Can you recommend a good concordance for Septuagint study?
This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2013.
You ask, in the first place, about recommendation for a good concordance. The one that I have, and have used over the years, is the two-volume concordance by Edwin Hatch and Henry A. Redpath (1906). This volume, in my day, used to be the generally recognized concordance to the Septuagint.
Septuagint study is a difficult field. The first thing to be aware of is that, technically speaking, there is no such thing as the Septuagint. As to its origin, we only have one or two legends. The main legend tells how the high priest at Jerusalem sent to Ptolemy II a copy of the Hebrew Scriptures, and seventy-two translators to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek for the benefit of His Majesty. According, then, to that legend, there were seventy-two translators, not just seventy. The English term 'Septuagint' means 'seventy', 'not seventy-two'; so the legend is questionable on many grounds. Another legend suggests that there were five translators.
We have no need to decide between these legends. Neither of them mentions anything more than the translation of the five books of Moses. No one knows who translated the rest of the books of the Old Testament. But over the years, in the ancient world, rabbis of various kinds and other scholars thought to improve the Greek translation. Most of them endeavoured to make the Greek correspond more with the Hebrew. Eventually, someone translated the rest of the Old Testament, plus the non-canonical books. You should be aware that the published versions of the Septuagint nowadays contain these non-canonical books, as though they were Scripture.
As for your word studies, it can be a useful technique to compare words from the Greek New Testament with similar words in the so-called Septuagint; but you should be aware that some translations of the Hebrew in the Septuagint are very arbitrary. There is nowadays a Greek-English Lexicon of The Septuagint (revised edition), compiled by Lust, Eynikel and Hauspie. This lexicon was published in 2003 by the German Bible Society in Stuttgart. You will have noticed that this volume has adapted the title, The Septuagint, in spite of the difficulties entailed in the history of the so-called Septuagint.
Similarly, there is A New English Translation of The Septuagint, published by Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford. It is compiled by A. Pietersma and B. G. Wright—at least, they were its editors. In their introduction, they point out that the term 'Septuagint' is in itself misleading, and has been generally abandoned by experts in this study. But the editors of this translation explain how, in the end, they were influenced by the common, though mistaken, view of the general public.
May the Lord guide you in your study of his word; but do be warned that the study of the so-called Septuagint is exceedingly complicated, and full of possible pitfalls.
Yours very sincerely in Christ,
