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Discovering the Septuagint: A Guided Reader. Edited by Karen H. Jobes. Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2016, 351 pp., $39.99.
The number, quality, and breadth of resources available for studying the Septuagint (LXX) has multiplied over the past few decades, and Karen Jobes, Gerald F. Hawthorne Professor Emerita of NT Greek and Exegesis at Wheaton College, has been solely responsible for or played an important part in the production of several of those resources. Her most recent contribution to this growing cache is Discovering the Septuagint: A Guided Reader, a book "intended to aid students who have had at least three semesters of koine Greek begin to read the Greek Jewish Scriptures as found in the Rahlfs-Hanhart critical edition of the Septuagint" (p. 9).
This Reader developed out of Jobes's experience of teaching advanced Greek reading classes at Wheaton. In teaching those classes, she came to realize that in order for students with proficiency in NT Greek to be able to read the LXX, two obstacles needed to be addressed. First, they needed help with LXX vocabulary because it is more extensive than the vocabulary of the NT and because some of the words that occur in both works have a different sense in the LXX than they do in the NT. Second, she recognized that, although the syntax of the LXX is similar to the syntax of the NT, in places the syntax of the LXX has been so influenced by the underlying Hebrew that LXX Greek is peculiar and difficult to understand. The notes in the book are intended to help students overcome...