Style and cohesion in the Septuagint's kaige tradition: Ecclesiastes and Lamentations

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The Septuagint corpus is a collection of the earliest Greek versions of Hebrew biblical texts. It is the earliest example of biblical translation, the central literary product of Hellenistic Judaism, an influential source for the New Testament, and an important source of post-classical Greek. As a large translation corpus (over 500,000 words in total), it is invaluable for enhancing our understanding of translation in the Graeco-Roman world and for informing how we interpret translated Greek texts. My research will bring linguistic questions and methods to bear on one of the most intriguing phenomena within this corpus: the so-called kaige translation tradition. This is a tradition of texts which share a highly isomorphic or 'literal' translation method, closely following the precise wording of the Hebrew (Kreuzer 2021). This method often results in a style of Greek, which has been variously described as awkward, barbaric, calqued, poor, unidiomatic or even unintelligible (McLean 2000; Rajak 2009). My resarch will reassess such judgements through a linguistic analysis of specific stylistic features and cohesion devices in Greek translations from this tradition. This will enrich our understanding of biblical translation in the Graeco-Roman world and the relationship between language use and religious identity in early Judaism.