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Throughout the biblical period, Egypt was an important destination for…

Although the Septuagint is a Greek text, it is possible to reason back to the mental dictionary and grammar of the translators. This provides an interesting window on the knowledge of Hebrew during the Hellenistic period (the bulk of the Septuagint having been produced between ca. 280 and 120 B.C.E.). A number of caveats need to be taken into account, however (Barr 1968:245–251). Any given passage of the Septuagint may be based on a text diverging from the received Masoretic text. In addition, t…

The vocabulary and grammar of Biblical Hebrew are remarkably constant, especially when one considers that the biblical texts must have come into being over a period of at least five-hundred (and possibly as much as one-thousand) years. To some extent, this constancy may reflect the fact that languages change slowly. But in the case of Biblical Hebrew there is an additional factor as well: after the Babylonian exile, when large parts of what was to become the biblical corpus had acquired a measur…

Hebraisms are linguistic features in another language that are in some way unusual due to the influence of Hebrew. In the ancient Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible (Septuagint, Theodotion, and Aquila), Hebraisms are due almost exclusively to the process of translation. While interlingual translation always leads to a certain amount of transfer from th…

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