Deuterocanonical Books

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JustaServant

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What are some of the linguistic differences between the deuterocanonical books and other Old Testament books?
 
The obvious one of course is that Wisdom of Solomon and 2 Maccabees were written in Greek, and Judith and Tobit may have been written in Aramaic, the rest were Hebrew though.

There isn’t much difference from works like Daniel, though compared to the older works there is much more mention of angels. The difference between some deuterocanonical works (1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees comes to mind) is greater than between the deuterocanonicals and the later protocanonicals, with 1 Maccabees much more like the earlier works (e.g. Kings), though then again the 2 Maccabees approach is not too different to the Chronicles one.

I think the following groupings may be better though:

Judith, Tobit and 2 Maccabees with Daniel and maybe Esther
Sirach and Wisdom have some similarities with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (though less so the other wisdom books), but the views on the afterlife are more defined in the deuterocanonicals

NB: those are among the last protocanonicals written

To be fair there’s little in Baruch and 1 Maccabees to distinguish them from a standard protocanonical book

The other major difference is much more focus on eternal punishment rather than temporal, though this does feature in Daniel and Isaiah, and some others to a lesser degree, it is absent from much of the Old Testament
 
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