Resilient Septuagint.An Initial Exploration of the Semantics of Killing and Healing in the Septuagint and its Reception in Patristic and Late Antique Sources (3rd cent. BCE – 5th cent. CE)

Areas:
Biblical exegesis and digital humanities

Abstract:
The Septuagint (LXX) is the most significant work of cultural mediation the ancient world has ever seen. It has been a bridge that long united the Jewish and Greek worlds in a synthesis that forged Western civilization. The boldness of the enterprise and its immediate impact on the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria with the translation of the Torah in the 3rd century B.C. are undeniable: the first recipients of the LXX regarded it as the self-evident Word of God. With the addition of Greek translations of other sacred texts, this sentiment would continue in subsequent generations of Greek-speaking Jews and Christians at least until the second half of the 4th century CE in the Western Church and still today in the Eastern Churches. Despite its vast influence in the ancient world, for a long time the LXX occupied a secondary historiographical role in the West. In fact, it has been used primarily as a source of "spare parts" to reconstruct problematic Hebrew biblical passages. The rediscovery of the importance of the LXX has only come about in the last three decades through studies conducted on the Dead Sea papyri. This research aims to advance knowledge of both the “Nutzungsgeschichte” and “Wirkungsgeschichte” of the LXX by integrating existing resources that are highly innovative from both heuristic-methodological and infrastructural perspectives: the HTLS, some PRIN2017 funded research, and the RESILIENCE-RI European research infrastructure. This general objective will be pursued through more detailed research focused on a set of words related to the field of violence and resilience. The specific objectives are to. - to examine the use/meaning of the semantics of kill/heal in the LXX (e.g. therapeuo, iatreuo, phoneuo), focusing on its Hellenistic milieu (extrabiblical Greek literature, papyri, inscriptions, other Hebrew-Hellenistic writings) and biblical and Semitic influences (Nutzungsgeschichte); - reconstruct the history of the reception of these specific words from the LXX in selected patristic works to diachronically explore the circulation of biblical texts and conduct a historical-conceptual analysis on the lexicon of killing/healing, as dramatically relevant today as in the time of Qo. (Eccl.) 3:3 (Wirkungsgeschichte). The resulting research will thus be an indicator of the biblical matrix of violence that characterizes the belligerence that has unexpectedly reappeared in Europe since the 1990s.

Duration of the project: 17/10/2023 – 17/10/2025

Principal investigator: Prof. Davide Dainese

Partnership: Università degli Studi di Catania Università degli Studi di Bari

Budget of the University of Bologna: 136.900

EUR ERC sectors:
SH5_8 Cultural studies, cultural identities and memories, cultural heritage;
SH5_3 Philology; text and image studies;
SH6_13 Gender history, cultural history, history of collective identities and memories, history of religions