Hellenistic

[Alice Faber]

Baker, John wrote:
>         In a review of The Hellenistic Age, by Peter Green, in The Wall
> Street Journal today, Peter Stothard asserts that the word Hellenistic
> itself came from the French name for the Septuagint.  I was a bit
> surprised by this, having always supposed that the word had something to
> do with the Hellenes (from Hellen, the mythical ancestor of the Greeks).
> Is there any basis at all for Stothard's assertion, or is it just
> another Wall Street Journalism?
>

Nope. Scholarly treatments of the Septuagint in French refer to it as la
septante: <http://orthodoxie.club.fr/ecrits/70/indexx.htm>,
<http://perso.orange.fr/andre.canessa/Esdras/index.htm>.

--
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Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                           tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                        fax (203) 865-8963

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