THE STUDY was originally intended to expose the manner and method of the Old Greek version of chapters i-xxxix of the Book of Ezekiel, with a view to a cautious assessment of its value for Old Testament philology and textual criticism. It was soon clear, however, that the enterprise could not go forward without considerable work upon the Greek language, the results of which turned out to be more relevant, as well as bulkier, than had been expected. The argument is made that the matters of unity, date and provenance and Hebraism must be studied as Greek Language questions methodologically distinct from and foundational to questions of translation technique. It is demonstrated that the nature of the text, the state of studies, and the need for a systematic approach to the application of the Old Greek to Hebrew text and interpretation combined to produce a pyramidal structure, in which study of the Greek of the version in Part I is the foundation upon which study of renditional method in Part II is based, and study of the bearing upon the Hebrew text in Part III rests on both together. It is also shown that at each stage there were few if any precedents for such an approach to an Old Greek text.
Readers of earlier printings were unintentionally deprived of the last line of p. x, note 12 of the Introduction, which should read "II Sa. xii.4.". Regrettably the text of this book has never existed in a modern Unicode word-processor, and has been created by scanning a printout from ChiWriter 3.17.
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