LXX Canon: New JBL Article

I just received my offprint for a forthcoming article titled "Suddenly and Then Gradually: The Growth of the Septuagint and Its Canon," Journal of Biblical Literature 143 (2024): 303–22. Below I paste the abstract of the article. I'll update this post with the link to the online source for the article when it is published. [Update, July 6, 2024: see here.] And, in accordance with the SBL publishing agreement, after 18 months I'll post the offprint of the article at my academia.edu page. 

Readers will find on the first page that the article is dedicated to Jim Aitken, a renowned LXX scholar at Cambridge whose sudden death last year shocked and saddened me, along with many others (see here). I did not know Prof. Aitken well. During the Covid lockdowns, he offered a couple seminars via Zoom, and I joined in some of those sessions as an observer. He was an editor, along with Bruce Longenecker, of a forthcoming volume that features an essay by me on "The Use of the LXX in the Early Church." (The volume is called The Apocrypha and Septuagint, and it is to be volume 1 of this Zondervan series.) Besides these encounters, Prof. Aitken had a direct impact on this JBL article, as he was present at the session of the IOSCS in which I presented the paper in November 2022. He expressed interest in the paper and encouraged me to continue pursuing the subject, and he advised me on some ways to refine the argument. 

Let me also note how much I appreciate and admire the current JBL editor, Susan Hylen. In my experience publishing papers via biblical studies journals, I can say that she as an editor dedicated an unusual amount of time to my article, partly due to my own stubbornness. She patiently waited for me to realize the wisdom of her counsel. The review process for JBL is a long one, but one of the payoffs is getting to work with and learn from Prof. Hylen. 

By the way, this post sorta continues a series that I started years ago, on the LXX Canon, a renewal of that series after seven years. See here and follow the links back. Also, the subject of this article picks up on the topic of chapter four in my book on the LXX, a book that I seem to have never mentioned on this blog—not too surprising since this is my seventh post on this blog in four years or so (but the second in the past couple weeks!). 

Abstract:

The Septuagint defies easy definition. Biblical scholars routinely use the term to designate the Greek Old Testament, though they recognize that such language is similar to talking about “the English Bible” or “the German Bible”: there is no such thing, or rather there are many such things. This paper urges closer attention to the way ancient people described the translation, particularly its scope. While modern scholars often seem (tacitly or not) to assume that the Septuagint began as the Greek Torah and then expanded its borders to welcome new Jewish scriptural books as they continued to be translated into Greek, ancient authors did not depict the Septuagint in this way. All ancient Jewish sources that mention the translation restricted the Septuagint to the Pentateuch, whereas most patristic sources attributed a Greek version of the entire Hebrew Bible to the Seventy translators. The the most significant moment in the “growth of the Septuagint” is when it suddenly swelled from five books to perhaps a couple dozen or more. These ancient ideas on the extent of the Septuagint have implications for our notions of the Septuagint canon and for the use of this Greek version in the New Testament.