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Response to David Washburn, Review of Repetition of the Possessive Pronouns in the Septuagint, by Raija Sollamo.

1. I was very happy to see a review of my book so soon and, of course, I was very delighted with David L. Washburn's high evaluation of it. Unfortunately, he has misunderstood one of my main results. David L. Washburn writes in his review: "Sollamo shows ... that repetition of possessive pronouns in lists of two or more nouns is not a Hebraism at all; it is perfectly good Koine Greek. Authors such as Polybius, the Ptolemaic Papyri, Pseudo-Aristeas, Philo and Josephus repeated the pronouns more often than not" (par. 4). This is not correct. I have demonstrated that there is only one case involving the repetition of possessive pronouns by the Koine authors, namely Bell. Iud. 1,558. My examples are not taken at random from Koine authors. I have presented my text corpus on p. 7, and it has been scrutinized thoroughly. My examples are all that appear in this text corpus. As a result I state on page 17: "Firstly, the normal LXX practice of repeating the possessive pronoun with coordinate items proves to be a Hebraism."

© TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 1996.

Raija Sollamo
University of Helsinki