Identifying "Updated" Prophecies in Old Greek (OG) Isaiah: Isaiah 8:11-16 As a Test Case‪.‬

In a 1997 article entitled "Isaiah in the Septuagint," Arie van der Kooij made the following bold claim: "LXX Isaiah represents a unique case within the LXX of the Old Testament as a whole, in being a free translation which reflects at several places an actualizing interpretation of the Isaianic prophecies."1 As van der Kooij employs the term, "actualization" refers to "a type of rewritten or rephrased text" that offers a "fulfillment-interpretation" of a passage in the translator's Vorlage. (2) Actualization is not limited to word- or phrase-level phenomena such as the modernization of place-names; according to van der Kooij, actualization in OG Isaiah may take the form of Although Isac Leo Seeligmann, Jean Koenig, and others claim to have identified instances of "actualized" or "updated" prophecies in OG Isaiah, (4) it is van der Kooij who has offered the most sophisticated methodological proposals to date for testing such claims. (5) As he himself acknowledges, "The question of how to determine the actualization is a rather complicated one." (6) Thus, his method begins with a close comparison of the OG and MT at the levels of grammar, syntax, and semantics. The interpreter attends not simply to the word level, but also to phrases, clauses, and entire verses. The next stage of analysis adopts what van der Kooij terms a "contextual approach." Here the Greek passage is "read as a text in its own right." (7) One examines the individual features of the OG in their interrelation, asking, "Do specific renderings, be it words or clauses, relate to each other contextually" so as to constitute "a coherent text?" (8) Finally, van der Kooij examines the text at the level of its genre. For a prophecy, this entails inquiring whether the translator has updated the oracle so that it now refers to his own contemporary situation.