An Ear For An Eye—Lay Literacy And The Septuagint By Cameron Boyd-Taylor

This chapter discusses the nexus between form and function and illustrates a way in which this nexus might figure in studying the Septuagint. The chapter commences with an outline of a functionalist perspective on translation, i.e., one that views translation technique as a goal directed behavior and attempts to understand it in relation to a specific social and cultural background. It revisits a long-standing source of perplexity within the field: the Tabernacle Account of the Greek Exodus, and ask whether by adopting a functionalist perspective we might, if not solve the problem, then at least move forward our discussion of it. The Hellenistic period saw the rise of a plethora of reading communities, many of which produced secondary literatures ancillary to the study of canonical texts. That such communities are indicative of a larger trend, namely, what the educational theorist Ivan Illich has called the rise of lay-literacy, is patent. Keywords: form and function; Greek Exodus; Hellenistic period; Ivan Illich; lay literacy; Septuagint