Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint

The Hebrew Bible has played an important part in the development of Western culture. Its central ideas - such as monotheism, the demythologization of nature, or the linearity of time - needed to be taken out of the national and linguistic milieu in which they had developed, however, if they were to become comprehensible in the Graeco-Roman culture. They also needed to be rendered palatable to a mentality that had experienced the scientific, rationalist revolution prepared by the Greeks. As the oldest Greek translation of the Jewish Bible, composed during the third and second centuries B.C.E., the Septuagint represents the first important step in this process of acculturation. Over the past twenty years, the Septuagint has come out of the shadows of its Hebrew source. Historians of Judaism, linguists, and biblical scholars have come to view it as a significant document in its own right. As the discoveries in Qumran have shown, the Hebrew source text of the Septuagint was not identical to the traditional text received by the synagogue. The Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint is a large-scale collective and interdisciplinary project aimed at providing a new research tool: a multi-volume dictionary with around 600 comprehensive articles for each important word or word group of the Septuagint, thereby filling an important gap in the fields of ancient philology and religious studies.