The Greek Bible in the Graeco-Roman World: Evaluating the Greek Bible as a source for Jewish interpretation of the political, social and intellectual culture of the Hellenistic world (continuing into the early Roman Empire).

"The project has two related goals. 1. A systematic assessment of existing criteria for the contextualisation of the translation of individual books or groups of books. Emphasis will fall on those books of the Greek Bible, which, by virtue of their content matter, offer substantial sources for historical contextualisation. Hitherto chronological analysis has been conducted: a. through investigation of phenomena internal to the translations and evidence for common procedures of translation that appear to provide links between different books. b. from supposed historical allusions and terminology apparently associated with a particular milieu or period. 2. A major investigation into the language of the translators. The project will focus on a comparative examination of the political, legal and administrative terminology of the books (examples for comparison include court titles, legal terminology and conceptions of the hellenistic monarch). The basic procedure for this analysis will be the systematic creation of an electronic database, incorporating a wide range of relevant data. This data-base will have independent scholarly value and it is intended that it should become a publicly available search tool. No prior assumptions will be made about the location of the translators (avoiding in particular the widespread assumption that all Jewish-Greek literature originated in the city of Alexandria). The method is to investigate clusters of terms, not individual manifestations of words, and to distinguish unusual vocabulary from what is too commonplace and widespread in the hellenistic world to be an indicator of chronological, cultural or political context.The project utilises existing modern search tools for the LXX corpus itself and for papyri, inscriptions and literary texts that provide the primary material for revealing the Greek cultural context. "