The Septuagint

The Septuagint - the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures - is one of the most important documents in the history of both Judaism and Christianity, and one of the most underappreciated by general readers of the Bible. It was the Bible of the early church. When New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, they almost always quote the Septuagint rather than translating directly from the Hebrew. The theological vocabulary of the New Testament - words like ekklesia (church), diatheke (covenant), hilasterion (mercy seat/atonement) - was shaped by Septuagint usage. To understand how the New Testament reads the Old Testament, you need to understand the Septuagint.

The translation was produced beginning in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd century BCE. The legend preserved in the Letter of Aristeas holds that Ptolemy II Philadelphus commissioned seventy-two Jewish scholars to translate the Torah into Greek; they were separated and produced identical translations, proving divine guidance. Modern scholarship treats this as legend. The translation was almost certainly produced over a long period by multiple translators working on different books - which is why the quality and style of the Greek varies considerably across the collection. The name "Septuagint" (Latin for seventy, abbreviated LXX) derives from the legend.

The Septuagint differs from the Hebrew text in ways that range from minor to significant. Some differences reflect translation choices - the Greek translators making decisions about how to render difficult Hebrew expressions. Others reflect a different Hebrew text tradition - places where the Septuagint translators appear to have had a Hebrew manuscript that differed from the one that became standard. The book of Jeremiah is the most dramatic case: the Septuagint Jeremiah is about one-seventh shorter than the Hebrew and arranges its material differently. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed that multiple Hebrew text traditions existed in the Second Temple period, validating the Septuagint as a witness to genuine ancient textual variation rather than simply a flawed translation.

One specific difference has had enormous theological consequences. Isaiah 7:14 in Hebrew uses the word almah, meaning a young woman of marriageable age. The Septuagint translated this as parthenos, the Greek word for virgin. Matthew 1:23 quotes the Septuagint version in his account of the virgin birth of Jesus. Jewish interpreters, reading the Hebrew, have always maintained that the verse refers to a young woman, not specifically a virgin, and that it referred to a birth in Isaiah's own time as a sign for King Ahaz. The difference between the two readings traces directly to a translation choice made in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE.