A New English Translation of the Septuagint

The NETS is the single best translation of the Septuagint on the market (at least at the moment). The translation follows an ultra-literal method of translation they call "interlinear". The reason for this is that the LXX follows the same pattern and is very jarring. So, where the Hebrew and LXX agree, they translate the Hebrew text and translate it as literally as possible following the LXX at the same time. Where it disagrees, they follow the LXX. It has as a "boiler-plate" the NRSV, but it eschews many NRSV translation principles like gender-inclusive language. All gender-inclusive language except when the LXX's language is itself gender-inclusive (and this happens). The method of translation further removes it from its English parent. In the end, the only way you can know that it started as an NRSV would be to read the introduction. It really only has a few drawbacks. First, because the Bible is written for scholarly study, it is not useful for liturgical use or for private devotional use. Its language would also be too hard for the average reader because of its audience. This, however, is its stated goal. It may be a draw-back, but that's a side-effect of what it set out to do. I do not like the way they translated "pnevma theou" as "divine wind" in Genesis. It's justifiable to a point (it means "breath" and "wind" as much as it does "spirit), but everywhere else I checked they translated translated "pnevma" as "spirit". It should be consistent. The reason for this is plainly obvious: it was produced by an inter-religious committee of Christians and Jews. Since Jews are not Trinitarians, and that would be a valid understanding of the Hebrew and to a degree of the Greek, they would naturally not want anything like this. Christians, almost from the beginning, have made the connection between "Spirit of God" in Genesis and "Holy Spirit". The connection is further exasperated in English, because "spirit" for us does not have the same range of meaning as it does in Greek or Hebrew. So, the only fault I can give them is that it is an inconsistent translation, not that it's an invalid one. The prefaces also almost invariably favor the theory that the LXX is a translation with liberties over that it has a different parent text. Both are truly present, but we generally cannot tell when the LXX reading cannot be derived from repointing or re-dividing the Hebrew words (at that time, they had not yet pointed the text or put spaces in it, and so there were more ways to interpret the consonants than in its current form). Again, however, they do not say anything that is invalid regarding the relation of the LXX and its parent text. I simply divide the text differently than they do and so do not always like the introductions' emphasis. Going back to its strengths, its production standards were exceptional. The binding is excellent, the font is excellent, and it has generous margins. It even does this by being as cheap as the "cheap" Bibles. Short of going back to rag paper, this is about as good as I would normally expect. Overall, if you have good reading skills, I would reccomend this translation hands-down over any other English translation.

It's not for daily reading or devotion, or like memorisation. For that, I switched to the Lexham Septuagint ( more smoother). Still beautiful, accurate to represent the Greek text. And no, it's not merely a NRSV modified as some claim. You feel it's a Greek based translation. I keep it for reference, intro on the books, and maybe for some reading. It's based on Ralhf Septuagint, but nothing too different to the Lexham (Sweete edition). Font too small, but great cover. Not my go to Septuagint in English. The Lexham has taken that place.

I write as a Christian layperson. The Septuagint translation of the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) into Greek was produced by Jewish scholars in Alexandria in the late third and second centuries before the Common Era. It had incalculable influence on the development of Christianity. Before the important Christian writings were gathered together in the second century of the Common Era to form the New Testament, the Septuagint was THE Bible of the new Church. It has been said that quotations from the Septuagint appear in every book of the New Testanent except the letters of John. As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, few of its adherents could read Hebrew or Aramaic. Many could read Greek, if they could read at all. Pietersma and Wright have put together the first good English translation of the Septuagint since the nineteenth century. It is a literal translation, very close to the original Greek, and therefore often somewhat awkward in English, and this is good. Readers with even a modicom of biblical Greek, say a New Testament Greek course from college days, can use this hand-in-hand with the Greek Septuagint text (available from the American Bible Society), and do quite well. One experiences a very ancient text of the Old Testament even if one has little or no Hebrew. In the past few weeks I have thus worked through the Greek text of the first chapter of Genesis, several psalms, and selections from Second Isaiah, and this has been revivifying and enlightening. I am in debt to Pietersma and Wright. Even with no command of ancient languages, one can taste the flavor of the Septuagint text with this book. Oxford University Press, with its five hundred-plus years of experience in printing bibles, has laid out the text in 1,027 double-column pages with one minor fault--the margins are too narrow to write notes. This inexpensive and well produced translation should be on the bookshelf of every serious bible reader no matter what the level of scholarship.

Just anecdotally, I've found that often when the NETS diverges from the Masoretic text it aligns with the Douay translation of the Vulgate. For example, LXX Psalm 42,4 in the NETS renders it: "to God who makes glad my youth" Douay has: "to God who giveth joy to my youth" Whereas JPS Tanakh has: "unto God, my exceeding joy." The Douay has the Latin book names so none of the frankly weird faux Greek spellings. And the Douay is more poetic. Brenton is more poetic for that matter. The point is if you're looking at buying the NETS just know that Brenton and Douay did it hundreds of years ago only better (IMHO) and those books are public domain. Do buy this book if you 1. can't be bothered to learn Greek and 2. prefer a mutilated NRSV over a little legwork learning how the LXX differs from the Masoretic text. On the other hand, it's sewn bound, compact, sleek and convenient. It opens flat and has a pleasing font. It's nice to consult when Liddell & Scott fail.

Translations into English of the full Old Testament (including, of course, its deuterocanonical writings) in Greek, long known as the Septuagint (LXX), have been rather few in number over the years. Thus, it is all the more suprising that two projects to translate the LXX have appeared in publication so rapidly one on the heels of the other. They are the New English Translation of the Septuagint (N.E.T.S.), on the one hand; on the other, there is the O.T. portion of the "Orthodox Study Bible" (O.S.B.), which its publisher, T. Nelson, for its part, issued only one year later (2008) and which encompasses both the Old Testament (O.T.) and the New Testament (N.T.). The O.T. of the O.S.B. denominates that translation's trademarked name as the "St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint" (S.A.A.S.). For most readers, these two new translations probably will have priority of interest over older translations of the LXX that have appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries, including that of Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton (still available in reprint), which still has its advocates to a respectable degree (and rightly so), more of them among Anglican and Protestant scholars, however, than among the Eastern Orthodox. The O.S.B. incorporates that own freshly completed new translation of its own of the Greek Septuagint O.T. (known, as already mentioned, as the "St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint" English Version, the S.A.A.S., for short), of which the translation project director is the estimable Jack Norman Sparks (who also is the principal editor of the O.S.B. as a whole), which can assure the Eastern Orthodox layman that the O.S.B. would opt for Eastern Orthodox preferences, regarding resort to preferred manuscript sources and concerning certain other matters as well. The full title of the N.E.T.S. version as the title page presents it may hint at some of these possibilities for divergence in exercise of scholarly judgment and preferences; in full, the publication's descriptive title is "A New English Translation of the Septuagint and the Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included under That Title" (N.E.T.S); however, the shorter form of the title constitutes the trademark's official wording. The scholarship embodied in the O.S.B. is entirely (or very largely) Eastern Orthodox, including that of many Orthodox converts from evangelical Protestantism; this is an asset, not a weakness, for the O.S.B.'s Orthodox men of learning circumspectly avoid what at times are some reckless turns of phrase that occasionally mar renderings of verses, sometimes disturbingly so, here and there in the N.E.T.S. By contrast with the O.S.B., two resolutely Protestant scholars, Allen Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright (but, compromising reliability, with the cooperation, along the way in their project, of some Jewish pedants among the other scholars who assisted them), edited the N.E.T.S. for Oxford University Press' 2007 publication (which bears the ISBN 978-0-19-528975-6). As the O.S.B. took the O.T. of the New King James Version (N.K.J.V.) as the literary point of departure, in editing and recasting the wording the N.K.J.V.'s O.T. text to comply with the LXX Greek O.T., the N.E.T.S. chose to rework the New Revised Standard Version (N.R.S.V.) of the O.T. to conform it to the Greek LXX O.T. The results of the editors' work for the N.E.T.S. English translation of the Greek LXX O.T. are remarkably fine. The N.E.T.S. translation is crisply clear (apart from occasional passages that are inhabitually awkward-sounding in an otherwise elegantly worded rendition) and it is freer of the slight ambiguities here and there that one finds in even the S.A.A.S. English rendition of the LXX O.T., except when the N.E.T.S. addles things a bit in its own way! (It is worth using these two English translations in conjunction with each other!) The traces of "feminist-speak" (or "inclusive language") and of other flaws in the N.R.S.V.'s at times too trendy original translation seem, from what this reader can tell in having used the N.E.T.S. fairly intensively along with the O.S.B.'s S.A.A.S., to have disappeared entirely, so meticulously thorough has been the work of Pietersma and Wright in reworking and conforming the N.R.S.V.'s O.T. to the Greek LXX. From this layman's point of view, the only real obstacle to ease in using the N.E.T.S. edition of the O.T. for daily reading is the N.E.T.S.' pedantic use of exactly transliterated forms of personal and place names, which differ (sometimes markedly) from the better-known forms of name in other English Bibles, which the O.S.B., for its part, wisely chose to retain as being more reader-friendly. Also, of course, having an O.T. in a volume, i.e. here the N.E.T.S., separate from the rest of the Bible (the N.T.) makes using the O.S.B. more convenient for daily use, in order for a reader to access, in a single volume, both the N.T. as well as the O.T.; this makes the O.S.B. (added to the O.S.B.'s avoidance of the sort of highly debatable renderings which occur at times in the N.E.T.S. that negatively and needlessly can affect doctrine) to be the principal choice for a practical edition of the Bible, in full (and, at that, according entirely to Greek texts), for constant use. All hail to the successful completion of both of these translations and publishing projects, the "Orthodox Study Bible" and the N.E.T.S. English translation of the Greek Septuagint Old Testament! The O.S.B., for its part, makes the complete Greek Bible translated into English available for today's Anglophone readers, especially for the Orthodox faithful among them, as well as for other Christians, and the N.E.T.S., for its share of glory, provides, most of the time and despite some serious flaws, what is perhaps the most delightfully clear yet graciously worded English translation of the LXX Greek O.T. that has appeared to date!

This is a great translation of the Septuagint translated from Greek to English. A great buy for anyone wanting to read , study or gain more understanding of the Bible.

The introduction to this book does a great job of laying out the challenges of translating an ancient translation. It is not, however, aimed at people without a significant background in Hebrew, Greek and translation theory. I give credit to the authors of the introduction, Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, for specifying the nature of the translation and its audience. Taken from Nida and Taber, _The Theory and Practice of Translation_ (Leiden: Brill, 1982), p. 31: "a translation in the present-day literary language, so as to communicate to the well-educated constituency." The translators chose this group "on the assumption that it is most probably this audience that has a more than passing interest in traditions of biblical literature other than their own" (p. xiv). I think they are right about this. "Translating an ancient text can only be described as a profoundly difficult undertaking.... "The difficulties of the undertaking are certainly not decreased when one attempts to translate an ancient translation into a modern language. If translating is an act of interpreting, as linguists suggest it is, rather than a simple transfer of meaning, a Greek interpretation of a Hebrew original can be expected to reflect what the translator understood the Hebrew text to mean. The end result is therefore inevitably to some degree a commentary written at a specific historical time and place by an individual person, whose understanding of the Hebrew will often have been at variance with our own, though at times perhaps equally viable." (p. xvi) Indeed, back when I was a linguist- and translator-in-training at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (early 1980s), I was taught the rather simplistic model of translation as a mere transfer of meaning. Experience, though, has taught me that this is virtually impossible. A text of any level of sophistication above that of a stop sign is full of cultural assumptions, lexical polysemy, syntactic ambiguity, and so forth. Any translation is perforce an interpretation. The only way to even begin to compensate for this, if the readers of the translations are not scholars trained in the relevant fields, is to include a massive set of footnotes. The average reader is just not going to take the time to read such a set of notes, even if they are included. The majority of traditional religious readers of a Bible translation are not prepared to deal with the challenges that such footnotes would present to their existing understanding of the text. The New English Translation of the Septuagint is aimed at those who already have at least some of the relevant scholarly background and are not averse to acquiring more.

Bought this as a gift for my father. He loved it. The book is really great for deep dive into the Bible history and origins. Highly recommend for people already familiar with the Bible and want to learn more. My dad said it was easy to understand.

Solid offering of the LXX. You may not agree with some of the formulas the team have utilised but it is nice to read a modern edition rather than Brenton's and Lexham (I generally steer clear of translations of another translation as is the case of Lexham). NETS is great in that it provides the theory behind the translation of each book (given historically accepted that the LXX had 70 different translators to begin with). This book is worth it for Isaiah, the Pentateuch and Jeremiah alone which I have majority worked through and compared with the NASB. Surprisingly I must confess I have shifted my stance across to the camp that believes this tradition is older than the Masoretic since doing so for a few reasons in particular. I even lug this book along to church most Sundays.

The Septuagint is by far one of the most important foundations to our faith ( in Christ) It's interesting to see how the Septuagint flows neatly into the gospels, as many early Christian writers believed as well. The font is a perfect size, and the language used is perfect for understanding what the authors meant to convey. I recommend this book to all my fellow Christians and readers a like.

Excellent Book and very fast delivery 🚚 i am Impressed 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

L'une des principales traductions scientifiques de la Septante en langue moderne. Si on lit le français, on pourra préférer la Bible d'Alexandrie (même si tous les volumes ne sont pas encore parus). De plus, la traduction n'est pas forcément élégante. Mais il est pratique d'avoir tout en un volume. Les introductions aux livres bibliques, décrivant notamment les techniques de traduction, sont très riches et utiles.

Me gustó que haya mucho material al introducir cada sección, cada libro tiene introducciones muy completas, hay bastante información sobre las variantes textuales entre distintas fuentes de la Septuaginta y comparativos con el hebreo. El Tomo está muy padre y es ameno para leer una Traducción del Texto Griego Original en un Inglés contemporáneo. Sin embargo, me imaginaba el Tomo más grande y la letra se me hace algo pequeña.