And so what is your point with this? I have a Catholic wife and ended up spending a lot of time in Catholic institutions. In fact, as German immigrants (one Jewish one Protestant German) I grew up spending time in the Kolping society because we had a close Catholic German neighbor. Doesn't mean my mother or my father or my brother or I necessarily spent a lot of time considering Catholic culture or were open-minded to those beliefs. I still make jokes that my wife who was raised religiously has never so much as opened a Bible as seems to be fairly normal for many/most Catholic believers.Not to mention that my wife is Jewish(and atheist), we go to Temple on High Holidays, my daughter is currently going to 5 weeks of sleepaway Jewish camp, and we of course contribute to Temple. But lets leave all that aside.
The point here is that Hebrew was an archaic language EVEN FOR JEWS for most of existence of modern Jewry. Since you made this personal. I assume being confronted with "Jewish identity" everyday have to try and make sense of it has helped you embrace this fringe theory. Why not take my advice and accept that Judaism is just weird and learn to accept its weirdness without trying to obscure it with the noble ideas of Plato and Greek philosophy. Again Jews like Catholics and many ancient religions tend not to take their religion that seriously. The OBSERVE their religion rather than make sense of it. So what are the roadmaps for your sensibilities to help you make sense of all of this weirdness?
If I am to play psychologist along comes a guy like Gmirkin's whose theory makes your wife's religion more "ordinary." Judaism is a strange religion. As my friend Steve Cowan once said, if you had never heard of Jews before and encountered one in the street you likely wouldn't believe that such a person was possible let alone a whole culture of such strange people. I know it is tempting to make the Pentateuch "ordinary" but it is strange document. There are so many examples of our present Hebrew text demonstrating itself to be corrupt and the LXX either preserving these corruptions in transmission or being little help solving them. https://books.google.com/books?id=3KtVA ... ss&f=false https://www.google.com/books/edition/Th ... frontcover No one anywhere has ever suggested that the LXX preserves a Greek translation of the original exemplar of the Hebrew Pentateuch. Doesn't that strike you as strange? Surely if Gmirkin is right the LXX attests to or testifies to the "original Hebrew text" the exemplar. But this is silly. The LXX attests to the same corruptions as the MT or SP albeit translated into Greek.
I don't know of any scholar with sufficient naivete to think or propose the LXX solves all the obscurities that arise out of the textual corruption of all known Hebrew exemplars. The experts in the Hebrew language I know don't have this idiotic notion that ANY SURVIVING TEXT is "pure" let alone the LXX witnessing the "original pure" Hebrew exemplar. The MT, the SP, the LXX are all descendants of some lost ur-text of course written in Hebrew. But no one in their right mind thinks the LXX is a Greek translation of anything but the same corrupt Hebrew traditions that have come down to us. There's a naivete to all this talk about the LXX providing us with a snapshot of the exemplar. The MT is a corrupt copy of something from before the Hellenistic period. The SP is a corrupt copy of something from before the Hellenistic period. And the Greek translation of the Hebrew text in Alexandria either around 270 or around 150 BCE is similarly a copy of a corrupt Hebrew exemplar. This theory would be and is laughable to a serious scholar of Biblical Hebrew for this reason alone. It resembles the deluded sincerity of a hillbilly farmer trying to make sense of the "good book" and is filled with generalities and oversimplifications.
Why do these childish oversimplifications work for you? Perhaps because you want to make your marriage to your wife and your daughter's participation in this bizarre culture more sensible to you. That's an admirable naivete I guess. But why not start with the idea that Judaism is weird and probably incomprehensible (as many learned Jews have failed to make sense of all its complexities having critical abilities in the primary language of the Pentateuch). Linking it with Plato and Greek philosophy is only a way of explaining away the weirdness. Weirdness is good. My advice is to let the Bible be weird rather than whitewash it in the name of "sameness."
