Chapter 2

What Is the Septuagint?

Origins, History, and the Letter of Aristeas

If I asked you to picture the oldest Bible in the world, what would you imagine? Maybe an ancient Hebrew scroll, hand-copied by a bearded scribe in some dusty Jerusalem workshop? Most people would imagine something like that. And they would be partly right — the oldest form of the Scriptures was indeed Hebrew. But the oldest translation of those Scriptures — and the Bible that Jesus's apostles actually used — was Greek. It is called the Septuagint, and its story is one of the most important and least known chapters in the history of the Christian faith.

In this chapter, we are going to explore how this remarkable translation came to be. We will travel back to ancient Alexandria, the greatest center of learning in the ancient world. We will meet the Jewish community that needed the Bible in a language they could actually understand. We will walk through the famous Letter of Aristeas, a fascinating ancient document that tells the story of how the Septuagint was created — a story that mixes real history with royal pageantry and more than a little legend. We will ask tough questions about how reliable that story is. And then we will trace how the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures eventually made their way into Greek over the next two centuries.

By the end of this chapter, I hope you will see why the Septuagint is not just an ancient curiosity. It is the Bible that shaped the early church, the Bible that the New Testament authors quoted more than any other, and the Bible whose story has been largely forgotten by the very Christians who owe it so much.

Alexandria: Where Our Story Begins

To understand the Septuagint, we need to understand the city where it was born. And what a city it was.

Alexandria, Egypt, was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, and within a generation it became the most spectacular city in the ancient world. Situated on the Mediterranean coast at the western edge of the Nile Delta, Alexandria was designed from the very beginning to be a center of culture, commerce, and learning. It had wide boulevards laid out in a grid pattern, grand temples, a massive harbor, and — towering above it all — the famous Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.¹

But Alexandria's greatest treasure was not made of stone. It was the Library of Alexandria — the most famous library in all of human history. Founded by Ptolemy I Soter (the general who inherited Egypt after Alexander's death) and greatly expanded by his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Library aimed to collect copies of every book in the known world. The ancient historian Strabo noted that Aristotle himself had helped teach the Ptolemaic dynasty how to build a great library.² At its peak, the Library may have contained between 200,000 and 500,000 scrolls — a staggering collection for the ancient world. Scholars came from across the Mediterranean to study, debate, and write there. It was the Harvard, Oxford, and Library of Congress of the ancient world, all rolled into one.

The Museum (or Mouseion, literally "shrine of the Muses") was connected to the Library and functioned as something like a research university. Scholars were given free room and board, exempted from taxes, and left free to pursue their intellectual work — whether in literature, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, or philosophy. It was here that Euclid developed his geometry, that Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth (with remarkable accuracy), and that scholars from across the ancient world gathered to debate, write, and push the boundaries of human knowledge. The intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria in the third century BC was electric — and it is precisely in this atmosphere that the Septuagint was born.

Alongside this thriving intellectual culture, Alexandria was also home to one of the largest Jewish communities outside of Palestine. Jews had been settling in Egypt for centuries — some came as merchants, some as soldiers, some as refugees. Alexander the Great himself had been favorable toward the Jews and, according to the first-century historian Josephus, had granted them full citizenship in Alexandria.³ By the third century BC, the Jewish quarter in Alexandria was enormous, occupying a significant portion of the city. Some estimates suggest that Jews made up as much as a third of Alexandria's population.⁴

These were prosperous, well-educated, deeply devout Jews. They built synagogues, maintained their religious practices, and treasured their Scriptures. But they faced a growing problem — a problem that would change the history of the Bible forever.

A People Who Could No Longer Read Their Own Bible

Here is the problem in a nutshell: by the third century BC, most Jews living outside Palestine — and a growing number living within it — could no longer read Hebrew fluently.

How did this happen? It is a long story, but the short version goes like this. When the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 586 BC, they destroyed the Temple and deported much of the population to Babylon. During the decades of exile, the Jewish people gradually adopted Aramaic — the everyday language of the Babylonian and later Persian empires — as their spoken language. Hebrew did not disappear entirely. It continued to be used for religious and literary purposes, especially among the priestly and scribal classes in Judea. But as a language of daily conversation, it was steadily being replaced.⁵

Then came Alexander the Great. When Alexander conquered the Persian Empire in the 330s BC, he brought with him not just an army but a language — Greek. In the centuries that followed, Greek became the lingua franca (the common language) of the entire Eastern Mediterranean world. This post-Classical form of Greek is called Koine (κοινή) Greek, meaning "common" Greek. It was the language of commerce, government, education, and everyday life from Egypt to Syria to Asia Minor.⁶

The impact on the Jewish diaspora was enormous. Jews living in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, and throughout the Mediterranean adopted Greek as their first language. Within a generation or two, many diaspora Jews could no longer read the Hebrew Scriptures at all. As S. Douglas Woodward notes, by 200 years before Christ's birth, Hebrew was effectively dead as a spoken language among diaspora Jews, and even within Judea itself, it was becoming the language of a scholarly elite rather than the language of the people.⁷

Recent scholarship confirms this picture. As Timothy Michael Law observes, the Jewish community in Egypt spoke Greek fluently as a native language, and some had access to formal Greek education as well. This is hardly surprising, since Jews in Egypt were generally well integrated into Ptolemaic society.⁸ The evidence from papyri, inscriptions, and literary texts overwhelmingly shows that by the mid-third century BC, the Jews of Alexandria were a Greek-speaking community.

Even in Palestine itself, the situation was more complex than many people realize. While Hebrew continued to be used for religious and literary purposes — particularly among the priestly and scribal classes — evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other sources shows that Aramaic had become the primary spoken language for most Jews in Judea. And Greek was making significant inroads as well, especially in administrative and commercial contexts. A striking piece of evidence comes from a letter written during the Bar Kokhba revolt in the AD 130s. One of Bar Kokhba's own officers writes: "The letter is written in Greek because we have no one who knows Hebrew." If Hebrew was already that scarce among Jewish nationalists fighting for their independence in the second century AD, imagine how much more scarce it was among diaspora Jews three centuries earlier.⁵⁰

Think about what this means. Imagine being a devout Jewish family in Alexandria around 280 BC. You keep the Sabbath. You observe the festivals. You go to the synagogue every week. But when the scrolls of the Torah are brought out and read aloud — they are in Hebrew, and you cannot understand a single word. You are hearing the Word of God, but it is locked away in a language that belongs to your great-grandparents, not to you. Your children are growing up speaking Greek. They attend Greek schools. They read Homer and Plato. But the Torah of Moses? It might as well be written in code.

Something had to be done. And, as it turns out, something was.

The Letter of Aristeas: A Royal Translation

The most famous account of how the Septuagint came to be is found in an ancient document called the Letter of Aristeas (sometimes called the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates). This fascinating text, likely written in the mid-second century BC, claims to be an eyewitness account of events that happened about a century earlier, during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC).⁹

Let me walk you through the story. It is quite a tale.

According to the Letter, Ptolemy II's royal librarian — a man named Demetrius of Phalerum — was tasked with collecting as many of the world's great books as possible for the Library of Alexandria. Demetrius reported to the king that the Library had already amassed over 200,000 volumes, with a goal of reaching 500,000. But there was one important collection still missing: the "lawbooks of the Jews." Demetrius explained that these sacred texts were written in Hebrew — a language unfamiliar to the Greek-speaking scholars of Alexandria — and would need to be translated into Greek before they could be added to the Library's holdings.¹⁰

Ptolemy was enthusiastic. He authorized the project and went a step further. At the urging of Aristeas (the narrator of the letter, who presents himself as a courtier in Ptolemy's court), the king agreed to release over 100,000 Jewish prisoners of war who had been enslaved in Egypt. This act of goodwill would pave the way for a positive relationship with the Jewish high priest in Jerusalem, whose cooperation was essential for the translation project.¹¹

Ptolemy then sent a formal letter to Eleazar, the High Priest in Jerusalem, requesting that he select qualified scholars to come to Alexandria and produce a Greek translation of the Torah. Eleazar agreed. He selected seventy-two elders — six men from each of the twelve tribes of Israel — and sent them to Alexandria bearing a magnificent copy of the Torah scrolls, reportedly written in gold letters on fine parchment.¹²

When the translators arrived in Alexandria, they were welcomed with lavish hospitality. Ptolemy hosted a seven-day banquet in their honor. During the feast, the king asked each of the seventy-two scholars philosophical and ethical questions — a kind of extended wisdom test. The Letter records these questions and answers in great detail, and the scholars impressed everyone with their sagacity. Ptolemy declared that these Jewish sages were wiser than his own Greek philosophers.¹³

After the banquet, the translators were taken to the island of Pharos (home of the famous lighthouse) where they set to work. The Letter tells us they worked collaboratively, comparing their translations and reaching agreement on each passage through careful discussion. In seventy-two days, the work was completed.¹⁴

The finished translation was then read aloud to the Jewish community in Alexandria, who received it with great enthusiasm. The Jewish leaders declared that since the translation had been so carefully and beautifully made, it should remain exactly as it was, with no future revisions permitted. Finally, the translation was presented to Ptolemy, who marveled at it, and it was deposited in the royal Library.¹⁵

This is the origin story of the name "Septuagint" — from the Latin word septuaginta, meaning "seventy," a round number recalling the approximately seventy (or seventy-two) translators. The abbreviation LXX uses the Roman numeral for seventy, and this is how scholars refer to it to this day.¹⁶

How the Legend Grew

Now, the Letter of Aristeas tells an impressive story. But as time went on, the story grew even more impressive — and considerably more miraculous.

Later Jewish and Christian writers embellished the account. The most famous embellishment appears in several ancient sources and is even recorded in the Jewish Talmud. In this expanded version, the seventy-two translators did not work together collaboratively. Instead, each translator was placed in a separate room — working entirely alone, with no contact with the others. And when they emerged after seventy-two days, every single one of them had produced an identical translation — word for word, letter for letter. The Talmud records: "King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: 'Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher.' God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did."¹⁷

The early church father Justin Martyr (ca. AD 100–165) even claimed to have visited Alexandria and seen the small rooms on the island of Pharos where the translators had supposedly worked.¹⁸ Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who was a contemporary of Jesus, told a similar version of the story and treated the translation as divinely inspired.¹⁹

The point of all these embellishments was clear: the Septuagint was not merely a human translation. It was a divinely guided work, equal in authority to the original Hebrew. God Himself had overseen the process and guaranteed the result.

How Reliable Is the Letter of Aristeas?

So what should we make of all this? Is the Letter of Aristeas a reliable historical account? Or is it pure legend?

The honest answer is: it is probably somewhere in between. Modern scholars have identified several historical problems with the Letter that make it clear the document is not a straightforward eyewitness report. Let me walk through some of the main issues.

First, the Letter is almost certainly pseudepigraphical. That is, it was not actually written by a Greek courtier named "Aristeas" who witnessed these events firsthand. Most scholars now believe the Letter was written by a Hellenistic Jew — probably in Alexandria — sometime around the mid-second century BC, roughly a century after the events it describes. The author adopted the persona of a Greek courtier to give the account greater credibility with both Jewish and Greek audiences.²⁰

Second, there are historical inaccuracies. For instance, the Letter names Demetrius of Phalerum as the royal librarian under Ptolemy II Philadelphus. But historians now know that Demetrius had actually fallen out of favor before Ptolemy II came to power and was likely exiled (or worse). He could not have served as librarian under Ptolemy II.²¹ There are other historical difficulties as well — the Letter refers to a military victory by Ptolemy that was actually a defeat, and the author displays a level of familiarity with Jewish practice that would be unusual for a genuine Greek courtier.²²

Third, the later miraculous embellishments are clearly legendary. The idea that seventy-two translators working in separate rooms all produced identical translations — word for word — strains credibility. Anyone who has ever tried to translate anything from one language to another knows that two translators working independently will never produce identical results. This detail was added to make a theological point about the divine inspiration of the translation, not to record what actually happened.

As Gregory Lanier and William Ross observe, even though the Letter of Aristeas is largely or entirely fictitious in its specific details, there are things we can learn from it. At the very least, it tells us that the Greek Pentateuch was produced by the late second century BC in Egypt and was regarded by Hellenistic Jews as equal in authority to the Hebrew Bible — precisely because it was viewed as a translation of the highest quality.²³

Timothy Michael Law puts it well: the Letter of Aristeas is essentially a retelling of the Exodus story. In the original Exodus, the Jews were freed from an evil Pharaoh and received the Law at Sinai. In the Letter of Aristeas, the Jews are freed from slavery by a benevolent Ptolemy and receive the Law in Greek in Alexandria. The parallels are deliberate. The message is this: the Greek Torah is a new Sinai — a fresh act of divine revelation for a new era.²⁴

Why Was the Translation Made? External and Internal Motivations

Even if the Letter of Aristeas mixes fact with embellishment, the fundamental question remains: why was the Greek Pentateuch produced? What motivated this enormous undertaking?

Scholars have debated this question for centuries, and the answer probably involves a combination of factors — both external to the Jewish community and internal to it.

External Motivations: The Library and the King

Some scholars emphasize the role of the Ptolemaic monarchy. The story of royal patronage in the Letter of Aristeas, while embellished, may reflect a genuine historical reality. The Ptolemies were passionately devoted to their cultural project of making Alexandria the intellectual capital of the world. They spent enormous sums collecting the great books of every civilization. In this context, it would have been entirely natural for the monarchy to request — or at least sponsor — a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures. After all, the Jews were a significant population within the Ptolemaic kingdom, and their ancient laws were of both scholarly and administrative interest.²⁵

There is also a legal dimension. The Ptolemaic administration went to considerable lengths to ensure that its laws and proclamations were accessible to all its subjects by publishing decrees in multiple languages. Legal texts from non-Greek peoples were often translated into Greek for administrative purposes. It would have been entirely consistent for the monarchy to request a translation of the Jewish legal tradition as well.²⁶

Internal Motivations: A Community in Need

But external motivations only tell part of the story. Many scholars — and I agree — believe that the primary impetus for the translation came from within the Jewish community itself.²⁷

Think about it from a practical standpoint. By the mid-third century BC, Alexandrian Jews were thoroughly Greek-speaking. Greek was their mother tongue. Their children were growing up in a Greek educational system. Their daily business, their legal proceedings, their social interactions — all were conducted in Greek. But their sacred Scriptures were still in Hebrew, a language that fewer and fewer of them could read or understand.

This created an urgent practical need. How do you conduct worship when nobody in the congregation understands the text being read? How do you teach your children the stories of Abraham, Moses, and David when they cannot read those stories for themselves? How do you maintain your distinct identity as the people of God when the very words of God are locked in a language that is slipping away from you?

The answer was obvious: translate the Scriptures into Greek.

It is worth pointing out that a parallel need arose in Palestine itself, where Aramaic was the dominant spoken language. This eventually led to the production of the Aramaic targumim (translations/paraphrases) of the Hebrew Bible. The same basic impulse — making the Scriptures accessible to people in the language they actually speak — drove both projects.²⁸

In all likelihood, both external and internal motivations played a role. The Ptolemaic dynasty may have provided patronage and encouragement, while the Jewish community provided the translators, the Hebrew manuscripts, and the urgent desire to have their Scriptures in Greek. The result was a collaboration that changed the course of biblical history.

The Translation of the Torah: The Beginning of the Septuagint

Whatever combination of factors brought it about, the translation of the Torah — the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — was the first stage of the Septuagint project. Scholars generally date this translation to the mid-third century BC, probably around 280–250 BC.²⁹

This dating is well supported by the evidence. The earliest physical evidence we have for the Greek Pentateuch includes the Rylands Papyrus 458, a fragment of Deuteronomy that dates to the second century BC, and Papyrus Fouad 266, which contains portions of Deuteronomy and dates to about 100 BC.³⁰ These fragments confirm that the Greek Pentateuch was in circulation well before the time of Christ.

The translation of the Torah was the foundational act. It was the Torah that was most important in Jewish worship and study. It was the Torah that the Letter of Aristeas describes being translated. And it was the Torah that the name "Septuagint" originally referred to — the work of the "Seventy" was, strictly speaking, only the Pentateuch. Everything else came later.³¹

Finishing the Translation: From the Prophets to the Writings

The Torah was only the beginning. Over the next two centuries — roughly from 250 BC to about 100 BC — the remaining books of the Hebrew Scriptures were gradually translated into Greek as well. This was not a single organized project like the translation of the Torah. It was a gradual process, carried out by different translators, at different times, in different places, and with varying levels of skill and style.³²

The Prophets (both the "Former Prophets" — Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings — and the "Latter Prophets" — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets) were probably translated next, over the course of the third and second centuries BC. The Writings — the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles — followed over the second and first centuries BC.³³

We know from the prologue to the book of Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) — one of the deuterocanonical books — that by about 132 BC, the translation was substantially complete. The grandson of Jesus ben Sira, writing in Greek, tells us that he came from Judea to Alexandria and found that the Scriptures had already been translated into Greek. He writes:

"Not only this book, but even the Law itself, the Prophecies, and the rest of the books differ not a little when read in the original."

This is a remarkable statement. It tells us that by 132 BC, a Greek-speaking Jew in Alexandria could refer to "the Law, the Prophecies, and the rest of the books" in Greek translation — a threefold division of the Scriptures that corresponds roughly to what we today call the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.³⁴ The grandson of Sirach also freely admits that translations always lose something compared to the original — an honest observation that any translator would affirm.

Because different books were translated by different people at different times, the quality and style of the translation varies significantly from book to book. Some books were translated with great care and skill; others were translated more roughly. As S. Douglas Woodward notes, the Pentateuch is generally considered to be the best-translated portion of the LXX, while books like Isaiah show a freer and sometimes less polished translation style.³⁵ This diversity of quality is exactly what we would expect from a two-century-long translation project involving dozens of different translators.

Law describes the translator of Genesis as someone who was perhaps "feeling his way step by step" — an apt description for what may have been the first book ever translated from Hebrew into Greek. The translation style in Genesis is inconsistent, sometimes achieving elegant Greek and sometimes producing clunky expressions that slavishly follow the Hebrew word order. The translator of Exodus, by contrast, was more "adventurous," taking greater liberties to produce readable Greek. By the time later books were being translated, the translators had the earlier work to learn from and build upon — a growing tradition of Jewish Greek biblical translation that shaped how subsequent translators approached their task.⁵¹

It is also worth noting that some books exist in the Septuagint in significantly different forms than their counterparts in the later Hebrew Masoretic Text. The most striking example is Jeremiah: the Greek Jeremiah is about 13 percent shorter than the Hebrew Jeremiah, and the material is arranged in a quite different order. For many years, scholars assumed the Greek translator had simply abbreviated and rearranged the text. But when Hebrew manuscripts of Jeremiah were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of them matched the shorter Greek version rather than the longer Hebrew one. This proved that the Septuagint translator of Jeremiah was faithfully translating a different — and quite possibly more original — Hebrew text.⁵² We will examine this evidence more closely in Chapter 4.

Was the Septuagint a Good Translation?

This brings us to an important question that critics of the Septuagint have raised for centuries: was the LXX actually a good translation? Or was it a sloppy, inaccurate rendering that distorted the original Hebrew?

This question has a long and sometimes contentious history. Since the time of Jerome (the fourth-century scholar who produced the Latin Vulgate), there have been voices arguing that the Septuagint is an inferior translation — that its Greek is poor, that its translators were incompetent, and that the Hebrew original should always be preferred. On the other hand, many church fathers — including Augustine, who vigorously disagreed with Jerome on this point — held the Septuagint in the highest esteem and regarded it as divinely inspired.³⁶

So where does the truth lie? I think the answer requires us to understand two things: what we mean by "literal" versus "free" translation, and what the Dead Sea Scrolls have taught us about the Hebrew text the translators were working from.

The Spectrum of Translation: Formal Equivalence vs. Dynamic Equivalence

Every translator faces a fundamental choice. On one end of the spectrum is what scholars call formal equivalence — a word-for-word, structure-for-structure translation that tries to mirror the original as closely as possible. On the other end is dynamic equivalence — a thought-for-thought translation that tries to capture the meaning of the original in natural, fluent language, even if the specific words and sentence structures are different.³⁷

Here is a simple example. In Romans 16:16, Paul writes (literally from the Greek): "Greet one another with a holy kiss." A formal equivalence translation would render this exactly as written: "Greet one another with a holy kiss." A dynamic equivalence translator like J.B. Phillips rendered it: "Give one another a hearty handshake all around." The meaning is essentially the same — a warm physical greeting — but the specific cultural expression has been updated for the target audience.³⁸

Neither approach is "wrong." They are simply different strategies, and both have advantages and disadvantages. Formal equivalence preserves the structure and "feel" of the original but can sometimes produce clunky, hard-to-understand results. Dynamic equivalence produces smooth, readable results but involves more interpretive judgment on the part of the translator.

The Septuagint translators used both approaches — and everything in between. Different books fall at different points on the spectrum. The Greek Pentateuch is generally quite literal — it follows the Hebrew word order and sentence structure closely, producing what scholars sometimes call "Hebraizing" Greek. Other books, like Proverbs and Job, were translated much more freely, with the translators taking considerable liberties in paraphrasing and rearranging the material. Still others, like the Psalms, fall somewhere in the middle.³⁹

Was the Greek "Bad"?

One common criticism of the Septuagint is that its Greek is "bad" — that it is clunky, awkward, and full of strange expressions that no native Greek speaker would ever use. There is a grain of truth in this. The Greek of the Septuagint does often sound unusual. Phrases are structured in ways that follow Hebrew word order rather than Greek word order. Hebrew idioms are sometimes translated literally, producing expressions that would have sounded odd to a Greek ear.

But as the Cambridge scholar Marieke Dhont has demonstrated, this criticism has been significantly overstated. Dhont shows that the language of the Septuagint Pentateuch actually corresponds to the everyday, conversational Greek found in non-literary papyri from the same period. In other words, the Greek of the Septuagint was not "high literary" Greek — it was the ordinary street Greek that people in Alexandria actually spoke. It might not match the elegance of Homer or Plato, but it was perfectly serviceable and perfectly understandable.⁴⁰

Dhont also makes the important point that just because the Greek of the LXX shows "interference" from the Hebrew source language, this does not automatically make it "bad." Every translation shows some influence from the source language. English translations of the Bible are full of expressions that would sound strange in ordinary English — "and it came to pass," "thus says the Lord," "he lifted up his eyes." These are not bad English; they are the natural result of translating an ancient Semitic text into a different language. The same is true of the Septuagint's Greek.⁴¹

Furthermore, as Dhont points out, we should not assume that the LXX translators were "still learning Greek." Many of them were native Greek speakers whose families had been living in Alexandria for generations. They were not fumbling immigrants trying to write in a foreign language. They were bilingual scholars — fluent in Greek and educated in Hebrew — who made deliberate choices about how to render the sacred text. As Dhont rightly observes: "Jews did not become less Jewish because they had started to speak Greek."⁴²

The Dead Sea Scrolls Changed Everything

But the single most important factor in reassessing the quality of the Septuagint is the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, beginning in 1947. Before the scrolls were found, scholars had only the much later Masoretic Text (produced between the sixth and tenth centuries AD) to compare with the Septuagint. When the LXX differed from the MT — which it does in thousands of places — critics assumed the LXX translators had simply gotten it wrong. They must have been incompetent, or careless, or inserting their own ideas into the text.

The Dead Sea Scrolls demolished this assumption.

Among the hundreds of biblical manuscripts found at Qumran and other sites in the Judean Desert, scholars discovered Hebrew texts that matched the Septuagint's readings in places where the Septuagint disagreed with the Masoretic Text. This was stunning. It proved that the Septuagint translators were not making mistakes or inserting their own ideas. They were faithfully translating a different Hebrew text — a Hebrew Vorlage (source text) that was different from the text that eventually became the Masoretic tradition.⁴³

As Martin Abegg, Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich — the editors of The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible — summarize the situation: "Among the Hebrew manuscripts found at Qumran are what we might call proto-Septuagintal manuscripts; that is, these Hebrew manuscripts are the base texts that were ultimately translated into the Greek Septuagint. What we learn by comparing the Hebrew base text to the Greek version of the Septuagint is that the translators were very good and faithfully translated the Hebrew text." The differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, they explain, are not because the translators were incompetent but because "the Septuagint is a translation of a slightly different Hebrew text than the Masoretic Text."⁴⁴

The great textual scholar Emanuel Tov, who has spent decades analyzing the Dead Sea Scrolls, has famously said: "The Masoretic Text is no longer the center of our textual thinking."⁴⁵ In many cases, where the LXX and the MT disagree, modern scholars now recognize that the LXX may actually preserve the older and more original reading. We will see many examples of this throughout this book — from the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 (Chapters 16–17) to the Christological passages that the rabbis may have deliberately altered (Chapters 7–12).

A Bible for a Whole New World

By the first century BC, the Septuagint translation was substantially complete. For the first time in history, the entire Hebrew Scriptures — the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, and the additional books that we now call the deuterocanonical or "apocryphal" books — were available in the most widely spoken language in the ancient world.

The impact of this achievement is difficult to overstate. Let me highlight just a few of the ways the Septuagint transformed the ancient world.

1. It Made the Bible Accessible to Millions

Before the Septuagint, the Hebrew Scriptures were accessible only to those who could read Hebrew — a shrinking population, even among Jews. After the Septuagint, anyone who could read Greek — Jews and Gentiles alike — could access the sacred writings of Israel. This was a revolution comparable in some ways to the invention of the printing press or the translation of the Bible into modern vernacular languages during the Reformation.

2. It Gave Judaism a Missionary Tool

The Septuagint made it possible for interested Gentiles to learn about the God of Israel, His laws, His promises, and His plan for the world. The "God-fearers" we read about in the Book of Acts — Gentiles who attended the synagogue and worshipped the God of Israel without fully converting to Judaism — almost certainly encountered the Scriptures through the Septuagint. The translation opened a door between the Jewish and Greek worlds that had profound consequences for the spread of the gospel.

3. It Became the Bible of the Early Church

This is perhaps the most important point of all. When the apostles went out to preach the gospel, the Bible they carried with them was the Septuagint. When Paul quoted Scripture in his letters, he overwhelmingly quoted from the Septuagint. When the Gospel writers cited Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in Christ, they drew from the Septuagint. When the early church fathers taught and preached, the Septuagint was their Bible. The New Testament contains over 300 direct quotations from the Old Testament, and the overwhelming majority — roughly 80 percent or more — follow the wording of the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Masoretic Text.⁴⁶

This fact alone should give every thoughtful Christian pause. Think about what it means. The inspired authors of the New Testament — men who wrote under the guidance of the Holy Spirit — consistently chose to quote from the Greek Septuagint rather than making fresh translations from the Hebrew. In several crucial passages, the theology of the New Testament actually depends on the distinctive wording of the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew. For example, the writer of Hebrews quotes Psalm 40:6 using the Septuagint's reading — "a body you have prepared for me" — rather than the Hebrew's "my ears you have opened" (Heb 10:5). Matthew's quotation of Isaiah 7:14 uses the Septuagint's parthenos (παρθένος, "virgin") rather than the Hebrew's almah (עַלְמָה, "young woman") — a reading that is foundational to the doctrine of the virgin birth (Matt 1:23). We will examine these passages and many others in detail in Chapters 7–12.

As Timothy Michael Law puts it: "Not only did most of the earliest Christians use the Septuagint but also their theology was explicitly shaped by it and not by the Hebrew Bible. Many of the most beloved teachings of the New Testament are shaped by and in some cases directly derived from the Septuagint."⁴⁷ This is a point we will explore in great depth in Chapters 7–12, where we examine the specific passages where the Septuagint's distinctive wording shaped the theology of the New Testament.

Law makes another point that is worth pausing over. He notes that the most theologically important book in the history of Christianity — Paul's letter to the Romans — has been influenced entirely by the Greek version of Isaiah, not by the Hebrew version. The early church developed its central doctrines through contact with the Septuagint. One cannot imagine the development of Christian orthodoxy without it. In the most formative period of Christian theology, when the early church framed the beliefs now taken for granted by Christians worldwide, their thoughts were shaped not by the Hebrew Bible that underlies most modern English translations, but by the Greek Septuagint.⁵³

4. It Preserved an Older Form of the Biblical Text

As we noted above, the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that the Septuagint was translated from Hebrew manuscripts that sometimes preserve older and more original readings than the Masoretic Text. This means the Septuagint is not just a translation — it is a witness to a form of the Hebrew Bible that is in some respects closer to the original than what we find in the standard Hebrew text used by most Bible translators today. This is a stunning realization, and it fundamentally changes how we should think about the relationship between the Greek and Hebrew Bibles.⁴⁸

There is additional corroboration for this from another ancient witness: the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Samaritans, who split from the Jews around the fifth century BC, preserved their own text of the Torah independently of the Jewish scribal tradition. In approximately 1,600 places, the Samaritan Pentateuch agrees with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. This triple agreement — Greek Septuagint, Samaritan Pentateuch, and Dead Sea Scrolls, all against the Masoretic Text — provides powerful evidence that in many places, the Masoretic Text represents a later text, not an earlier one. The text that the Reformers called the "original Hebrew" is, in some passages, a text that was modified after the time of Christ.⁵⁴

Let me say that again, because it is important: when modern Protestants talk about going "back to the original Hebrew," they are often going back to a text that is, in some places, less original than the Greek translation they are bypassing. The Septuagint deserves a place at the table in any serious discussion of the original text of the Old Testament. We will develop this argument fully in Chapters 4, 6, and 16–17.

The Septuagint and the Deuterocanonical Books

Before we close this chapter, there is one more crucial aspect of the Septuagint that we need to mention — one that will occupy a large portion of this book.

The Septuagint did not contain only the thirty-nine books that Protestants today recognize as the Old Testament. It also contained additional books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and additions to Daniel and Esther. These are the books that Catholics call "deuterocanonical" and that Protestants have traditionally called "the Apocrypha."⁴⁹

These books were part of the Septuagint. They were read, studied, and treated as Scripture by the early church. They were cited and alluded to by the New Testament authors. They were included in the great Christian Bible manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries — Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Alexandrinus. They were affirmed as canonical by the North African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419). For over a thousand years, they were simply part of the Christian Bible.

It was only at the Reformation in the sixteenth century that Protestant leaders — following Jerome's preference for the Hebrew canon over the Greek — removed these books from the Bible. We will examine the history and the arguments in detail in later chapters (especially Chapters 3, 13–15, and 18–26). For now, the point is simply this: when we talk about the Septuagint, we are not talking about just the thirty-nine books of the Protestant Old Testament in Greek. We are talking about a larger collection of sacred writings that the early church received as Scripture. Understanding the Septuagint means understanding why these additional books were there — and asking some hard questions about whether they should still be there.

Common Objections

Before we move on, let me briefly address a few objections that readers may already be forming.

"But wasn't the Septuagint just a translation? Shouldn't we prefer the original Hebrew?"

This is a natural question, and it sounds very reasonable. But it rests on two assumptions that are more problematic than they appear. First, it assumes that the Masoretic Text is "the original Hebrew." As we have already begun to see — and will see in much greater detail in Chapter 4 — the MT is not "the original." It is one textual tradition among several, and in many places it may actually be less original than the Hebrew text that underlies the Septuagint. Second, this objection assumes that a translation is always inferior to its source. But as we will see in Chapters 7–12, the New Testament authors clearly did not share this assumption. They quoted the Septuagint freely, even in places where it differed from the Hebrew, and treated it as the authoritative Word of God. If the Septuagint was good enough for Paul, Peter, and the writer of Hebrews, perhaps it should be good enough for us.

"Didn't Jesus and the apostles use the Hebrew Bible?"

Jesus almost certainly read and taught from Hebrew and Aramaic texts in the synagogues of Galilee and Judea. But the Gospels record his words in Greek, and when the Gospel writers cite Old Testament passages, they overwhelmingly use the Septuagint's wording. The apostles — especially Paul, who wrote to Greek-speaking congregations throughout the Roman Empire — used the Septuagint as their Bible. We will examine this in detail in Chapters 7–12.

"Isn't the Septuagint just a Catholic thing?"

No! The Septuagint was the Bible of the entire early church — long before there were Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox. It was the Bible of Paul, Peter, James, and John. It was the Bible of Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and virtually every Christian writer of the first four centuries. The Septuagint is the common heritage of all Christians, and recovering its importance is not a Catholic project — it is a project that should concern every thoughtful Christian who cares about the origins and integrity of the Bible.

Conclusion: The Bible That Built the Church

Let me pull together what we have learned in this chapter.

The Septuagint is the oldest translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into any language. It was produced in Alexandria, Egypt, beginning in the mid-third century BC, by qualified Jewish translators who were fluent in both Hebrew and Greek. The translation of the Torah came first, probably around 280–250 BC, and the remaining books were translated over the next two centuries, with the work substantially complete by about 132 BC.

The famous Letter of Aristeas tells the story of the translation's origin with a mixture of historical memory and legendary embellishment. The basic outline — a Greek translation of the Torah produced in Alexandria under Ptolemaic patronage by skilled Jewish translators — is broadly reliable, even if many of the specific details (the seventy-two separate rooms, the miraculous word-for-word agreement) are legendary additions.

The Septuagint was not a marginal or minor translation. It was the Bible of the Hellenistic Jewish world. It was the Bible that opened the Scriptures of Israel to the Greek-speaking world. It was the Bible that prepared the way for the gospel. It was the Bible that the New Testament authors quoted, alluded to, and presupposed on virtually every page. And it was the Bible that the early church received as the Word of God.

In the chapters ahead, we will see how the Septuagint's distinctive readings shaped the theology of the New Testament. We will see how the Dead Sea Scrolls vindicated the Septuagint against centuries of neglect. We will examine the deuterocanonical books that the Septuagint preserved and that Protestants have lost. And we will confront the difficult question of what happened to the Hebrew text in the second century AD — when Rabbi Akiba and his circle undertook a systematic revision of the Hebrew Scriptures that may have deliberately weakened the text's witness to Jesus as the Messiah — and what that means for our Bibles today.

The story ahead is sometimes surprising, sometimes troubling, and always fascinating. But it is a story that every serious student of the Bible needs to know. For too long, Protestants have been taught that "the Hebrew is always better," that the Septuagint is just a flawed translation, and that the deuterocanonical books are "just Catholic additions." Each of these claims, as we will see, is at best an oversimplification and at worst simply wrong.

But all of that lies ahead. For now, the essential point is this: the Septuagint is not a footnote in the history of the Bible. It is the foundation on which the New Testament was built. It is the Bible that built the church. And it deserves to be known.