Attic standard, of an original which was often imperfectly understood? A sufficient answer might be that the work forms part of a larger whole, the Grammar of Hellenistic Greek, the claims of which, as bridging the gulf between the ancient and the modern tongue upon the attention of φιλέλληνες and philologists have in recent years begun to receive their due recognition from a growing company of scholars. The Septuagint, in view both of the period which it covers and the variety of its styles, ranging from the non-literary vernacular to the artificial Atticistic, affords the most promising ground for the investigation of the peculiarities of the Hellenistic or ‘common’ language. “La Septante est le grand monument de la Κοινή,” says Psichari. But the Septuagint has, moreover, special claims of its own. Though of less paramount importance than the New Testament, the fact that it was the only form in which the older Scriptures were known to many generations of Jews and Christians and the deep influence which it exercised upon New Testament and Patristic writers justify a separate treatment of its language. Again, the fact that it is in the main a translation gives it a special character and raises the difficult question of the extent of Semitic influence upon the written and spoken Greek of a bilingual people.

The period covered by the books of the Septuagint was mentioned. This may conveniently be divided into three parts. (1) There is every reason to accept the very early tradition that the Greek Pentateuch, to which, it would seem, at least a partial translation of Joshua was soon appended, originated in the third century b.c. We are, then, in the Hexateuch taken back to the dawn of the Κοινή, to a period when certain forms and usages were in existence which had already become obsolete in New Testament times. Some of these are moribund survivals from classical Greek, others are experiments of the new language ...