Canter Bridge

This volume is a close study of LXX Isaiah chapter 23 by the most prolific writer on the Greek Isaiah. Chapter One (‘Introduction: the Method for the Book’, 1-19) surveys the various approaches to LXX Isaiah that have occupied the field since Z. Frankel’s seminal study. The author takes a ‘contextual approach’. The LXX is at first to be studied in relation to its presumed Vorlage (similar to MT Isaiah), but more importantly is taken seriously as a coherent text in its own right. Pace Seeligmann, the translator’s genius is not to be discovered at the word or verse level, in ‘isolated free renderings’, but rather at the level of pericope or passage. The translator is a scholar, with liberties to engage in creative and actualising interpretation.

Chapter Two (‘The Masoretic Text of Isaiah 23’, pp. 20-47) offers a verse-by-verse comment, chiefly designed to sort out the protagonists of this difficult chapter and their respective roles. These exegetical observations are complemented by analysis of the chapter’s divisions, style, and contents. An excursus questions the erstwhile consensus that Tarshish refers to Spanish ‘Tartessos’, favouring instead a location in Asia Minor and, by extension, the Mediterranean and even Africa/Carthage.

In Chapter Three (‘The Septuagint of Isaiah 23 as Text’, pp. 48-87), van der Kooij compares the LXX with the MT of Isaiah 23, presenting thereafter a reading of the Greek text that explains the considerable differences between the two as contributing to a coherent interpretation in LXX 23. The various parts of that Greek chapter fit together and tell the story of Carthage’s fall (rather than Tyre’s, as in MT) and the resulting demise of Tyre as that city’s trading partner.

Chapter four (‘The Septuagint of Isaiah 23 as a Vision’, pp. 88-109) locates the Greek Isaiah in the context of other Jewish texts from the Hellenistic period, documents which place the responsibility of interpreting ancient oracles in the hands of scholars and sages of the highest level (e.g. Daniel, the Teacher of Righteousness, even Josephus). The translator is a professional Scripture scholar who receives an ancient oracle of Tyre and moulds it so that it becomes a ‘recognizable prediction of events at the time of its author-translator’. The difference between LXX Isaiah and other ‘visions’ in this genre is that Isaiah is at the same time an interpretation and a translation of a venerable oracle. Van der Kooij’s intricate reconstruction of the translator’s milieu makes him a witness to several political events and thus establishes a tightly-defined chronology that is rather more specific than, but not in contradiction to, the current consensus that the translator of LXX Isaiah worked near the mid-point of the 2nd century BCE. Indeed, van der Kooij helped to establish that consensus with his Textzeugen des Jesajabuches. The translator was witness to the destruction of Carthage in 146, the Parthian invasion in Babylonia (understood as a signal of the breakdown of the Seleucid empire), and the involvement of Tyre in the Hellenization of Jerusalem and its temple.

In chapter five (‘The Septuagint of Isaiah 23 and its Hebrew Vorlage’, pp. 110-161), van der Kooij shows how LXX Isaiah 23 makes sense as the work of a ‘learned scribe’ who translates a consonantal parent text very similar to the MT, while reading and interpreting in a manner distinct from that which eventually congeals in the Massoretic tradition. This scholarly translator, quite distinct from any ad hoc translator of a text that is new and unfamiliar to him, produces a scholarly exegesis of a text he knows well. His craft can be compared to that of the learned translator of TJ Isaiah or even Jerome.

Chapter six (‘The Septuagint of Isaiah 23: Revision and Reception’, pp. 162-185) demonstrates that the limited textual attestation of disparate Greek revisions makes it impossible to prove a relationship between revision and reception (interpretation). Nevertheless, it becomes clear that patristic exegesis of Isaiah 23 applies the judgement part of the chapter (vv. 1-14) to the fall of Tyre to the Babylonians, while finding in the promissory section a reference to the spread of Christianity.

Van der Kooij provides his reader more than he has promised. His book uses Isaiah 23 as a test case in which he can work out in detail an approach to the Isaiah translator that he has promoted at another level for decades. That translator is an intelligent interpreter of his Hebrew Vorlage rather than a ‘dragoman’ working atomistically. An interpretatively acute scribe, he intends to produce a meaningful text rather than merely a word-for-word rendering of the Hebrew. Knowledge of LXX Isaiah and early scribal/translation practice would be considerably advanced by application of van der Kooij’s method to other biblical texts as these are represented in the early versions.