The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and Scribal Scholarship in Antiquity: Studies in Honor of Arie van der Kooij on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday

Scholars studying the transmission, translation, interpretation and reworking of ancient Israelite and early Jewish religious literature often get the impression that the manuscripts they study are hampered by a whole range of unconscious or deliberate scribal mistakes and misrepresentations. One scholar who has followed a different path throughout his long academic career in the field of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Septuagint and Peshitta studies is Arie van der Kooij. In his view, the vast corpus of early Jewish and early Christian literature is better understood as the product of scribal scholarship, instigated and authorized by leading circles within different Jewish and related communities in Antiquity. In the present volume, former students, friends and colleagues, inspired by Arie van der Kooij’s research offer tribute to the octogenarian in the form of studies devoted to examples of scribal scholarship found in the Hebrew Bible, its ancient versions and early Christian reinterpretations. The fifteen contributions all represent original work and add to the study of scribal scholarship in Antiquity and the impact of the work of Arie van der Kooij in this area in particular. They focus on the production and transmission of the Hebrew Bible, the interaction between the Hellenistic world and the Septuagint, or the inner logic behind the Greek and Hebrew versions of Genesis, Kings, Psalms and Isaiah. The impact of ancient scribal scholarship on New Testament writings is examined in Hebrews and 1 Corinthians, as is the impact on Early Christian translations of the Bible in Syriac and Latin.