Abstract
This book focuses on problems in the study of the Biblical Greek. The first chapter shows the persistence of the ideal of a Holy Tongue in the religious literature of the Hellenistic Judaism. In the domain of the Bible translation the need to reproduce a sacred idion may have lead to the adoption of a higly specific language. The two subsequent chapters attempt to demonstrate that ancient readers were well aware of the uncommon character of the Biblical Greek. Their comments on its specificity range from the recognition of semantic obscurity to remarks on the strangeness of certain linguistic forms. The philological notes from Hadrian‘s Isagogè (early Vth century AD) illustrate well the different types of difficulties encountered by the ancient Greek reader in his Bible. Yet these difficulties should not be attrbites to a linguistic system extraneous to the Greek: they can more plausibly be described as manifestations of a specific style. To characterize such linguistic phenomena, resulting from a particular attempt at writing sacred, the term hieratic style is proposed in order to avoid the fallacy of describing the Greek by reference to the Hebrew.
Léonas, Alexis