Theophrastus and the Septuagint: the wood of the Tabernacle between Hebrew and Greek

In the biblical book of Exodus, God orders the Jews to build a portable temple, the Tabernacle, using acacia wood as the main material. The translators of the Greek version of the Bible, the so-called Septuagint, rendered the original Hebrew expression for “acacia wood” (ʿăṣê šiṭṭîm) as ξύλα ἄσηπτα, which is non-literal and means “incorruptible wood” instead. This paper argues that this process took place due to the ambiguity of the Greek word for acacia, ἄκανθα (which mainly means “thorn,” “bramble” and only incidentally “acacia”), and that the solution adopted was based on the reading of Theophrastus’ Historia plantarum, which uses the adjective ἄσηπτος to describe the acacia. The fact that the translator of Exodus used the Greek botanical work as a source to solve this linguistic problem sheds new light on the translation techniques of the Septuagint and unveils how Greek scientific culture played a role in the making of the translation.