Olofsson on Religious Background of LXX

I came across this very interesting quote from Staffan Olofsson.  At first read I was both taken aback and defensive, but considering that all translation is interpretation, this is, to a certain degree, true.

As a consequence, the LXX is, at least to a certain extent, influenced by the subjective character of the Judaeo-Hellinistic piety which was partly at variance with the objective nature of the revelation of God in the Hebrew Old Testament.  This subjective character probably best defined as an anthropocentrical attitude has its base in the view that it is the religious conviction that influences man to follow God’s rules and laws.  It is not the question of a blind obedience, but an obedience dependent on the voluntary response of man, or to accentuate another aspect of this attitude ‘To the Hellenist, and therefore to the translators of the Septuagint, the Bible emphasizes not so much God’s revelation and his demands on man, but the religiousness of man, and man’s demand on God.’  One can perhaps say that the crucial point in the Old Testament has been moved from God and his actions to man and his reactions to them.

This entry was posted in LXX, Quotes and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s