Some of the earliest witnesses to the Book of Isaiah are translations into Greek and Syriac. Sometimes the translators offered not simply basic equivalents to Hebrew words but shaped their translation of passages to accord with understandings of them that were current in their Jewish communities. Although this can make the window to their Hebrew text opaque, sometimes their differences from today’s standard Hebrew text preserve alternative wordings found elsewhere in early Hebrew texts, while in other cases they include wordings that have not survived in any other Hebrew witnesses. The chief question such differences raise is whether the translator tailored his version to the readers’ pre-understanding or if they reflect different Hebrew words in the manuscript he used. In “Early Versions of Isaiah as Translations and Interpretations,” Ronald L. Troxel cites examples of these conundrums, and illustrates how scholars attempt to reason about their origins.

Chapter 5 turns, at last, to the more conventional resource for Christian ethics, namely the Bible. It looks specifically at the way that teleios and teleioö (adjective and verb) are used thrice each in Matthew, in Paul and in Pauline letters, but most frequently in Hebrews where Jesus is seen as being perfect and without sin and in the Septuagint variously depicting human, and more occasionally divine, perfection.

Early Christians used biblical narratives and motifs often and extensively. Supplementing literary evidence, Christian funerary inscriptions and inscriptions in church buildings reveal the dissemination of biblical tradition by the naming of children and by allusions to and citations from the Bible. Ekphrastic reference to and depiction of scenes from the Bible—like Moses splitting the Red Sea, Jonah and the big fish, the seven-eyed lamb of the Apocalypse or the paradisiacal peace of Isaiah 11—in stone or as mosaics and dipinti could be admired in churches or on graveyards. Through inscriptions, mosaics, literary works (such as those of Pseudo-Athanasius, Theodoret of Cyrus, or Amphilochius of Iconium), and liturgical practices, biblical stories and traditions were kept alive and woven into a network of knowledge and imagination, connecting Christians all over the ancient world.

This chapter is a response to the volume’s arguments. It explores the book’s two central claims – that literary works must be seen as products of their time, and are best understood as being in dialogue with one another. It argues that ‘being of one’s time’ is a complex idea that requires a sophisticated sense of ‘situatedness’. Specifically, it first explores how the imperial and colonial conditions of Hellenistic culture produce contested performances of belonging that change over time as the imaginary of empire is constructed. Second, it looks at how ‘dialogues’ between texts are gestures of self-authorisation for ancient writers and for modern historians. Third, it draws attention to the physical affordances of the construction of belonging – from how a person speaks and walks to the material culture of empire. Finally, it suggests that the book’s unwillingness to discuss the full range of, say, Jewish Greek writing from the period restricts how we can understand cultural translation and cultural belonging in the Hellenistic age, and produces a potentially misleading literary history of the era.

Contemporary discussions of Jews in the diaspora often draw a distinction between diaspora and exile, arguing that by the Hellenistic era, most Jews in the diaspora no longer viewed themselves as in exile, having exchanged the traditional biblical view of exile and return for a "diaspora theology" in which they took pride in the diaspora, viewing it in positive terms. This chapter argues that there is in fact no evidence to support such a claim. Whereas it is often claimed that the Septuagint systematically weakens the prophetic verdict on exile, a closer look at the evidence shows otherwise. The chapter concludes by arguing that while it is true that many Jews lived prosperous and happy lives in the diaspora, the fact that they remained subject to the whims of foreign rulers and the frequency with which Hellenistic Jewish texts portray the diaspora as a continuation of exile cannot be dismissed. The chapter concludes that there is simply no evidence that Jews in the Hellenistic diaspora regarded the period of exile as having ended and significant literary evidence to the contrary.

This chapter examines Philo's views of exile and eschatology and his use of Israel terminology. The first part of the chapter argues that despite his tendency towards allegory, numerous places in the Philonic corpus suggest that Philo viewed the exile as ongoing and—like Josephus—looked forward to a future restoration of Israel. The second part of the chapter shows that Philo avoids the term "Israel" when referring to his contemporaries, whom he calls Ioudaioi ("Jews"), while "Israel" appears in other contexts and correlates closely with his eschatological statements. Like Josephus, Philo argues that Israel's restoration will come through divine initiative rather than violent revolution, and the first element of that restoration will be a divinely initiated return to virtue and obedience. Remarkably, Philo also suggests that not all Jews are or will be included in "Israel," a view that reflects sympathy with a prophetic or sectarian view of Israel in which Israelite status is contingent on proper obedience to God.

This chapter investigates the specific philological practice of textual criticism and explores how this highly valued methodology was adopted by Jewish scholars working in the German-speaking world of the nineteenth century as part of the modernizing intellectual movement of Wissenschaft des Judentums, ‘The Scholarship of Judaism’. It explores how this move towards modernity depended on specific methodological engagement with a classical past. In particular, it focuses on how one leading rabbi and scholar, Zacharias Fraenkel, studied Greek philology in order to redraft Christian supersessionist historiography, which in the nineteenth century was composing a particular but profoundly distorting historical account of early Judaism, based on new philological methods. Fraenkel used philology to create a theologically-laden account of ancient Jewish society not as a dying religion but as a vital creative culture.

Argues that translation constitutes a distinct form of rewriting, with a distinctive range of functions that overlap with the functions of same-language rewriting. Examines the differing functions of translation in the books of the Greek Bible, the rabbinic Targumim, and the Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran, and highlights connections to other forms of rewriting.