Septuagint

• 1. Introduction

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  Each year, Jews in Alexandria celebrated the Septuagint with a grand picnic on the beach at Pharos, where the Lighthouse of Alexandria stood. Some Gentile visitors joined the crowd. Pharos mattered because the translation was said to have been made there. The Septuagint, abbreviated LXX, is the earliest surviving Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. A translation that earns a beach festival is unusual. This one went on to shape two religions, and to divide them. Who really made it, and why did a story of seventy-two translators grow up around it? What did the collection hold that many Bibles now leave out? Why did Jews turn away from it while Christians treated it as their own? And why do scholars who hold the Hebrew text in their hands still check the Greek?

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• 2. Seventy-Two Chambers

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  Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Macedonian Greek pharaoh of Egypt who ruled from 285 to 247 BC, stars in the founding legend. In that story he asked for the laws of the Jews and brought seventy-two Hebrew translators from Jerusalem to Alexandria. Six came from each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Their task was to render the Torah from Biblical Hebrew into Koine Greek, for the Library of Alexandria. The tale comes from a letter attributed to Aristeas, addressed to his brother Philocrates. Some scholars suspect the letter is pseudepigraphical, meaning it was written under a borrowed name. Philo, Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews, and later writers including Augustine all repeated the story.

  The Babylonian Talmud, in Tractate Megillah, adds a miracle. King Ptolemy gathers seventy-two elders and places each in a separate chamber, without telling them why. He visits each room and says, "Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher." God then moves every elder to produce a translation identical to the others.

  Philo of Alexandria explained the number by choosing six scholars from each of the twelve tribes. That detail raises a problem. It implies the twelve tribes still existed under Ptolemy, almost 500 years after Assyria forcibly resettled the Ten Lost Tribes. One answer is that many people of those tribes had fled to Jerusalem and survived, preserving a remnant of each lineage. Jerusalem swelled to five times its earlier population. Later rabbinic tradition adds that the translation was given to Ptolemy two days before the annual fast of the Tenth of Tevet.

  Other voices offered different accounts. Aristobulus of Alexandria, in his third fragment, claimed that portions of the Law were translated into Greek long before the famous version. He added that Plato and Pythagoras knew the Jewish Law and borrowed from it. Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, in the preface to his 1844 translation, agreed that Alexandrian Jews probably wrote the Greek. He dismissed Aristeas as a pious fiction. Brenton thought the name came from the earliest version being submitted to the Sanhedrin in Alexandria for editing and approval.

  The name arrived late. It descends from the Latin phrase Vetus Testamentum ex versione Septuaginta Interpretum, meaning the Old Testament from the version of the Seventy Translators. Nobody called the Greek scriptures Septuaginta until the time of Augustine of Hippo, who lived from 354 to 430 AD. Scholars now write LXX for seventy, and sometimes the single letter G when they compare it with other texts.

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• 3. Translators at Work

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  Few people in the Second Temple period could speak Hebrew, and fewer still could read it. Koine Greek and Aramaic served as the shared languages of the Jewish community, and some targums paraphrased the Bible into Aramaic. The Greek translation filled the same need. Scholars agree that Jews in the Ptolemaic Kingdom translated the first five books, probably in the early or middle part of the 3rd century BC. The large community in Alexandria stood at the center of that effort.

  Three clues support that early date for the Torah. Its Greek looks like early Koine. Other writers cite it from the 2nd century BC. And manuscripts datable to the 2nd century BC survive. The remaining books followed over the next two to three centuries, and the Greek text was complete by 132 BC. Nobody can say for certain which book came when, or where. Some books may have been translated twice, then revised. Quality varied widely, from close literal rendering to loose paraphrase to bold interpretation.

  The Greek itself shows the strain of crossing languages. Some sections carry Semiticisms, which are idioms borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic. Daniel and Proverbs lean more heavily on Greek habits of expression. The translation also helps scholars hear archaic Hebrew. Many proper nouns appear with Greek vowels, while the Hebrew texts of the day had no vowel marks. Even so, Greek could not capture every Hebrew sound.

  Names posed a special puzzle. Translators usually matched Hebrew place names and personal names with similar-sounding Greek forms. For the region of Aram, they followed Greek custom instead and wrote Syria, and they called the Arameans Syrians. That choice rippled into Latin and later English versions. The American orientalist Robert W. Rogers, who died in 1930, lamented it in 1921. He wrote that it should always be Aram and the Aramaeans.

  The Greek text also became a parent. Early Christians rendered it into Latin in several versions known collectively as the Vetus Latina. It also underlies the Old Church Slavonic, Syro-Hexaplar, Classical Armenian, Old Georgian and Coptic versions of the Christian Old Testament.

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• 4. More Than One Book

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  Fourth-century copies of the Septuagint already contained books missing from the modern Jewish canon. The Hebrew Bible has three parts: the Torah, the Nevi'im and the Ketuvim. The Greek collection has four: law, history, poetry and prophets. It is a gathering of translations made by many people, in many places, at different times and for different purposes. They sometimes worked from different Hebrew manuscripts, while the canon itself was still taking shape.

  The extra books are called the deuterocanon, from Greek words for a second canon. They are estimated to date from between 200 BC and 50 AD. They include the first two Books of the Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, the Book of Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah. Esther and Daniel also carry additions. As a result, the Greek Daniel and Esther run longer than the Masoretic versions that Rabbinic Judaism affirmed. The Greek Jeremiah runs shorter. Some copies add further works, such as the Psalms of Solomon, 3 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151.

  Organization differed too. The Books of Samuel and Kings form a single four-part work titled Basileon, meaning Of Reigns. The Books of Chronicles became Paraleipomenon, meaning Of Things Left Out. The Twelve Minor Prophets sit together as one Book of Twelve.

  The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that some of these books had Hebrew originals. A 1st century scroll found in 1956, known as 11QPs(a), holds two short Hebrew psalms that scholars agree were the basis for Psalm 151. Sirach survives in two Hebrew scrolls from Qumran and another from Masada. Five fragments of Tobit turned up at Qumran, four in Aramaic and one in Hebrew.

  Churches still disagree about the extra books. The Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church include most of them. Protestant churches usually do not. After the Reformation, many Protestant Bibles followed the Jewish canon, and the excluded texts came to be called the Apocrypha. The King James Version prints them under a separate heading.

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• 5. A Parting of Ways

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  By the 2nd century, most Jews had stopped using the Septuagint. Part of the reason was its new owners. The earliest gentile Christians relied on it out of necessity, since it was the only Greek Bible and most could not read Hebrew. Association with a rival religion made the translation suspect to a newer generation of Jewish scholars. They turned to Hebrew and Aramaic Targum manuscripts, later compiled by the Masoretes, and to Aramaic translations such as those of Onkelos and Rabbi Yonathan ben Uziel.

  A second reason may have mattered more. Readers noticed that the Greek differed from contemporary Hebrew scriptures. Even Greek-speaking Jews tended to prefer other Jewish versions in Greek, such as the translation by Aquila, which tracked the Hebrew more closely. How far Alexandrian Jews had ever treated the Septuagint as authoritative remains unclear. Copies among the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest that various Jewish sects once used it.

  Mainstream Rabbinic Judaism rejects the Septuagint as scripture for two stated reasons. It departs from the Masoretic Text in many places, especially in the Book of Job. Heinrich Guggenheimer argues that deliberate mistranslations in Deuteronomy 6 echo ancient sources of the Passover Haggadah. The translation also sometimes seems to miss Hebrew idiom.

  The most famous example is Isaiah 7:14. The Hebrew word almah means young woman, but the Greek renders it parthenos, meaning virgin. Irenaeus treated the Greek as the older and clearer witness. He wrote that the Septuagint plainly identifies a virgin who would conceive. By his account, Theodotion and Aquila, Jewish converts, read almah as young woman. He added that the Ebionites used that reading to claim Joseph was the biological father of Jesus. To Irenaeus this was heresy, made possible by late anti-Christian changes to the Hebrew scripture. The older, pre-Christian Greek, he argued, exposed the changes.

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• 6. Jerome Against Tradition

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  Jerome translated most of the Old Testament in his Vulgate from Hebrew rather than from Greek, and his contemporary Augustine sharply criticized the choice. Jerome argued that the Hebrew texts were superior and could correct the Septuagint on philological and theological grounds. Because he was accused of heresy, he also took care to acknowledge the Greek. His version gradually gained acceptance and displaced the Old Latin translations that descended from the Septuagint.

  Jerome had evidence in hand. Greek was the shared language of the eastern Roman Empire, so the early church there used the Greek texts. Syriac Christianity used Aramaic. The Septuagint seems to have been a major source for the Apostles, yet not the only one. Jerome pointed to Matthew 2:15 and 2:23, John 19:37, John 7:38 and 1 Corinthians 2:9. He said these appear in Hebrew texts but not in the Greek. Matthew 2:23 is missing from the current Masoretic tradition too. Jerome said it was in Isaiah 11:1. Yet New Testament writers freely cited the Greek, even when quoting Jesus citing scripture. That implies Jesus, his apostles and their followers considered it reliable.

  The Eastern Orthodox Church kept faith with the Greek. It prefers the Septuagint as the base for translating the Old Testament into other languages. Where Greek is the liturgical language, it uses the untranslated text.

  Modern translators working from the Masoretic Text still consult it. The foreword to the New Jerusalem Bible says other versions, including the Septuagint, are used only when the Hebrew presents "insuperable difficulties." The preface to the New International Version says the translators consulted the more important early versions. They occasionally followed those readings where the Masoretic Text seemed doubtful.

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• 7. Witnesses and Variants

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  In Isaiah 36:11, the Masoretic Text speaks of the people on the wall, while the Greek speaks of the men. The meaning is the same, but the wording differs. Scholars once cited such gaps to call the Septuagint a poor translation. Then the Isaiah Scroll from Qumran turned up with the Hebrew word for the men. Even small differences, it seemed, could come from a different Hebrew source text.

  That discovery is one of four ways the Greek and Masoretic texts diverge. Sometimes the Hebrew sources differ. Sometimes the same Hebrew was interpreted differently, as in Genesis 4:7, the only noticeable difference in an otherwise matching chapter. Sometimes an idiom resists translation. In Psalm 47:10, the Masoretic Text calls the guardians of the earth God's own. The Greek says the mighty ones of the earth belong to God. And sometimes copyists introduced errors, or revisers changed the text.

  Emanuel Tov, editor of the translated scrolls, sorts the biblical manuscripts from Qumran into five groups. About 60 percent are proto-Masoretic, with a stable text close to the Masoretic. About 5 percent, including 4QDeut-q and 4QJer-b, share distinctive affinities with the Greek Bible. About 20 percent, among them the Isaiah Scroll 1QIsa-a, follow what Tov calls the Qumran practice, with free handling and frequent corrections. Another 5 percent resemble the Samaritan Pentateuch. The last 10 percent align with no single type.

  Deuteronomy 32:43, the Song of Moses, shows the spread. Bastiaan Van Elderen compares three versions. The Masoretic reads, "Shout for joy, O nations, with his people." Qumran invites the heavens to rejoice and all the divine ones to worship. The Greek has the sons of God worship him and the angels of God be strong in him.

  The oldest big witnesses are Greek. Codex Vaticanus from the 4th century and Codex Alexandrinus from the 5th are the oldest nearly complete manuscripts of the Old Testament in any language. The oldest complete Hebrew texts come about 600 years later, from the first half of the 10th century. Codex Sinaiticus, also 4th century, partly survives, along with Codex Marchalianus.

  The earliest fragments are older still. They include 2nd-century BC pieces of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and 1st-century BC pieces of the Pentateuch and the Twelve Minor Prophets. Later revisions by Aquila in 128 AD, Symmachus and Theodotion followed the Hebrew of their day more literally than the original Greek. Origen's Hexapla set six versions side by side, with a column for the Old Greek marked by symbols showing which version each line came from. Copyists reproduced his combined text without the symbols and neglected the older uncombined one. Jerome later named two more recensions, the Lucianic or Antiochene and the Hesychian or Alexandrian.

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• 8. Print and Translation

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  The Complutensian Polyglot Bible was the first printed Septuagint. Its basis was manuscripts now lost, and it seems to reflect quite early readings. The Aldine edition, begun by Aldus Manutius, appeared in Venice in 1518. In 1587 the Roman or Sixtine edition was published under Antonio Carafa and the authority of Sixtus V. It used Codex Vaticanus as its base. It was meant to help revisers preparing the Latin Vulgate ordered by the Council of Trent. It became the received text of the Greek Old Testament.

  The modern standard began with Alfred Rahlfs, a researcher at the University of Göttingen. He started a manual edition in 1917 or 1918, and the completed Septuaginta appeared in 1935. It relies mainly on Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus. The Göttingen Septuagint, a multivolume critical edition published since 1931, is still unfinished. The largest missing pieces are the historical books, Proverbs, Song of Songs and a new Psalms. In 2006 the German Bible Society issued a revised Rahlfs with over a thousand changes, but only two wording changes, in Isaiah 5:17 and 53:2.

  English readers waited far longer. Charles Thomson produced the first English translation in 1808, without the apocrypha. Lancelot Brenton published his in 1854, with Greek and English in parallel columns. For much of the time since, it was the only one readily available, and it has stayed continuously in print.

  The 21st century brought a burst of new versions. The Apostolic Bible Polyglot appeared in 2003 with a Greek-English interlinear text. The Complete Apostles' Bible by Paul W. Esposito followed in 2007. In October 2007, the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies released A New English Translation of the Septuagint, known as NETS. The Orthodox Study Bible arrived in early 2008. Lexham Press published the Lexham English Septuagint in 2012 and a second edition in 2019. One description calls it the only contemporary English translation made directly from the Greek.

  The same society publishes the Journal of Septuagint and Cognate Studies. On the 8th of February 2006, it declared an International Septuagint Day, to promote work on campuses and in communities.

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