The Hebrew Bible has played an important part in the development of Western culture. However
its central ideas - such as monotheism the demythologization of nature or the linearity of
time - had to be taken out of the national and linguistic milieu in which they had developed if
they were to to become fertile on a wider scale. They also needed to be rendered palatable to a
mentality that had experienced the scientific rationalist revolution prepared by the Greeks.
The Septuagint - the oldest Greek translation of the Jewish Bible produced over the third and
second centuries BC - is the first important step in this process of acculturation. Over the
last twenty years the Septuagint has come out of the shadow of its Hebrew source. Historians of
Judaism linguists and biblical scholars have come to view the Septuagint as a significant
document in its own right. As the discoveries in Qumran have shown the Hebrew source text of
the Septuagint was not identical to the traditional text received by the synagogue (the
Masoretic Text). Also the translators appear to have taken a degree of liberty in interpreting
the text. Dominique Barthélemy used the term 'aggiornamento': the Septuagint is a kind of
update of the Jewish scriptures. This large-scale collective and interdisciplinary project aims
to produce a new research tool: a multi-volume dictionary providing a comprehensive article
(around 500 articles in all) for each important word or word group of the Septuagint. Filling
an important gap in the fields of ancient philology and religious studies the dictionary is
based on original research of the highest scientific level. The dictionary will be published in
English. The first volume contains over 160 articles on words with the letters Alpha to Gamma.
