THE SEPTUAGINT

The myth speaks of seventy-two Jewish scholars locked in separate cells in Alexandria, emerging seventy-two days later with perfectly identical Greek translations of the Torah. The history is far more brutal, organic, and sovereign.

To examine the Septuagint (LXX) is to confront a paleographical and theological earthquake. By the third century BC, the Jewish diaspora scattered across the Mediterranean was losing its mother tongue. In the great academic hub of Alexandria, Egypt, Jewish scholars embarked on an unprecedented endeavor: translating the sacred Hebrew texts of the Old Covenant into Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the ancient world.

Modern Christians often assume that when Paul the Apostle or Jesus of Nazareth quoted the Old Testament, they were translating directly from the standardized Hebrew text we possess today (the Masoretic Text). This is a historical fallacy. In the overwhelming majority of New Testament quotations, the apostles did not quote the Hebrew; they quoted the Septuagint. They staked the theological foundation of the Christian faith upon a Greek translation.

Understanding the LXX is not a mere academic exercise; it is mandatory for grasping how the apostles defended the deity of Christ and the new covenant.

Textual criticism demands that we understand the origin and nature of the texts before us. The Septuagint is not a single, unified book. It is a collection of translations executed over centuries, possessing wildly varying degrees of literalism and theological interpretation.

The Torah (the first five books) was translated first, and with remarkable fidelity to the Hebrew. However, as the Prophets and Writings were translated in subsequent centuries, the Greek scribes frequently encountered obscure Hebrew syntax. In their attempt to make the text comprehensible to a Hellenistic audience, they sometimes paraphrased, expanded, or utilized Greek philosophical vocabulary to articulate Hebrew theological concepts.

The supremacy of the Septuagint in the early church creates a severe textual tension for the modern expositor. When the New Testament authors cite the Old Testament, their quotations frequently diverge from our modern Hebrew Old Testament (the Masoretic Text). The apostles were unapologetically utilizing the Greek recension, even when the Greek translation introduced unique theological nuances not explicitly found in the Hebrew.

The author of Hebrews builds a massive Christological argument upon the phrase “a body You have prepared for Me” a phrase that exists in the Greek Septuagint but is absent from the traditional Hebrew Masoretic Text (which reads “my ears you have dug/opened”). To the fiercely conservative mind, this is terrifying. Did the author of Hebrews build a divine argument on a faulty translation? Or did the Holy Spirit intentionally superintend the Greek translation to explicitly reveal the incarnation of the Son?

“For the first Christians, the Septuagint was the Bible. It provided the theological vocabulary and the exegetical framework for the early church… When the New Testament writers quoted the Jewish Scriptures, they did not feel compelled to correct the Greek text back to the Hebrew original. They treated the Septuagint itself as the authoritative voice of God.” KAREN H. JOBES & MOISÉS SILVA // Invitation to the Septuagint

In the first century AD, the Septuagint was the pride of Alexandrian Judaism. By the second century AD, the Jewish synagogue had violently rejected it.

The irony of textual history is that the Greek Old Testament, originally commissioned by Jews for Jews, survived antiquity almost entirely because the Christian Church preserved it. The great Uncial codices Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus are Christian Bibles, yet they contain the most complete surviving copies of the Jewish Septuagint.

For centuries, modern scholars operated under a specific assumption: wherever the Septuagint differed from the medieval Hebrew Masoretic Text, the Greek translators must have been sloppy, paraphrasing, or making mistakes. The Masoretic Text was viewed as the flawless standard. Then came the caves of Qumran.

In 1947, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls shattered the paradigm of Old Testament textual criticism. Amidst the thousands of scroll fragments, archaeologists discovered Hebrew manuscripts that predated the Masoretic Text by over a thousand years. Shockingly, in many instances where the LXX differed from the MT, the Dead Sea Scrolls contained Hebrew readings that perfectly matched the Greek Septuagint.

“The Dead Sea Scrolls have proven that the Septuagint is not merely a loose translation or a theological paraphrase, but often a highly literal translation of a Hebrew Vorlage [base text] that differed from the later Masoretic Text. The LXX provides us access to ancient Hebrew readings that the Masoretic tradition subsequently lost or altered.” EMANUEL TOV // Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible