"The Barnabas Network: Cyrene, Jerusalem, Salamis, and Alexandria".

Abstract

My essay in this Peeters volume reads the literary unit of LXX Isaiah 23–27 (which mirrors the chiastic organization of MT Isa 23—27), as being a particularly illuminating example of actualized prophecy that functions as symbolic second century BCE historiography for the purpose: (1) of critiquing the religious and political in-roads made by the Jews in Ptolemaic Egypt and by the Antiochean Seleucids in Judea, respectively, and (2) of encouraging Alexandrian Jews, in particular, towards faithful Torah-observant living in their diasporic Hellenistic Egyptian world as they await the “world-shaking” Day of the Lord. I explore the possibility therein that the grandson of Ben Sira, who translated Hebrew Ben Sira into the Greek text of Sirach (c. 132 BCE), may have been the tendentious translator behind the Greek text of LXX Isa 23—27.