The Septuagint: The Greek Bible of Alexandria and Its Legacy

The Septuagint is the ancient Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, begun in Alexandria in the third century BCE with the five books of the Torah and completed over the following two centuries. Its name — Latin for "seventy", abbreviated LXX — comes from the legend that seventy-two Jewish elders translated the Law for King Ptolemy II. Made by Jews for the Greek-speaking diaspora, it became the Bible of the early Christian church, preserves readings and books absent from the later Hebrew text, and remains the Old Testament of the Eastern Orthodox churches.

The Legend of the Seventy: The Letter of Aristeas§

The earliest account of the translation is the Letter of Aristeas, a Greek work presented as the report of a courtier of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (reigned 285–246 BCE). In it the royal librarian, Demetrius of Phalerum, advises the king that his great library lacks the Jewish law. Ptolemy frees Jewish captives in Egypt as a gesture of goodwill and writes to the high priest Eleazar in Jerusalem, who sends seventy-two learned elders, six from each tribe, with a splendid copy of the Torah written in gold. After seven days of banquets at which the king questions them on wisdom and kingship, the elders work on the island of Pharos and complete their translation in seventy-two days. The Jewish community of Alexandria then hears it read, approves it and pronounces a curse on anyone who alters it.

Scholars agree that the Letter is not the eyewitness report it claims to be: it was written by a Jew, probably in the second century BCE, and its real purpose seems to be to defend the authority of the Greek Torah and to present Judaism as a philosophy worthy of Greek admiration. Later writers embellished the story. Philo of Alexandria says the translators, working separately, produced word-for-word identical versions as if under divine inspiration, and that Alexandrian Jews held an annual festival on Pharos to celebrate the event. The Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 9a) tells a parallel story of seventy-two elders in seventy-two rooms who all, by divine guidance, made the same deliberate changes to avoid misunderstanding by the king. Christian writers extended the legend to the whole Old Testament.

When and Why the Septuagint Was Translated§

Behind the legend lies a real history. By the third century BCE the Jews of Egypt, especially in Alexandria, spoke Greek as their first language, and many could no longer follow the Hebrew text. Most scholars think the translation of the Torah was made in Alexandria around the middle of that century, though whether it arose from the needs of the synagogue, from education, from legal use in the Ptolemaic courts, or from royal interest as the legend claims is still debated. The language of the translation is the ordinary Koine Greek of Hellenistic Egypt, with many Hebraisms, and its vocabulary matches papyri from the period.

The Prophets and Writings were translated piecemeal by different hands, in Egypt and perhaps in Judea, over the next two centuries. The grandson of Jesus ben Sira, writing in Egypt around 132 BCE, says in the prologue to his own Greek translation of his grandfather's book that "the Law itself, and the prophecies, and the rest of the books" already existed in Greek and differed not a little from the Hebrew originals. The oldest surviving fragments are papyri of Deuteronomy from the second and first centuries BCE; among the Dead Sea Scrolls were Greek fragments of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and a scroll of the Minor Prophets from Nahal Hever. Strictly speaking, "Septuagint" applies to the Torah translation; scholars often use "Old Greek" for the original translations of the other books.

How the Greek Differs from the Hebrew Bible§

The Septuagint is not one translation but many, and the translators' styles range from the careful and fairly literal to the free and paraphrastic. Some differences arise from interpretation. The divine name YHWH is rendered Kyrios, "Lord", a choice with lasting theological consequences; torah becomes nomos, "law"; and some anthropomorphic descriptions of God are softened. In Isaiah 7 the Hebrew almah, "young woman", is rendered parthenos, usually "virgin", the reading later quoted in the Gospel of Matthew and the subject of centuries of Jewish–Christian debate.

Other differences show that the translators worked from Hebrew texts that differed from the one later standardised by the rabbis and the Masoretes. The Greek Jeremiah is about an eighth shorter than the Hebrew and arranges the oracles against the nations differently; Hebrew fragments found at Qumran agree with the shorter Greek form, showing that two editions of the book once circulated. The Greek Job is about a sixth shorter, the Greek Samuel often preserves a better text than the Masoretic, and the Greek Esther and Daniel contain substantial additions — prayers of Mordecai and Esther, the story of Susanna, the tale of Bel and the Dragon and the song of the three young men in the furnace. For textual critics the Septuagint is therefore an indispensable witness to the history of the biblical text (see the Hebrew Bible).

Extra Books: The Septuagint Canon and the Apocrypha§

The great Christian manuscripts of the Greek Bible — Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus of the fourth century and Codex Alexandrinus of the fifth — contain books not found in the Hebrew canon. Some were translated from Hebrew or Aramaic originals, such as Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus), Tobit, Judith and 1 Maccabees; others were composed in Greek, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and 2 Maccabees (see the Maccabees). The lists vary from manuscript to manuscript, and there is no evidence that Alexandrian Jews ever fixed a separate, larger "Alexandrian canon", as was once supposed.

When Jerome made his Latin Vulgate around 400 CE, he translated from the Hebrew wherever he could, appealing to the "Hebrew truth", and expressed doubts about the extra books, though they remained in the Latin Bible. At the Reformation, Martin Luther gathered them into a separate section of "Apocrypha"; the Council of Trent in 1546 affirmed them as Scripture for Catholics, who call them deuterocanonical. The Orthodox churches accept a somewhat larger set. The history of these decisions is traced in the Christian Bible and its canon.

Revisions, Rivals and Origen's Hexapla§

Even before the Christian era, Jewish scholars revised the Greek to bring it closer to the Hebrew current in their day; the Nahal Hever Minor Prophets scroll shows such a revision, which scholars call kaige after one of its characteristic words. In the second century CE three new Jewish translations appeared. Aquila, described in tradition as a proselyte and disciple of Rabbi Akiva, produced an extremely literal version that mirrored Hebrew word order and even particles; Symmachus wrote a more idiomatic Greek; and Theodotion's version of Daniel replaced the Old Greek Daniel in Christian Bibles.

Around the 230s–240s CE the Christian scholar Origen assembled the Hexapla, a vast six-column synopsis of the Hebrew text, a Greek transliteration of it, Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint and Theodotion, marking with critical signs where the Greek had more or less than the Hebrew. The work was too large ever to be copied whole and survives only in fragments, but its revised Septuagint column influenced the later manuscript tradition. In the sixth century the emperor Justinian, in a law of 553, permitted Greek readings in synagogues and named both the Septuagint and Aquila.

The Septuagint in Judaism and Christianity§

For Greek-speaking Jews the Septuagint was simply Scripture. Philo built his allegorical philosophy on its wording, Josephus used it, and Jewish authors in Alexandria wrote histories, poems and wisdom books in its language. Its vocabulary shaped religious Greek: diaspora, angelos for a heavenly messenger, diabolos for the satan, christos for the anointed one, ekklesia for the assembly of Israel.

The Christian movement inherited it. Most quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament, including many in the letters of Paul, follow the Greek, and the Church Fathers read it as inspired. As Christian apologists used readings like parthenos in debate, Jewish interest shifted toward the Hebrew and toward Aquila, and in later rabbinic tradition the translation came to be remembered ambivalently: a late tractate compares the day of its making to the day of the golden calf. After late antiquity the Septuagint survived almost entirely through the churches. It remains the authoritative Old Testament of the Greek Orthodox Church, and modern critical editions — Alfred Rahlfs' handy edition of 1935 and the multi-volume Göttingen Septuagint — together with translations into English, French and German have renewed its study by Jewish and Christian scholars alike as a monument of Hellenistic Judaism.

Frequently asked questions§

Why is it called the Septuagint?§

The name comes from the Latin septuaginta, "seventy", a rounded form of the seventy-two translators of the legend in the Letter of Aristeas. It is therefore abbreviated with the Roman numeral LXX.

Is the Septuagint older than the Hebrew Bible?§

No. It is a translation of Hebrew (and some Aramaic) books, and its oldest parts date from the third century BCE. However, its manuscripts are older than the earliest complete Hebrew manuscripts of the Masoretic text, and in places it preserves a Hebrew text older than the one later standardised.

Do Jews use the Septuagint today?§

Jewish communities read the Bible in Hebrew and use modern translations based on the Masoretic text. The Septuagint is studied by Jewish scholars as an important source for Second Temple Judaism and the history of the biblical text, but it has no liturgical role in contemporary Judaism.

Sources and further reading§

• Invitation to the Septuagint — Karen H. Jobes & Moisés Silva, 2000
• The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible — Natalio Fernández Marcos, 2000
• When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible — Timothy Michael Law, 2013
• The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today — Abraham Wasserstein & David J. Wasserstein, 2006
• A New English Translation of the Septuagint — Albert Pietersma & Benjamin G. Wright (eds.), 2007
• The Letter of Aristeas — H. St. J. Thackeray (trans.), 1917
• Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible — Emanuel Tov, 1992