[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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