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Νόμος/νόμοι in the Septuagint and the Letter to the Hebrews
In the Septuagint, the word “law” (in the singular) always refers to the Law of God. The singular is semantically loaded: the Law is one, just as there is one God and one Temple. This translation strategy is the same for all the books of the Old Greek translation. The appearance of the plural forms of νόμοι “laws” in the Greek Bible may be due to one of the following factors:
(a) we are dealing with later translations/revisions that no longer follow the rule mentioned above;
(b) upon closer study of the textual tradition, the text adopted in the standard Septuagint editions as Old Greek turns out to be secondary;
(c) we are dealing not with a translation from Hebrew, but with fragments originally written in Greek;
(d) (the most interesting case) the translators deliberately choose the plural form to distinguish the law(s) in question from the Law of Moses (a kind of lexicalization of the grammatical category of number).
The present paper focuses especiallly on the meaning of pl. νόμοι in Jer 31/38:33 and Jer 31:36/38:37. It is shown that the difference between the Hebrew and the Greek texts witnesses to a re-interpretation of Jer 31/38 in the LXX. Differently from the Hebrew original, the Greek text of Jeremiah speaks here not about the Torah of Moses, but rather about the new laws, that will be given in the context of the new, eschatological covenant (Jer 31/38:1). One can say that by rendering the Hebrew “Law” as νόμοι, the LXX translator of Jeremiah paved the way for the future self-understanding of the first Christians.
It is important that the contrast between the singular νόμος and the plural νόμοι in the Old Greek translation has nothing to do with the Hebrew Vorlage and cannot be used for its reconstruction. In particular, the plural νόμοι in Jer 31/38:33 says nothing about the grammatical number of the corresponding word in the Hebrew Vorlage. It can be used to reconstruct the theological worldview of the translators, but not the underlying Hebrew text of Jeremiah.