Abstract
The Septuagint (LXX) is the most significant work of cultural mediation the ancient world has ever seen. It has been a bridge that long united the Jewish and Greek worlds in a synthesis that forged Western civilization. The boldness of the enterprise and its immediate impact on the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria with the translation of the Torah in the 3rd century B.C. are undeniable: the first recipients of the LXX regarded it as the self-evident Word of God. With the addition of Greek translations of other sacred texts, this sentiment would continue in subsequent generations of Greek-speaking Jews and Christians at least until the second half of the 4th century CE in the Western Church and still today in the Eastern Churches. Despite its vast influence in the ancient world, for a long time the LXX occupied a secondary historiographical role in the West. In fact, it has been used primarily as a source of "spare parts" to reconstruct problematic Hebrew biblical passages. The rediscovery of the importance of the LXX has only come about in the last three decades through studies conducted on the Dead Sea papyri. This research aims to advance knowledge of both the “Nutzungsgeschichte” and “Wirkungsgeschichte” of the LXX by integrating existing resources that are highly innovative from both heuristic-methodological and infrastructural perspectives: the HTLS, some PRIN2017 funded research, and the RESILIENCE-RI European research infrastructure. This general objective will be pursued through more detailed research focused on a set of words related to the field of violence and resilience. The specific objectives are to. - to examine the use/meaning of the semantics of kill/heal in the LXX (e.g. therapeuo, iatreuo, phoneuo), focusing on its Hellenistic milieu (extrabiblical Greek literature, papyri, inscriptions, other Hebrew-Hellenistic writings) and biblical and Semitic influences (Nutzungsgeschichte); - reconstruct the history of the reception of these specific words from the LXX in selected patristic works to diachronically explore the circulation of biblical texts and conduct a historical-conceptual analysis on the lexicon of killing/healing, as dramatically relevant today as in the time of Qo. (Eccl.) 3:3 (Wirkungsgeschichte). The resulting research will thus be an indicator of the biblical matrix of violence that characterizes the belligerence that has unexpectedly reappeared in Europe since the 1990s.
Results achieved
The project aimed to advance the knowledge of the genesis and “stabilization” of the text of the Septuagint (Wirkungsgeschichte) and the history of its use (Nutzungsgeschichte), which are at times concretely and scholarly independent and at times intertwined. It pursued this aim by integrating highly innovative existing resources from both a heuristic-methodological and infrastructural perspective: the Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint (HTLS), research funded by recent competitive projects (PRIN2017, Sacrifice in the Europe of the Religious Conflicts and in the Early Modern World), and the European research infrastructure RESILIENCE-RI. To this end, the team developed two computational prototypes aimed at mapping the history of both the formation of the various versions of the Greek Bible and their circulation. In order to test the prototypes, the focus was placed on a specific lexical field: that of killing and healing, which structurally articulated the paradigmatic function of the “a time to kill / a time to heal” of Eccl/Qoh 3:3. The research was driven by the effort to restore to the Septuagint a historical dignity far beyond the traditional historiographical use that, for decades, treated it primarily as a repository of “spare parts” for reconstructing problematic Hebrew biblical passages. Instead, it sought to align with the trends of the last thirty years, which have successfully capitalized on studies conducted on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The central wager of the project, in fact, was the idea that the Septuagint represents the most significant work of cultural mediation the ancient world ever witnessed: a bridge that for centuries connected the Jewish and the Greek worlds in a synthesis that helped shape Western civilization. The boldness of the enterprise and its immediate impact on the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria with the translation of the Torah in the third century BCE are undeniable. The earliest recipients of the LXX regarded it as the manifest Word of God. With the addition of Greek translations of other sacred texts, this perception endured among successive generations of Greek-speaking Jews and Christians at least until the second half of the fourth century CE in the Western Church, and it continues to this day in the Eastern Churches. As a result, the project produced not only studies in the fields of the so-called digital humanities and computational linguistics, but also research in biblical studies and in the history of early Christianity, as well as in the history of later Christianity. Given the selected lexical field and the initial research frameworks, this latter line of inquiry extended to the Wars of Religion of the early modern history. The main results achieved by the Bologna unit, coordinated by the project’s Principal Investigator, Davide Dainese, fall into two areas: (1) the development of an AI-based semantic search engine for identifying allusions to the Septuagint in patristic literature; and (2) historical and conceptual research into the relationship between violence and religion over the longue durée. With regard to the first area, the project’s findings were extensively discussed at an international conference organised by the University of Catania, the proceedings of which are now available in the volume edited by L. Arcari, L. Carnevale, D. Dainese, and A. Rotondo, Lost in Translations. Bibles, Libraries, Webs of Books, EDB, Bologna 2026. The code of the search engine developed by Resilient Septuagint has already been adopted and integrated by the uBIQUity team into its marketplace. D. Dainese’s article, “Due paradigmi antropologici a confronto in Strom. VI: l’embriologia di Clemente d’Alessandria messa alla prova,” Annali di Scienze Religiose 19 (2026), is the first published scholarly study to have made use of the tool. The results of the historical and conceptual research, by contrast, have been published in two substantial articles in Italian Class A journals: D. Dainese, “Balthasar de Ayala. Storia e immagine storiografica di un convitato di pietra delle guerre di religione del lungo secolo di ferro,” Cristianesimo nella Storia 45 (2024), 97–173; and D. Dainese, “Cum libeat et causa subsit: guerra, Stato e diritto in Pierino Belli. Una ricerca sul ‘crollo’ del regime di cristianità,” Nuova Rivista Storica 109 (2025), 513–558. The search engine dataset (EnGraSept) was developed by the University of Catania unit, coordinated by Arianna Rotondo, while the University of Bari unit, coordinated by Laura Carnevale, used the search engine developed within the PRIN project to prepare three entries for the Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint: ἐξίστημι / ἔκστασις / ἐκστατικός and ἐπιφαίνω / ἐπιφάνεια / ἐπιφανής, authored by Luca Arcari, and ἐκλέγω / ἐκλεκτός, authored by Laura Carnevale.Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Davide Dainese
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà
Coordinatore:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Contributo totale di progetto: Euro (EUR) 198.270,00
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 136.900,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
17/10/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
