Septuaginta: An Abridged Reader’s Edition offers a curated selection of seventy chapters from the Greek Old Testament as it appears in the Rahlfs-Hanhart revised Septuaginta, laid out in a clear and readable format. The included passages generally fit one or more of the following criteria: they record key milestones in the history of Israel and Judah; they are particularly influential for the writers of the New Testament; they are helpful in providing the reader with the overall “feel” of a given biblical book. Select texts from the Apocrypha are included that will be interesting to non-specialist readers. The included passages cover all the major genres of the Old Testament: Pentateuch (16 texts), historical books (16 texts), poetry and proverbial books (17 texts), prophetic books (21 texts).

In order to facilitate natural and seamless reading of the text, every word occurring 100 times or fewer in the Rahlfs-Hanhart text (excluding proper names)—as well as every word that occurs more than 100 times in the Rahlfs-Hanhart text but fewer than 30 times in the Greek New Testament—is accompanied by a footnote that provides a contextual gloss for the word and (for verbs only) full parsing. Additionally, an appendix (glossary) provides a complete alphabetized list of common vocabulary (namely, all the words that are not accompanied by a footnote), with glosses and (as applicable) comparison of a word’s usage in the Septuagint to its usage in the New Testament.

All of these combined features will make Septuaginta: An Abridged Reader’s Edition an indispensable resource for biblical scholars and an excellent tool for improving one’s comprehension of the Greek language.