The dominant view regarding Septuagint origins posits that the Pentateuch was the first portion of the Hebrew Bible to be translated into Greek. Significant consensus also exists that after the creation of the Greek Pentateuch, the translators of the post-Pentateuchal books utilized many of the linguistic and literary features of the Greek Pentateuch for their own work. Similarities and parallels between the two corpora function at several levels, ranging from lexical and syntactic to intertextual and stylistic. In light of such features, scholars have debated how to characterize the relationship between the Greek Pentateuch and the later Septuagint books. An array of terms has been used to describe the function of the Greek Pentateuch as a source: ‘quarry,’ ‘word-list’ (Barr, 1979); ‘model,’ ‘dictionary’ (Lust, 1997; Barr, 2003); ‘lexicon’ (Tov, 1999; Yardney, 2019); ‘glossary’ (Lee, 2018). But at present a precise expression of this relationship lacks insufficient nuance.
In contrast to hypothetical ‘lists’ or ‘glossaries,’ I follow the approach of Lee (2018) in viewing the whole of the Greek Pentateuch itself as the model for the later translators. In this paper, I expand and develop this position by arguing for a more nuanced conception of the Greek Pentateuch as a ‘literary-scriptural encyclopedia.’ This approach borrows ideas from the ‘cultural encyclopedia’ model of Umberto Eco (1979, 1992, 2001, 2003), which suggests that texts are not simply repositories of linear lexical information. They are instead a complex web of semantic and semiotic potential which unveils an entire literary and cultural world. And since the Hebrew Torah and Greek Pentateuch can be conceived of as constituting a ‘literary-cultural-scriptural encyclopedia’ in Second-Temple Judaism, the later Greek translators were free to capitalize upon its literary ‘culture’ of robustly associative readings and to engage in semiotic play in their own work.
After setting forth this conceptual model, I survey well-known examples from discussion about the Greek Pentateuch as a ‘lexicon’ with the aim to demonstrate the potency of my proposal to better explain accepted examples and to revisit debated ones afresh. I posit that an ‘encyclopedia’ approach still allows researchers to employ the common expressions such as ‘word-list,’ ‘lexicon,’ and ‘glossary.’ But it also allows scholars to better explain the creative ways that post-Pentateuchal translators employ earlier material. Because the Greek Pentateuch is a ‘literary encyclopedia,’ it still can be used as a source for lexical items in a straightforward way. However, it was primarily a literary tapestry of the world and everything in it. As such, it invited the later translators to explore the semiotic and literary possibilities in the use and creation of sacred translation literature in Second Temple Judaism.