What is your advice for those interested in doing research on the Septuagint?
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2004.
You ask about doing research in the Septuagint. Certainly, the Septuagint is a field that needs more young conservative evangelical scholars to work on the problems that are special to it.
On the other hand, if your interest is in lexical and syntactical studies for exegetical purposes, then it might be that the Septuagint would not be a very profitable place for your research. When it comes to syntactical matters, then you might find the work of, say, Professor Stanley Porter on the field of New Testament Greek grammar and syntax to be more immediately helpful.
Or again, if you really wish to work in lexical matters to do with the Septuagint, you should consider the work of scholars like Muraoka, who has made a specialty of this field. Or, if your interest lies in the grammar and syntax of the Septuagint, you should consult the work of the late Ilmari Soisalon Soininen and the modern representatives of the Helsinki school that he founded in Finland.
A useful tool for considering the work that has been done, and is being done in these fields—as in all fields of Septuagint studies—is the Journal of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies.
However, here are areas of Septuagint studies where major work is needed:
Examination is needed in places where the Septuagint disagrees with the Masoretic Text. There are, of course, thousands of examples of small differences, and certainly they need to be examined. There are also other places where there are very large differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, and here we need to understand the reasons for this.
There are many places in which the Septuagint reading is taken by scholars to be evidence of a Hebrew textual variant of what appears in the Masoretic Text; and here again there is need for much careful investigation. Where the Septuagint has used a dynamic translation, it is not safe to suppose that this accurately represents the actual words that stood in the Hebrew text which the translator used. Moreover, the style and standards of the translators of the different books of the Septuagint vary considerably; and before one uses the Septuagint as a way of deciding between Hebrew variants, one needs to understand the character of the translation of each particular book.
The same is true of the translations of the New Testament into such languages as Syriac and Old Latin. A great deal of important work is nowadays being done by P. J. Williams
Another field which still requires attention is the question of canonicity. In recent years there has been a great revival of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox position, that the Septuagint is the Bible of the Christian Church; and that, therefore, we should accept the deuterocanonical and apocryphal books as part of the Old Testament. Nowadays one can find some evangelicals who are beginning to espouse that this view is completely mistaken; but, in view of the surge of books on this topic in recent years, it certainly deserves attention from conservative evangelical scholars.
I hope that these remarks may be of some help to you, in guiding you towards practical considerations, when you come to make up your mind as to what studies you should pursue.
Yours very sincerely,
