Special Lectures

A number of established lectureships throughout the academical year regularly bring international figures from outside Cambridge to contribute to our research culture.

• Hulsean Lectures

• Jeremie Lecture 
  

  The Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge is pleased to announce the Jeremie Septuagint Lecture 2023-2024 by Emeritus Professor Mark Janse (Ghent University):

   

  "The Three Commandments: Hellenizing and / or Hebraizing the Old Greek and other early and later translations of the Hebrew Bible" (abstract below).

   

  The event will take place on the 8^th of May at 5pm in the Runcie Room at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. Everyone welcome, no registration required.

   

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  The Three Commandments: Hellenizing and / or Hebraizing the Old Greek and other early and later translations of the Hebrew Bible

   

  According to the pseudepigraphical Letter of Aristeas, a curse would be pronounced on anyone adding, removing or displacing any word in the Septuagint translation of the Torah, echoing the commandments given by God to Moses in Deuteronomy. The ‘Three Commandments’ have dictated the translation techniques of the various translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, as well as appreciations of the quality of Septuagint Greek from late Antiquity up to the present day. Strict obedience to the three commandments results in a Hebraizing aka word-for-word, literal or source-text/language translation. A Hellenizing aka sense-for-sense, free or target-text/language translation, on the other hand, may result in ignorance of any or all of the ‘Three Commandments’ to a greater or lesser extent.

   

  In the first part of my lecture, I return to the placement of object clitic pronouns (OCPs) in the Septuagint. As is well known, OCPs are postverbal in the vast majority of cases, especially if they correspond with pronominal suffixes in the Hebrew Vorlage. The cases of preverbal placement are nevertheless indicative of the native speaker competence of the translators, as they can only be explained as reflexes of Wackernagel’s Law, an inherited Indo-European but not Semitic feature (Wifstrand 1950; Janse 1998, 2002; Lee 2018; Dhondt 2023). The contexts in which Wackernagel’s Law is triggered are well-known, but the question arises why we find both preverbal and postverbal OCPs in similar, or even identical, contexts. To better understand this variation, I present new evidence including indirect and direct OCP clusters and the placement of OCPs in relation to topicalized and focalized constituents, with due attention to the Hebrew Vorlage, textual variation and the position of the Septuagint within the history of the Greek language.

   

  In the second part of my lecture, I focus on Bible translations which are strictly Hebraizing. The best known early Greek translations are those by Aquila and Theodotion as well as the so-called Kaige recension. I discuss a number of peculiarities of such translations, which often result in unidiomatic or even ungrammatical Greek, with special attention to Aquila. By way of comparison, I present a number of medieval Spanish Bible translations, some of which are Hebraizing, resulting in interesting syntactic extensions reminiscent of Aquila’s translation technique. I conclude with the utterly Hebraizing Bible translation by the well-known unknown A.J.B. (Abbé) de Vay, with the unassuming title Biblia sacra ita exactè translata ut statim videatur quid refert unaquaeque vox textûs, quod nullus antea praestitit interpres (London 1817?), whose efforts to be a fidus interpres failed miserably, yet amusingly.

   

  –––––––––––––

   

  Dr Marieke Dhont

   

  Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge

  Foundation Year Teaching Associate, University of Cambridge

  Bye-Fellow, Girton College, Cambridge

  Director of Studies in TRPR, Gonville & Caius, Cambridge

  FWF Esprit Postdoctoral Researcher, Paris Lodron University Salzburg

  Done!Yes, will do.This is done.

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  PH

• Stanton Lectures

• Tyrwhitt Lecture

• 2024 Yerushah Lecture 
  Thursday 22 February at 5 p.m .

  Qohelet: A New Reading and a New Seeing
  
   

  Professor Menachem Fisch and Debra Band 

The Cambridge Faculty of Divinity is pleased to announce that the 2024 Yerushah Lecture will take place at 5 p.m. on Thursday 22 February, in the Runcie Room, Faculty of Divinity, West Road.  Professor Menachem Fisch (Tel Aviv University) and Deborah Band will speak on ‘Qohelet: A New Reading and a New Seeing.’ All are welcome, and refreshments will be served following the lecture. 

The two speakers will be on drawing on their analysis from their recent book on Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living (Baylor University Press, 2023). 

Menachem Fisch is Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University, TAU codirector of the Frankfurt–Tel Aviv Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies, and senior fellow of the Goethe University Frankfurt’s Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. He is author of The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism (with Y. Benbaji) (Notre Dame, 2011), Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency (Chicago, 2017), and Covenant of Confrontation: A Study of Non-Submissive Religiosity in Rabbinic Literature (Hebrew) (Bar-Ilan, 2019). 

Debra Band draws upon her love of both the manuscript arts and the Jewish textual tradition in her acclaimed illuminated manuscripts. She is the author and illuminator of The Song of Songs: The Honeybee in the Garden (JPS, 2005), I Will Wake the Dawn: Illuminated Psalms (with Arnold J. Band) (JPS, 2007), Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah (with Arnold J. Band) (Honeybee in the Garden, 2012), and Kabbalat Shabbat: The Grand Unification (with Raymond P. Scheindlin) (Honeybee in the Garden, 2016), among other works. Her paintings have been widely exhibited across the United States and Canada.  

The annual Yerushah Lecture in the Faculty of Divinity was established with a benefaction from the Righteous Persons Foundation, created by Steven Spielberg from the proceeds of his 1993 film Schindler’s List. ‘Yerushah’ is the Hebrew word for ‘heritage’. The Yerushah Lecture is devoted to Jewish heritage in all its aspects, with an emphasis on the transmission of Jewish identity and values across the generations. 

Inaugural and Valedictory Lectures

Conferences

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