The language and style of Old Greek Job in context

This dissertation offers a study on the language and style of the oldest Greek translation of the biblical book of Job. The aim is to nuance the difficulties scholarship has had when characterizing the translation technique of Old Greek Job as "free", when describing its style as "good" and "literary" Greek, and its cultural outlook as "Hellenized". First, a thorough literary study of OG Job allows us to analyze its character from a new perspective, namely style. Style, defined as the selection of a set of linguistic features from all the possibilities in a language, pertains to all levels of the text: the choice of words, the order in which those words are combined to form phrases and clauses, and the way in which different clauses are combined to form a larger unit. Style implies choice and comparison: a translator has a choice between alternatives and these choices may be compared to the choices made by others. With this in mind, a variety of linguistic and stylistic phenomena in Old Greek Job are analyzed and multicausal explanations for the translator's choices are offered. Since Old Greek Job is a translation from a Hebrew source, the phenomena in the Greek text must always be discussed in relation to the Hebrew text. Consequently, this dissertation is also a study in translation. A descriptive analysis of language and style implies the ability to gain new insights into the translator's working method and abilities, that is, into the translation technique of Old Greek Job. Second, a descriptive analysis automatically leads to questions about the context. How can we explain the translator's choice of "free" translation technique, especially since the lion's share of Septuagint books are characterized as "literal"? Why did the translator use a higher register of Greek than many other Septuagint translations? In other words, how does OG Job fit in its literary environment? Moreover, the book of Job's linguistic transition from Hebrew into Greek is often regarded as a cultural transition from Judaism into Hellenism. Old Greek Job, however, remains a fundamentally Jewish text and is part of a specific corpus within Hellenistic literature, namely that of Jewish-Greek literature. The latter developed on the basis of the Greek translation of the Pentateuch and contains translated texts as well as non-translated compositions. It is the aim of this research to situate OG Job in this development from a literary point of view. An adequate theoretical framework to approach this issue was found in modern literary studies, in particular Polysystem Theory. Polysystem Theory allows us to study Old Greek Job as a translation from a Hebrew text and as a product of the target culture, namely of the Greek-speaking Jews in the Hellenistic Middle East. It is argued that Old Greek Job reflects a literary expression of a Judaism in development in an intercultural context, in terms of language, style, and cultural outlook.(THEO - Théologie) -- UCL, 201