[B-Greek] Psalms and Greek poetry
Trevor Peterson
abuian at access4less.net
Fri Feb 11 19:05:33 EST 2005
Albert Pietersma wrote:
> From my perspective the central issue continues to be whether
> Septuagint translators can be said DELIBERATELY TO HAVE CREATED the
> antecedents of Greek rhythmic poetry or whether, in its reception
> history, the LXX (notably the Psalms) EXERTED AN INFLUENCE ON the
> evolvement of Greek rhythmic poetry. For the former I see no credible
> evidence within the LXX. In fact, I would argue that the
> textual-linguistic make-up of most of the LXX makes such highly
> improbable even a priori. The latter scenario is certainly possible
> though by no means a necessary explanation for the development from
> Classical to Byzantine poetry.
Please excuse my ignorance. So, is there no clear evidence of what
happened with Greek poetry between the Classical stage and the
Byzantine? Or was Classical poetry still being written in the Koine
period, but it's simply that we don't find it in the GOT? In either
case, your remarks seem to go beyond my question, which was simply, are
there poetic features in the Greek translation of psalms that are not
incidentally imported from Hebrew? For instance, if we were talking
about Hebrew poetry, we would have to admit that there is a lot of
controversy surrounding the core structure, but we could still identify
features that tend to distinguish poetry from prose--more frequent use
of figurative language, phonetic patterning, etc. I realize some of this
sort of thing will simply come across from Hebrew into Greek, but are
there characteristic features that can be observed in the Greek
translation that do not track directly with the Hebrew source?
thanks,
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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