Interaction between Lexical Innovation and Morphemic Analysis in the Septuagint? Evaluative Study on Hebrew Nominal Derivatives Related to Cultic Realia

The idea of treating this subject comes from an inspiring observation made by Pinkhos Churgin which I took into consideration while I was preparing the article βωμός for the Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint. In his article The Targum and the Septuagint, Churgin comes to the conclusion that “we must assume that the purpose of coining a new word for altar in the Bible, i.e. θυσιαστήριον, was a linguistic one”. In other words, the conceptualization “place of sacrifice” – easily inferable from the internal derivation of the noun mizbēaḥ, but completely absent in its predictable equivalent βωμός – would have been considered so salient in terms of expressivity as to justify the introduction ad hoc of a new Greek word moulded to be the exact replication of its Hebrew counterpart. Notwithstanding the explanatory limitations of his conclusions, the interesting aspect of Churgin’s approach based on the linguistic motivation is that it connects two distinct linguistic operations, which may interact in the practice of translation: morphemic analysis and lexical innovation. In fact, the morphemic parsing of the source language’s lexical units can function as a valuable source of information on their meaning and can lead, under particular circumstances, to a demand for lexical innovation in the target language. The present paper aims at inspecting more closely and extensively whether and to what extent such connection is in operation within the Septuagintic translations.