THE SEPTUAGINT

This paper is a revised version of a talk that was originally given to the
Midlands Orthodox Study Centre in November 2007. It is only a brief
introduction to the Septuagint and owes much to the scholarship of others.
It outlines the religious and cultural milieu within which the Septuagint was
produced; describes how this translation of the Hebrew Bible came about;
touches on the differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible;
highlights some of the distinctive characteristics of the Septuagint, and its
significance and use in the early Church; and concludes by considering
existing and impending English translations.
In his book The Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia very
simply and clearly sets out the position of the Greek Old Testament, the
Septuagint1: The Orthodox Church has the same New Testament as the rest
of Christendom. As its authoritative text for the Old Testament it uses the
ancient Greek translation known as the Septuagint. Where this differs from
the Hebrew text (which happens quite often), Orthodox believe that the
changes in the Septuagint were made under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,
and are to be accepted as part of Gods continuing revelation.
The Septuagint was produced in the Helleno-Roman cultural world, that is,
roughly the period from Alexander the Greats conquests (c325 B.C.) to the
establishment of the Roman Empire. The lingua franca of that world was the
koine dialektos (common) Greek. Then as now many more Jews lived outside
the Holy Land than lived within it, and the great majority of them did not
speak Hebrew. There was, then, a very clear need for a version of the
Hebrew Bible in Greek. The Septuagint was written by Greek-speaking Jews
of the Judaeo-Greek Diaspora, employing, not, as some scholars have
imagined, a separate Semitic form of Greek, but the common koine with a
specialised vocabulary (including idioms) and style that reflected its own
distinctive interests. For an apt comparison one might think of the legal, or
journalistic English of our own day.
What is the Septuagint? (The name itself comes from the Latin word
septuaginta, meaning seventy). It originated in Egypt. The origin of the
translation is set out in the Letter of Aristeas, which was written some time
between 150 and 100 B.C. The Letter is supposed to have been the work of
an official at the court of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285246 B.C.). Aristeas says that King Ptolemy, at his (i.e. Aristeas) urging,
wished to have a Greek translation of the Jewish Torah (that is, the Law, i.e.
Genesis to Deuteronomy). The Torah was, of course, the major legal
document of Judaism and therefore of the kings Alexandrian Jewish
subjects. So King Ptolemy gave orders for a letter to be sent to the High
Priest Eleazar in Jerusalem, asking him to send experienced translators to
Alexandria in order to undertake this project. Eleazar responded by sending
the king a magnificent edition of the Torah, scrolls on which the Law had
been inscribed with the Hebrew letters in gold as well as seventy two
translators (not seventy), six from each of the tribes of Israel, in order that

after examination of the text agreed by the majority, and the achievement of
accuracy in the translation, we may produce an outstanding version. On
their arrival, the translators were carried off to the island of Pharos outside
Alexandria, where in seventy two days they produced the Greek translation
of the Torah. This was publicly read to the kings Jewish subjects, who
heard it with enormous enthusiasm. The king then had copies made for his
royal library and for his Jewish subjects. It was only the Torah that was
translated. Strictly speaking, the term Septuagint should be applied to the
original translation of the five books of the Law only. The Greek translations
of the remaining books of the Bible were the work of later hands between the
third and first centuries B.C.
Now Aristeas account of the origin of the Septuagint may well be
apocryphal. But it is a very early account, and it clearly shows that before
the time of Our Lord there existed another textual tradition of the Hebrew
Bible which was at least contemporary with, if not earlier than, that
represented today by the Masoretic text.
The Christian Church arose in Jerusalem among Jews who recognised
Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, the Anointed One and who found in the
sacred scriptures of the Judaism of their day the meaning of His death and
resurrection. The Jewish Bible was their Bible too. But if we assume, as do
so many in the west, that the proto-Masoretic Hebrew Bible was the
canonical text of the Old Testament at the time of Our Lord, then most New
Testament authors failed to quote the Old Testament correctly, because
usually they quoted from the Septuagint. A nineteenth century study of 275
New Testament passages by D. M. Turpie2 concluded that the New
Testament, the Septuagint and the Hebrew text all agree in only about 20%
of the quotations. Of the 80% where some disagreement occurs, fewer than
5% agree with the Hebrew against the Septuagint. These figures show just
how heavily the New Testament writers used the Greek version of the Old
Testament and how significant the Septuagint was for the emerging
Christian Church. And when Christianity spread outside the borders of
Palestine, it was apparently the Septuagint from which the Apostles,
especially St Paul, preached Christ. For nearly a century both Christians
and Jews used the Greek Bible, but they understood it differently; and this
is the main reason why the Septuagint fell out of use in Judaism and why
the Jews embarked on new translations of the Hebrew text. Among the Jews
the Septuagint began to be supplanted in the second century A.D. by the
successive recensions of Aquila, Theodotion and Symmachus, all of which
were designed to assimilate the Greek text to the then-current Hebrew. Only
fragments of these versions survive. Aquilas translation indeed seems to
have been so extremely literal a version of the Hebrew that it could hardly
have been understood without some understanding of the Hebrew itself. It
remained in use in the Synagogue until the sixth century A.D.
While the early relationship between Christians and Jews no doubt played a
major role in the history of the Greek versions of the Old Testament, there
was another factor that should not be overlooked. Here we find ourselves in
the complex world of textual criticism. The task of textual criticism is
classically described as following back the threads of transmission of a text

and trying to restore the text as closely as possible to the form it originally
had. But in the case of the Old Testament the problem is about what
actually constitutes the original text and whether it is possible to get back to
it if there is more than one textual tradition. The evidence of the Dead Sea
Scrolls clearly shows that at the turn of the era, just before the birth of
Christianity, there was no one fixed text of the Hebrew Bible and that some
books of the Hebrew Bible were circulating in markedly different versions.
One of these textual forms, the proto-Masoretic text, emerged as the
standard text by the beginning of the second century A.D. Much work of
recension of this text was later undertaken by the Rabbinical scholars and
the Masoretic scribes, as well as by members of the semi-heretical Karaite
sect. The earliest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible date only from
about 1000 A.D., many centuries later than those of the Septuagint. The
Masoretic text is the Hebrew version that is behind virtually all modern
translations of the Old Testament. However, it has been noted by the Danish
Biblical scholar Mogens Muller3 that: Historically the Septuagint should be
endowed with special significance considered as a translation, because, to
some circles of Greek-speaking Jewry, it replaced the Biblia Hebraica, and
thus became their Bible. Because it was accepted as conclusive evidence of
the biblical revelation, it was used by the authors of the New Testament
writings, and accordingly came to have a decisive impact on the theology of
the New Testament. In an historical perspective, it became, to an even greater
extent than the Biblia Hebraica, the Old Testament of the New Testament.
This circumstance is fundamental insofar as this translation as a witness of
the handing on of traditions represents a reappraisal of the basic content of
the Old Testament. According to Robert Hanhart, it even expresses a more
profound appreciation of the Old Testaments testimony of revelation (i.e. than
the Hebrew).
The Septuagint displays several very significant characteristics. Kyrios Lord, is consistently used throughout the Septuagint without the definite
article for the Divine Name Yahweh. Following its use in the Septuagint
proper, it was used thus throughout the other books of the Greek Old
Testament. There is still some debate about whether Kyrios was the original
Septuagint rendering of the Divine Name. Origen and Blessed Jerome are
insistent that it was not and that the Tetragrammaton (i.e. the four
consonants YHWH of the Divine Name) was used in some form or other. (As
a matter of interest, there are on Internet photographs of fragmentary papyri
of the Septuagint which have the Tetragrammaton.) But other Jewish
writings of the time provide evidence that Kyrios was used by Greekspeaking Jews for Yahweh, and it may have been so with the Septuagint.
Proper names are given their Greek form, as they are in the King James,
Douay-Rheims and other older versions of the New Testament, e.g. Elias (or
Eliou) instead of Elijah and, very importantly, Jesus instead of Joshua. This
latter, when Jesus/Joshua goes up into Mount Sinai with Moses (Ex.24:1218), is seen by the Church Fathers as a type of the Holy Transfiguration.
And Jesus/Joshua act of going down into the river Jordan (Jes.3:14-4:14) is
clearly seen as a type of Our Lord Jesus Christs baptism.

In the Septuagint loan translation is quite often used: i.e. the adoption of a
Hebrew phrase by translating its constituent parts rather than by rendering
the meaning of the whole phrase. For example, for the Hebrew expression to
lift someones face meaning to favour the Septuagint uses the very literal
lambano prosopon. In contrast, throughout the Septuagint there is a
marked avoidance of those very characteristic Hebrew anthropomorphic
expressions or metaphors which are used to describe God, such as, rock or
stone, perhaps out of a desire to avoid any possible suggestion that the
Hebrew God was in some way equivalent to the sacred stones and idols that
were so prevalent in pagan Egypt and the Hellenic world. So the Septuagint
uses such terms as God, helper, guardian, protector, which preserve the
sense but not the vivid imagery of the Hebrew.
But what are the more significant variations between the Septuagint and the
Hebrew Bible? First, the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew Bible both in
respect to the number of books and their arrangement, as also do the
Vulgate and those translations that are officially approved by the Roman
Catholic Church such as the Jerusalem Bible. Most obviously, the
Septuagint has 49 books compared with the Hebrew Bibles 39 (although by
counting some books together Judaism reduces this to 24 books). The
Hebrew Bible does not include what the Protestant West calls the
Apocrypha. There are considerable differences between the books and their
actual order as between the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint and the Vulgate.
Finally, the texts of some individual books are very different. The Masoretic
and Septuagint texts of Jeremiah, Job and Proverbs, differ so much that one
is forced to conclude that the Hebrew text behind the latter cannot have
been the text we know today.
The Septuagint very clearly attests to the developing concept of the expected
Messiah in the Hellenistic period. Our Saviour Jesus Christ quoted from the
Psalms and applied them to Himself. (e.g. Psalm 90: He shall give His
angels charge over Thee to keep Thee in all Thy ways: and Psalm 109: The
Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou at my right hand, until I make Thine enemies
Thy footstool.) There are also key messianic references in Psalms 59 and
107. In Luke 24:27 He is shown expounding to His disciples all the Law and
the Prophets and saying that they were fulfilled in Him. There are other
examples of the messianism of the Septuagint. In Amos 4:13 God is
described in the Masoretic text (MT) as making known to mankind what is
His thought. The Septuagint reads announcing His Anointed One to men.
Ezekiel 17:22b-23a in the MT reads And I myself will plant a shoot on a high
and lofty mountain; on the mountain height of Sion I will plant it. In the Greek
it is And I myself will plant it upon a high mountain; and I will hang him on
the mountain height of Sion. Numbers 24:7 and 24:17 are often cited as
messianic readings found in the Septuagint but not in the MT. 24:7 in the
MT Water will flow from His buckets, and His seed will have abundant
water becomes in Septuagint a man will come out of His seed, and he will
rule many nations. 24:17 in the MT has A star will come out of Jacob, and a
sceptre out of Sion is in Septuagint A star will come out of Jacob, and a man
out of Sion. Before we assume too readily that the transmission of these and
similar readings is simply due to a later distinctively Christian reading of a

Jewish text, because most of the surviving mss of the Septuagint are from
Christian sources, we should perhaps remember that ancient Judaism was
by no means identical with modern Judaism.
The theological concept of personal resurrection apparently developed in
Judaism in the Hellenistic period. The Septuagint version of Psalms shows
this clearly. So with regard to the concept of personal resurrection,
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgement of the Hebrew Ps.1
becomes Therefore the ungodly will not rise up in the judgement, using the
Greek word anistemi, which means specifically to rise up. And New
Testament writers use anistemi with reference to resurrection, as does for
example 2 Maccabees 7:9, 14, which contains the account of the torture and
execution of the seven sons, and their testimony to personal resurrection:
you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the Universe will raise
us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for His laws...to
cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will
be no resurrection to life. The Septuagint also makes very explicit reference
to prayer for the dead, which is intimately bound up with personal
resurrection, in 2 Maccabees 39-45. The Books of Maccabees are not found
in the Hebrew Bible, and prayer for the dead is rejected by most Protestant
communions.
It is a fact that, for almost a hundred years of its earliest history, the
Christian Church shared its Bible with Judaism. That Bible was the
Septuagint. The Septuagint was the first Bible of the Christian Church.
Before and during the time of Our Lord Jesus Christ the Septuagint was
used by Greek-speaking Jews (the great majority of Jews) throughout the
Greek and Roman worlds. Among them the Septuagint possessed great
authority, which ceased only after later controversies with Christians who
cited its undeniably messianic prophecies in favour of their new faith. Not
until the middle of the second century do we find evidence of original
Christian writings the Gospels, Acts and Epistles appearing as scripture
together with Old Testament Books. The Jewish Bible was transformed into
the Christian Bible when the first Christians and the early Church were able
to adopt it as their Old Testament without any outward reservation by
reading it and interpreting it in the light of faith in Jesus as the Christ. (This
is of course exactly what the Gospels say that our Lord Himself did.) This is
an approach that starts with the New Testament and then goes back to the
Old Testament. In other words, the Old Testament only makes sense when it
is read in the light of the New Testament: Vetus Testamentum in Novo
Receptum, that is, The Old Testament taken into the New.
The ancient Greek Bible continues to this day to be the authoritative Old
Testament text used in the Orthodox Christian East, and the Slavonic,
Arabic, Coptic and other translations were all made from the Septuagint.
The case of the Latin Vulgate is somewhat different, because of Blessed
Jeromes growing regard for what he called the Hebrew verity after he
moved to Bethlehem in 386 A.D. (The Vulgates resemblance to the
Septuagint is still quite striking however, very largely because Jeromes
Psalter from the Hebrew did not replace the earlier Gallicanum, which was
translated from the Septuagint, and also because Jerome did not translate

the Deuterocanonical books, so that the Old Latin versions of the latter
included in the Vulgate are translations from the Septuagint.) But Jeromes
insistence on the primacy of the Hebrew text and the consequent
displacement of the Septuagint that this occasioned in the West
paradoxically can be seen as the seed from which grew the sixteenth century
Western Reformers veneration for the Hebrew Masoretic text. This became
the basis of virtually all vernacular Old Testament translation, especially in
English, even though it distorted the relationship of the Old Testament with
the New. William Tyndale, before his death at the stake in 1536, translated
about half of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew Masoretic text
rather than the Septuagint Greek or Vulgate Latin of Christendom. The
books that did not form part of the Hebrew Bible were not at first excluded
by the English Reformers from the canon, but they were placed together at
the end of the Old Testament as the so-called Apocrypha. Finally they were
dropped altogether, as can be seen by inspecting most modern English
Bibles that emanate from the various Protestant sources. This development
was most unfortunate: it gravely weakened the early Churchs attitude of
Vetus Testamentum in Novo Receptum, and led to the present anomaly of
biblical criticism conducted outside of the Church. Holy Scripture cannot,
repeat cannot, be independent of the Church that canonizes it and says
what it is. The idea is absurd. And if there is not exact correspondence
between the text of the Old Testament and those New Testament quotations
from it made by the Saviour Himself, the Evangelists and Apostles,
especially St Paul, the vital salvific link between the Old Testament and the
New is fundamentally obscured. Muller4 goes to the heart of the matter:
the question of what is the true Old Testament text cannot be separated
from the question of what the early Church regarded as its Bibleit is quite
unreasonable to say that the true (i.e. Hebrew) text actually differs from
what the early Church believed it to bethe quotation from Isaiah 7.14 cited
in Matthew 1.23, (which is a proof text of the virgin birth), makes this
absolutely clear. Matthew says virgin in accordance with the Septuagint
Greek translation parthenos, whereas the Hebrew text uses the word for
young woman, alma, (which in Greek would be neanias). It would be
pointless to rebuke the Evangelist for using the wrong text. On the contrary,
the so-called wrong text gains a significance of its own by being used.
The foregoing will have shown why it is most unsatisfactory when Orthodox
Christians have to use Old Testament translations that are made from the
Hebrew. It is very important that we Orthodox know and use the Septuagint
version of the Old Testament either in the original Greek or in translation.
Our church formularies and services (certainly the most theologically
complex and profound of all Christian church services) are a virtual mosaic
of scripture quotation from the Septuagint or of the Church Fathers
paraphrasing and commenting on Septuagint texts. For an example of this
take the very first line of the very first Book of the Bible, Genesis. In the
Hebrew Bible and the English translations made from it we have In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In the Septuagint it is In
the beginning God made the heaven and the earth. The first clause of the
Nicene Creed, following the Septuagint, has Maker of heaven and earth, not
Creator. (The Apostles Creed of the Roman Catholic Church, following St

Jeromes translation from the Hebrew, has Creatorem, Creator.) In the next
sentence of Genesis the Septuagint describes the earth at the moment of
creation as invisible and without form. The Septuagints word invisible is
taken into the next clause of the Nicene Creed, where we have and of all
things visible and invisible. In the Hebrew the passage reads without form
and void (or empty). It is a truism that learning the Orthodox Faith comes
very largely through attending its services. If we cannot recognise these
scriptural quotations when we encounter them in the services, our
apprehension of our faith is handicapped.
English-speaking Orthodox have long been so handicapped. It is true that
for a long time there have been two English translations of the Septuagint.
At the end of the eighteenth century Charles Thomson, one of Americas
Founding fathers, recognising the vital connection of the Septuagint with the
New Testament, produced the first English translation of the Septuagint,
made from J Fields printed Greek text of 1665. Then in 1851 Sir Lancelot C
L Brenton published his translation of the Septuagint. It is this latter that is
generally available and fairly widely known today in bilingual editions in
book form or on the internet. However it is a diplomatic text (i.e. one that is
based on one codex, in this case Vaticanus), which does not entirely agree
with the Greek text of the Orthodox Church. Now several other English
translations are completed or are in progress. The most significant of these
are the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS) and The Orthodox
Study Bible (OSB). Others include Peter Papoutsis translation of the official
Greek Orthodox Greek text (in progress), and the Eastern Orthodox Bible
(EOB), a project which is intended eventually to include the Septuagint text
in a modern English revision of Brentons translation, noting also variant
texts from the Syriac Peshitta, the Masoretic and other ancient versions. And
the present writer has produced an unpublished version based on the text of
the Church of Greeces Apostoliki Diakonia, with the King James Bible as its
English template but changing it where it differs from the Greek, which it
does very often.
The New English Translation of the Septuagint is a scholarly eclectic text
translated from the Gottingen/Rahlf5 critical edition of the Septuagint. The
first volume of this translation, Psalms, appeared in 2000. Oxford University
Press published the complete translation in October 2007. The text of NETS
is based on the Old Testament of the New Revised Standard Version of the
Bible. Because it is based on an eclectic Greek text, this version of the
Septuagint is unsuitable for use by English-speaking Orthodox.
The second of these translations is of more direct significance to Orthodoxy.
The Orthodox Study Bible, New Testament and Psalms (OSB) was originally
published in 1993. The New Testament text of the OSB is the New King
James Version (NKJV), which is itself based on the Byzantine Received Text,
the traditional text of the Greek-speaking churches, indeed of all
Christendom until the nineteenth century. In the absence at that time of a
suitable English translation of the Septuagint, the Psalms were taken
directly from the New King James Versions translation of the Masoretic
Hebrew. This first OSB received much adverse critical comment. Now, under
the direction of Fr Jack Sparks, a new Septuagint translation has been

published in the USA as part of The Orthodox Study Bible: Septuagint and
New Testament.
The new Orthodox Study Bible was published in February 2008. It has
study notes and theological guides. It is a word for word translation of the
Greek by a number of contributors in a formal modern English but with
echoes of the King James Bible. Like its 1993 predecessor the new OSB uses
the New King James Version as its base, but claims to have changed it
where it differs from the text of the Septuagint. However, this is by no means
always the case. The OSBs dependence on the NKJV Bible is at times a
decided liability: there seems to be a marked reluctance to deviate from the
text of the NKJV even when the plain meaning of the Greek demands it. One
egregious example of this occurs in the key Messianic text of Genesis 49:10.
The Greek means, A ruler shall not be wanting from Juda and a leader from
his thighs, until the things stored up for him come, and he is the expectation of
nations. The OSB, following NKJV exactly, has: The sceptre shall not depart
from Judah, nor a lawgiver from his loins until Shiloh come: and to him
shall be the expectation of the nations. However, despite its very obvious
shortcomings, it seems that the OSB, with a major publisher (Thomas
Nelson) behind it, will remain the standard Orthodox translation of the
Septuagint for the immediate future.
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy): The Orthodox Church, p.208; Penguin 1963,
2 Turpie, DH: The Old Testament in the New;, Williams and Norgate 1868
3 Muller, M: The First Bible of the Church, pp.115-6; Sheffield Academic Press
1996.
4 Muller, M: op.cit, p.23
5Septuaginta. Id est Vetus Testamentum Graece iuxta LXX Interpretes.
Stuttgart: Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1935
1