“The Voice of Your Wife”: Why an Ancient Interpreter Chose to Voice Eve with a Testament

Eve’s Testament (Greek Life of Adam and Eve 15–30) contains an expansive first-person retelling of the Eden narrative in which an elder Eve remembers her younger self calling to Adam “with a loud voice” and saying, “listen to me!” She then admits that when she opened her mouth, “the Devil was speaking,” and she was able to quickly persuade her husband to eat of the forbidden fruit. The unparalleled decision of an ancient author to voice the primordial woman with a testament builds exegetically on a textual problem in Gen 3:17 where YHWH Elohim punishes the man for “listening to the voice of his wife” when the woman never spoke to the man in Gen 2–3. Eve’s Testament provides the missing voice of Adam’s wife, and through it, we learn how the devil used her voice to get Adam “cast out of Paradise.”

Language Contact, Cognition, and Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Greek Pentateuch

This study engages recent discussions concerning the description of the Greek of the LXX Pentateuch and the nature of source text interference. Research in contact linguistics and cognition provides a framework to describe the various phenomena observed, ranging from borrowing of linguistic material to the more widespread structural transfer. Processes such as pivot-matching and the cognitive aspects of word-choice transfer shed light on the mechanics of translation and issues such as the nature of cross-linguistic influence and a translator’s apparent inconsistencies. In this context, the intelligibility of specific renderings or their grammatical conventionality are not sufficient criteria for assessing cross-linguistic influence since its effects can be felt at the level of register or genre. This has important ramifications for the register or genre categorization of various textual units of the LXX Pentateuch and stylistic descriptions.