Modal morphosyntax in the Septuagint within the history of Post-Classical Greek

In this paper, I develop an approach to the morphosyntactic patterns of modaity in the Septuagint that allows us to interpret these patterns within the wider history of Greek. To this end, I provide a diachronic analysis of the different forms and functions of wish strategies found in the Septuagint corpus. I find a diverse set of diachronic scenarios, demonstrating the complex balance between functional inheritance and contact-induced innovation in the modal morphosyntax in the Septuagint corpus: (i) the mood marker ὄφελον is used as inherited idiomatic way to represent counterfactual wishes in the Hebrew source text but also innovatively extends to non-counterfactual wishes due to system-internal change and contact (as confirmed by limited diffusion to later texts), (ii) insubordination creates a novel counterfactual wish pattern (εἰ γάρ with ὄφελον) in the high register context of Job, whilst inherited insubordinate strategies such as εἰ γάρ + optative are reused for rhetorical effect in line with its use in earlier and later texts, and (iii) the impact of contact leads not only to less directly equivalent structures in the Septuagint (e.g. questions to represent typically Hebrew who give wishes), but also to lower frequencies of the optative in translated books of the Septuagint than non-translated books and contemporary patterns, with specific forms being used in ways based partially on literary precedent and partially on contact-induced extensions (e.g. γένοιτο for amen and δῴη for causative natan).