PREFACE With the Septuagint, it is the same as in Goethe’s lines: Poems are painted window panes! From the market one looks into the church, Where all is dark and sombre … A considerable number of theologians regard the Septuagint as Goethe views the poems in ‘der Herr Philister’: they know it, if at all, merely from the outside, and are therefore able to do little with it. At best, it has a subservient function, for example in aiding the establishment of the text of the Hebrew Bible, as proof of