Topic 4 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
The Septuagint
The Septuagint - abbreviated LXX for the seventy (or seventy-two) translators of legend - is the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, produced primarily in Alexandria, Egypt, beginning in the 3rd century BCE. It was made for diaspora Jews who no longer read Hebrew fluently, and it became the Bible of the early church. When New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, they almost always quote the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew text directly. Understanding the Septuagint is essential for understanding how the New Testament reads the Old.
The legend of its origin, told in the Letter of Aristeas, holds that seventy-two Jewish scholars were brought to Alexandria at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, placed in separate cells, and produced identical translations - proof of divine guidance. Modern scholarship treats this as a pious legend rather than history. The translation was in fact produced over a long period by different translators working on different books, which is why the quality and style of the Greek varies considerably across the collection. The Pentateuch was translated first and most carefully; some of the later books show less polished work.
The Septuagint is not simply a translation of the Hebrew Bible. In some books it differs from the Hebrew text significantly enough to suggest that the translators were working from a Hebrew manuscript tradition different from the one that became standard. The book of Jeremiah in the Septuagint is about one-seventh shorter than in the Hebrew and arranges its material differently. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed that multiple Hebrew text traditions existed in the Second Temple period, making the Septuagint's differences historically interesting rather than simply erroneous.
For Christian readers, the Septuagint matters because it shaped how the earliest Christians understood their scriptures. When Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14 to speak of a virgin birth, he follows the Septuagint's Greek word parthenos (virgin) rather than the Hebrew almah (young woman). The difference between the two words is at the center of one of the oldest Jewish-Christian interpretive disputes. The Septuagint is not an error or a corruption. It is a distinct textual tradition that carried the Hebrew scriptures into the Greek-speaking world and made the New Testament possible.