I’ve read a chapter of the Psalms, some of Jeremiah, some of Exodus. I only noticed one typo (Jeremiah 1:11 has “Βακτηρίανr”).
The glosses are good, as far as I can tell. The UBS Reader’s Edition New Testament glosses seemed to err too much in the direction of contextual meaning and away from lexical meaning. I haven’t read enough of this edition yet to know for sure, but I think that it does a better job of avoiding that.
The glossed verbs are parsed, although everything else just gets lexical form + english gloss. So no help in gender or declension, and sometimes you’ll need to think for a moment to distinguish an adjective from a noun.
I found it to be a very pleasant reading experience, and found that it’s very well suited for my level.
The binding is nice, in two volumes, with each volume having two ribbon bookmarks. The only real editorial flaw seems to be that they go a little overboard with the capital Greek letters in starting out speech and quotations. The more Greek that I read, the more oppressed I feel from all of our punctuation and paragraphing and typesetting.
They seem to present a single text, without criticism, even in areas where Rahlfs has parallel texts. [EDIT: I’m wrong, they present the parallel texts on facing pages] They probably discuss this somewhere in the introduction (which I haven’t read fully). I don’t think that it’s that great a loss.
Thanks for this. I am at the moment using their Reader’s edition of the Hebrew version, a really nice book. If this is as good (and from your review it sounds like it is) it should be a great volume. Care to post some pictures?
Is there any way you could post a sample of one of the Psalms?
I heard it uses the Alfred Rahlfs edition of the greek text so I am curious how the psalms look.
I prefer the Henry Barclay Swete arrangement of the text of the psalms but if they did any reformatting of this section I might be inclined to purchase this version.
Exscuse my slightly off-topic post. When I was in Greece at the Ἑλληνικὸν Εἰδύλλιον, I noticed in the house a multivolume edition of the Bible with notes mostly from the Fathers, the rest in katharevousa. I searched for a pdf online, but couldn’t find it. Does anybody know?
I have also just received my copy, and it really is wonderful… I won’t comment on the quality of the glosses, since I haven’t read enough, but it’s a joy to read.
You can tell it’s been put together by people who love good books - and I say that as someone who used to work in publishing. The production quality is great, as befits a book to be read and re-read. The type is slightly smaller than my UBS reader’s GNT, but somehow seems actually clearer and easier to read.
All the aids are easy to use, and having parsing is a boon. The glossary, which is in the back of both volumes, is better than usual too, offering a better range of glosses than these usually do.
This is my first foray into the Septuagint, and I was surprised just how easy it is so far. Hopefully, it will improve my greek substantially.
I was fortunate to have an undergrad course reading the LXX with a Jewish professor, and then later a graduate course with Moises Silva, whose focus was textual criticism and translation theory, both very profitable. Off and on I still read the LXX, comparing it with the Hebrew where the interest strikes me. Does it improve my Greek? Maybe not so much now, but it certainly did when I was an undergrad.
I hope it does the same for me. My Greek isn’t that great to start with. Also, I am a trainee pastor, so getting a better handle on koine is helpful. The New Testament is just so familiar, and so short!
I know the LXX is pretty different from good Attic prose. But there is a lot of time spent on this forum and elsewhere lamenting the lack of easy Greek readers, and the LXX is a lot of relatively easy Greek.
Among established biblical scholars, many are remembering (or recognizing for the first time) that being able to search a text digitally is not at all the same as refined competence in an ancient language or close familiarity with its content and related literature. Maybe it’s just because I am still (relatively!) young, but I also think students and other young scholars in particular want to take a break from the constant digital glare and sit down with a well-made physical text for sustained reading. Greg and I certainly do.
I did not know that this even existed…Thanks for bringing to my attention…
mwh says the Septuagint is unlikely to improve my Greek…Is this statement re: grammar and/or vocabulary. I would think it could assist in vocab acquisition…but, I dunno. I hope you can explain your statement. Do you think it is true for people who have only completed an undergrad textbook with brief (but near-daily) reading of UBS NT Reader’s Edition?
Can someone with this edition perhaps post an image from a page of Ecclesiastes and Isaiah?
Sorry, only just spotted this. I only meant that if you want to improve your Greek, reading the LXX is one of the worst ways to go about it, because its language is tainted to various degrees by the syntax and forms of expression of the Hebrew that it aims to translate. But I expect you know that, and the LXX will do your Greek no harm if you bear it in mind. It was done for Greek-speakers, after all—though not of course for Christians.
Though the text here is smaller than the UBS reader’s edition, that does have reasonably large font compared to my UBS 4. And the Septuaginta print is, as I said, clear and easy to read - in all it’s much bigger and clearer to read than anything I’d want in English, and a very good size in Greek. Unless someone had quite poor eyesight, I think they’d be fine with this.