Book Review: Johann Cook. The Septuagint of Proverbs: Jewish and/or Hellenistic Proverbs? Concerning the Hellenistic Colouring of LXX Proverbs.

Abstract

"It is a rare day that brings the publication of an entire monograph devoted to a book of the LXX/Old Greek corpus. Further, the book of Proverbs has not received adequate attention, so a monograph such as this is doubly welcome. 2. Cook's volume on OG Prov contains a preface (XV-XVIII), a list of abbreviations (XIX-XXI), and four chapters. The book concludes with a selected bibliography (pp. 343-348: correct the title of Yee's article to "Prov 8:22-31" and the volume number of ZAW to 82 both here and elsewhere in the book); an index of modern authors (pp. 349-350), a subject index (pp. 351-359); indices of Hebrew (pp. 360-366), Greek (pp. 367-376), and Syriac words (pp. 377-378); and a biblical reference index, in alphabetical order (pp. 379-391). 3. As we might expect, in the Introduction (ch. 1, pp. 1-43) Cook reviews the history of research on OG Prov, including contributions by Schleusner, de Lagarde, Mezzacasa, Gerleman, and, more recently, his own work and those of Tov and Giese (pp. 1-12). Most of the Introduction is concerned with issues of method (pp. 12-36). Here he deals with the textual history of OG Prov (pp. 12-16), including the issue of the "double translations" and the hexaplaric text, and the available manuscript evidence (pp. 20-29). He adopts Ziegler's classification of witnesses for Eccl, in the belief that it should apply to Prov as well. There follow brief sections on translation technique (there is a consensus that OG Prov has been translated "rather freely," but no consensus on "what should be understood by the term translation technique with regard to ancient translations" [pp. 29-31; the citation is from p. 29]), the literary genre of Prov, and the LXX as exegetical writing (pp. 32-36). The Introduction closes with remarks about the research problem that is the concern of this book (pp. 37-40) and the method and plan of research (pp. 40-43)."(pg 1)