Characterizing Old Greek Deuteronomy as an Ancient Translation by Jean Maurais (review)

Reviewed by: Characterizing Old Greek Deuteronomy as an Ancient Translation by Jean Maurais Larry Perkins jean maurais, Characterizing Old Greek Deuteronomy as an Ancient Translation (JSJSup 203; Leiden: Brill, 2022). Pp. xiv + 324. €139/$167. This monograph is a revised version of Jean Maurais's 2020 dissertation (McGill University). In it, M. acknowledges that previous commentaries on Old Greek Deuteronomy (OG Deut) offer varying perspectives on the translator's approach to his task, as well as the relationship between the Vorlage and the target text. Although they make excellent contributions to understanding OG Deuteronomy, the attempts by each presentation to characterize OG Deuteronomy as a translation, in M.'s opinion, have various shortcomings. M. seeks to develop a more principled approach to understanding "the production milieu" of OG Deuteronomy more precisely (p. 3), focusing his attention on the text-as-produced. He argues that a Jewish translator produced OG Deuteronomy in Alexandria, Egypt, sometime in the first half of the third century b.c.e. Some evidence suggests that this translator knew OG Genesis and OG Exodus. Maurais regards current categories, such as "literal," or "free," or "faithful," often used to characterize OG Deuteronomy, as too imprecise, and their use often generates misleading impressions. Recourse to different models employed in the last decades to analyze various documents in the LXX, namely, Descriptive Translation Studies, Skopostheorie, and Poly-system theory, provide several methodological advances, because they affirm the complex nature of translation. They focus on the target audience and its cultural realities and various other factors influencing the nature of the resultant translation. M. argues that, in the case of OG Deuteronomy, part of its translational complexity involves identifying the Hebrew source text employed. The variety of Hebrew texts circulating in the third century b.c.e. makes it more challenging to discern whether differences between the resultant translation and extant Hebrew texts are due to the translator's initiative or show the influence of a Hebrew Vorlage that has not survived. In M.'s opinion, such discernment requires a "more flexible approach" (p. 8), one that does not use a priori assumptions to make such determinations. M. also indicates that Papyrus 848 particularly needs reevaluation as a witness to the text of OG Deuteronomy. In order to develop a characterization of OG Deuteronomy that is more principled and comprehensive, M. examines three texts (6:13–25; 25:1–12; and 32:1–9) "from the perspective of [their] production, employing a descriptive approach" (p. 9). He uses Gideon Toury's grid—described in Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995)—for characterizing translations, namely, function, process, and product, but also follows its adaptation by Cameron Boyd-Taylor in Reading between the Lines: The Interlinear Paradigm for Septuagint Studies (Biblical Tools and Studies 8; Leuven: Peeters, 2011). M. adjusts Boyd-Taylor's schema for describing a translation's profile, as well as employing the descriptors' "adequacy" (to define the "relationship to its source" [p. 9]) and "acceptability" (to define its relationship to its "target culture" [p. 9]). In order to plot the position of OG Deuteronomy's translation on these axes, M. analyzes "1) its linguistic character, pertaining to grammar and lexicon; 2) its textual-linguistic features, dealing with issues of coherence and cohesion; and 3) literary/cultural characteristics, that have to do with literary conventions and thematic or ideological values" (p. 9). His goal is to discern how the translator worked, by identifying his various strategies and "regulative norms, as [End Page 160] well as his preference values" (p. 9). In a later section, M. describes these as "translational norms," that is, "a set of shared assumptions that will govern what the ensuing product should look like" given the social context and cultural expectations involving such a translation (p. 68). He classifies these norms into three categories: "regulative norms," "conformity to target conventions," and "constitutive norms" (p. 82). He also evaluates whether they are systematic (primary), typical (secondary), or sporadic (tertiary) (p. 82). Maurais selects texts for analysis from Deuteronomy's paraenetic, legal, and poetic discourses and devotes a chapter to a close reading and analysis of each text segment using his method and summarizing the results. In...

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