The Old Testament in Byzantium (review)

The Septuagint (LXX) is the major Greek translation (among others) of the Hebrew Bible from the early Hellenistic period that is still a central pillar (in its many versions) for Christian cultures to the present day. However, the impact of the LXX upon Byzantium (the common modern term for the Christian Roman Empire that ruled from Constantinople from 330 until 1453) and its successor Orthodox states has not yet been subjected to sustained inquiry by scholars. The eleven chapters in this volume represent a new stage in the study of the LXX and its influence on Byzantine art, culture, politics, and religion.

The lengthy introduction by the two editors is an important statement for scholars of both Byzantine Hellenism and Judaism. It represents both a survey and a study in itself of the impact of Jews on Byzantine culture and their relations with the Christian majority. Traditionally the Jewish minority in Byzantium, a declining demographic group, has been treated as subject (or victim) to legal restrictions and a hostile rival ecclesiastical tradition. More recently the economic role of the Jews in medieval Mediterranean economy has been treated by a number of scholars. In this volume the editors, in a most welcome emphasis, stress the value and impact of the LXX on many aspects of Christian and Jewish cultures in Byzantium.

The essay by Nicholas de Lange deals in particular with the use of Greek in the Bible translations of Byzantine Jews. Some years ago Benzion Wacholder emphasized that the Greek of the LXX was a kind of Yiddish Greek, i.e., a semi Atticized Greek version of the Semitic patterns that it introduced into the dominant gentile language. De Lange notes that Jews used mainly a second-century translation by Akylas (Aquila), a convert invited by the Tannaim to prepare a literal translation of the Hebrew text for the use of the Jews, presumably since the LXX had been appropriated by the new Christian movement and also because the text had to be updated for those Jews who did not control Hebrew, which did not become the intellectual language and script of the Jews until the eighth or ninth century. This version of Akylas was used through the sixth century in Greek, and echoes of it can be found in the Hebrew glosses, scholia, and commentaries of Byzantine Jews through the sixteenth century alongside use of other rabbinical sanctioned translations into Greek of the fourth and fifth centuries. De Lange discusses various Byzantine Greek texts extant in Genizah collections, primarily that of Cambridge University, and also notes the possible influence of the Greek-Jewish tradition on Christian scholars. He rightly stresses the paucity of surviving Byzantine Jewish texts, although one should note that more kabbalistic texts from Byzantium are extant than from Sepharad and Ashkenaz combined.

The two lead essays, comprising a sixth of the volume under review, set the stage for the following informative and perceptive chapters. James Miller, on the centrality of the Prophetologion or the third lectionary (LXX excerpts) of readings from the Old and New Testaments which were of more immediate influence on the "common" Christian population, challenges the thesis of the book at large and asks how much of the Old Testament was known to Byzantines. By way of example he argues that only a handful (perhaps 17) of the 1500 extant Old Testament manuscripts may have contained the whole biblical corpus. This datum, in contradistinction to post-Gutenberg realities where nearly every home has at least one complete Bible (Old and New Testaments), privileges the thesis that Byzantines knew their limited biblical data through the lectionaries to which they were exposed in church. We might suggest a parallel with the Jews where the midrash and Talmud are repositories of relevant texts and few complete Bibles were available other than the regular public reading of the Torah as discussed by de Lange. To Miller the Old Testament was in reality a part of the Orthodox liturgy in...