Texts of Assimilation, Texts of Change

Texts of Assimilation, Texts of Change

One of the crucial dynamics in the history of Jewish scripture is the translation of the Torah into Greek and then its double life as a Greek and Hebrew text, as it enters into a cultural relationship first with a dominant Greek cultural privilege, then with a Christian religious authority -- and then a translation into Latin. This paper will consider first the general background of such a dynamic and the consequent, sometimes heated differences between cultural interaction and cultural separation enacted at the linguistic level; and second a specific test case of the translation of a sentence from the story of Noah which opens in turn into the long history of `repentance` -- the question of moral change dramatized in and through linguistic change. How do practices of translation and stories of transformation speak to each other?