Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [220]
The Septuagint
THE SEPTUAGINT is the ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The Letter of Aristeas propounds that the Septuagint was produced by the royal fiat of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the Greek Ruler of Egypt, but it appears also to reflect the scriptural understandings of several generations of Hellenistic Jews, who themselves were progressively less able to understand the Hebrew text. The legendary beginnings of the book are that it was produced by seventy (hence the abbreviation LXX; Septuaginta means “seventy” in Latin) scholars working at Ptolemy’s behest. Begun by the third century BCE and completed before 132 BCE, the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew Bible in both content and meaning. First it contains a number of interesting books that Rabbinic Judaism later excluded as noncanonical-for instance, the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees.
Even the order of the books of the Bible is different in the Septuagint; the Greek Bible has been reorganized in more complicated categories, including sections for historical books, wisdom, and prophecy, as well as the Torah (first five books of Moses). Although the translation sometimes is quite literal, in other places it is as much a commentary as a translation. Some scholars hold that the readings of the Septuagint reflect the actual meaning of the original Hebrew, while the received Jewish text, the so-called Masoretic Text (MT), is a departure from it. The Dead Sea Scrolls often present a Hebrew text closer to the LXX than the MT, giving some credence to its early witness of Bible readings, especially in Samuel and Jeremiah. Other passages, however, simply evidence Christian interpolations. However that problem may be resolved, the commentary on various passages gives us an inkling of how the Hellenistic Jewish community could understand its Bible. One of the most interesting things about the LXX is the way in which resurrection creeps into its pages. In this respect the LXX is clearly innovative over the MT.
Because the Hellenistic period does contain a notion of an immortal soul, as well as resurrection of the body, the translators of the Septuagint understood several Biblical passages in light of their own times. In some places, where the Hebrew is ambiguous in meaning, the later Greek translation resolves the ambiguity in the direction of the afterlife. Many of the passages in the Hebrew Bible that are used later to demonstrate life after death consequently meant considerably less in Hebrew than they are made to mean in Greek. Sometimes modern English translations side with the tendentious Greek translations instead of leaving the ambiguity intact. We have seen passages like this, which can imply resuscitation in the Hebrew Bible. For instance:
See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no God beside me; I kill and make alive. (Deut 32:39)
… the Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up ….(i Sam 2:6)
“Am I God to kill and make alive?” (2 Kgs 5:7)
The first two passages are found in poetic portions in Hebrew, “The Song of Moses” (Deut 32:1-43) and Hannah’s “Magnificat” at the birth of Samuel (1 Sam 2:1-10). Both “psalms” take as their most central theme praise for God’s power in saving and preserving His people. The order of the verbs may say that God first kills and then brings to life, as the Septuagint appears to want to translate. But the poetry may only be saying that God has the power of life and death. He may kill one person and then bring another to life, conventional powers of YHWH which were also said of Ba’al, for instance. In other words, the word meḥayyeh, a pi’el intensive or causative form of the verb “live,” perhaps ought more accurately to