Abstract
‘Supplemental’ in this case is explained in the book’s sub-sub-title ‘An Essential Addition to any Greek New Testament Lexicon’. However, as the author notes in the preface, he aims especially to supplement Frederick Danker’s recent revision of Bauer, Arndt and Gingrich’s A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature (BDAG: Chicago, 2000). Chamberlain’s approach to Septuagint lexicography is closer to that of Takamitsu Muraoka (A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, Peeters, 2009), in that he defines Greek words according to their meaning for a Greek reader with no knowledge of the underlying Hebrew text, in contrast to the methodology of Lust, Eynikel and Hauspie’s A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (LEH: rev. ed. Stuttgart, 2003), which carries an awareness of the Hebrew source text into the glosses.
Chamberlain uses as a basis for the LXX text both Rahlfs and the Göttingen edition, with the variants from Rahlfs. He also makes extensive use of BDAG, Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) and its supplements, LEH, and Muraoka’s Lexicon.
The entries are very concise but clearly set out from a typographical point of view. Misunderstandings of the Hebrew Vorlage are helpfully noted. For instance, an entry on Greek elpizō ‘to hope’, used in Gen 4.26 for Hebrew hwḥl, explains that the translator interpreted the word as being from yḥl ‘expect’ rather than ḥll ‘begin’.
More innovative are the appendices at the end. There is a list of Greek words occurring in ‘extrabiblical’ texts, which are either comparable to or explained by their usage in LXX. Another page gives transliterations of Semitic words found in LXX (though of course these are further garbled in many manuscripts). A longer and subdivided list presents words that do not occur outside LXX, and those first attested in LXX (words not included in LSJ are in bold). The list of Greek words stereotypically translating every occurrence of a Hebrew word (e.g. abussos for tōhū) seems rather short and not particularly remarkable (e.g. thalassa ‘sea’ always rendering yām ‘sea’). The list of Greek mistranslations collects together the words noted as such in the main part of the volume. The final two lists in Appendix I suggests places where emendation may be indicated, first of LXX, and second of MT. Appendix II provides a comparative index of words not included in the main lexicon because their coverage in BDAG is deemed adequate (plain font), and words covered by Chamberlain and absent in BDAG (bold). Appendix III gives the Greek names for biblical books, and then the LXX numeration of certain chapters and verses where these differ from that of English bibles based on the Hebrew order.
The audience primarily envisaged for this work is NT scholars who would like to make more use of the LXX and thus need a supplement to BDAG, rather than LXX scholars who are already using Muraoka and/or LEH.