CHAPTER 1 What is ‘the Septuagint’? Writing in the first century CE, the Jewish author Philo of Alexandria described the Mosaic Scriptures in Greek as a ‘good gift’ from Jews to the Greek-speaking world (De Vita Mosis 2.41). In our own time, the Septuagint (LXX), the first sustained translation of Semitic sacred texts into an Indo-European language, has been called a ‘phenomenon’ (Brock 1972: 11). Both linguistically and culturally, the LXX is a remarkable achievement of Hellenistic Judaism, with
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