The first translation of the Bible was not made by Christians, and it was not made into Latin or English. It was made by Jews, in Egypt, into Greek, beginning in the third century BCE. It is called the Septuagint, from the Latin for “seventy,” and it is one of the most important books in the history of the Bible.

Why a Greek Bible?

After Alexander the Great’s conquests in the 330s and 320s BCE, Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean. Large Jewish communities grew up outside the land of Israel, especially in Alexandria, the great city Alexander founded in Egypt. Within a few generations, many Alexandrian Jews spoke Greek as their first language and could no longer read Hebrew easily. If they were to hear and study the Law of Moses, they needed it in Greek.

The legend of the seventy-two

The traditional story of the translation is told in a document called the Letter of Aristeas, written probably in the second century BCE. It claims that King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (who reigned 285–246 BCE) wanted a copy of the Jewish law for his famous library in Alexandria. At his request, the high priest in Jerusalem sent seventy-two learned elders, six from each tribe, who translated the Law in seventy-two days on the island of Pharos, and their translation was received with acclaim by the Jewish community.

Later writers embellished the story. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, in the first century CE, says that the translators, working separately, produced identical translations as if inspired (Life of Moses 2.37). Some Christian writers extended the legend to the whole Old Testament.

Scholars agree that the Letter of Aristeas is not a reliable historical account; it is a piece of advocacy for the translation. But it probably preserves some truth: the Torah (Genesis to Deuteronomy) was translated into Greek in Alexandria in the third century BCE, and the translation was soon accepted as authoritative by Greek-speaking Jews. The name “Septuagint,” meaning seventy (a round number for the seventy-two), was first applied to the Torah and later to the whole Greek Old Testament.

A library of translations

The rest of the Hebrew Bible was translated over the next two centuries or so, by different people, in different places and with different methods. By the time of the prologue to the Wisdom of Ben Sira, written in Egypt around 132 BCE, the translator could say that “the Law itself, the Prophecies, and the rest of the books” differed considerably when read in Greek.

So “the Septuagint” is not one translation but a collection. Some books, like most of the Torah, are translated quite literally. Others are freer: the Greek of Job is about one-sixth shorter than the Hebrew, and Proverbs has additions and a different order. The Greek of Daniel and Esther includes additional passages. Some books written originally in Greek, or surviving only in Greek, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and 1–2 Maccabees, came to be included in Greek collections of scripture. This is the origin of the books that Catholic and Orthodox Christians call deuterocanonical and Protestants call the Apocrypha (see How the Old Testament books were gathered).

The Bible of the first Christians

The early church was mostly Greek-speaking, and its Bible was the Greek Old Testament. When New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they very often use a Greek form close to the Septuagint, even where it differs from the Hebrew we know. Some examples:

  • Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 as “the virgin shall be with child,” using a Greek word that the Septuagint had already used to translate the Hebrew almah, “young woman.”
  • Hebrews 10:5 quotes Psalm 40:6 as “you prepared a body for me,” following the Septuagint, where the Hebrew reads “ears you have dug for me.”
  • Acts 15:16–17 has James quote Amos 9:11–12 in a form close to the Septuagint, which speaks of “the rest of men” seeking the Lord, where the Masoretic text speaks of possessing “the remnant of Edom.” The Hebrew words for “Edom” and “mankind” differ by one vowel letter.

These quotations show that the apostles used the Bible their hearers knew, as Christian missionaries have done ever since. They also show why the Septuagint is essential for understanding the New Testament: its vocabulary, such as the Greek words for “covenant,” “glory,” “righteousness” and “Lord,” shaped the language of the apostles. In the Septuagint, the divine name YHWH is generally rendered kyrios, “Lord,” which is the background to the New Testament’s confession that “Jesus is Lord.”

Revisions and rivals

Because Christians used the Septuagint, and argued from it, some Jewish scholars in the second century CE made new Greek translations that followed the Hebrew text more closely: those of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. The process had begun earlier. The Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever, copied around the turn of the era, shows a Jewish revision of the Septuagint towards the Hebrew. Dominique Barthélemy’s study of this scroll, published in 1963, transformed the field.

In the third century, the Christian scholar Origen produced the Hexapla, a massive work setting out in six parallel columns the Hebrew text, a Greek transliteration, Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint and Theodotion. Origen marked where the Septuagint had material not found in the Hebrew, or lacked material that was. The Hexapla itself is lost, but its influence shaped the later transmission of the Septuagint.

The oldest near-complete manuscripts of the Septuagint are the great Christian codices of the fourth and fifth centuries: Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus. Many fragments are older, including papyri from Egypt and Greek fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A witness to the Hebrew text

Because the Septuagint was translated from Hebrew manuscripts that are much older than any surviving Masoretic manuscript, it is a valuable witness to the Hebrew text. Where it differs from the Masoretic text, there are several possibilities. The translator may have misread the Hebrew, interpreted it, or paraphrased. But sometimes the translator was faithfully rendering a different Hebrew text.

Before 1947 it was often difficult to tell which. The Dead Sea Scrolls changed that. In books like Samuel and Jeremiah, Hebrew scrolls from Qumran agree with the Septuagint against the Masoretic text, proving that the Greek translators had Hebrew manuscripts that read differently (see What the Dead Sea Scrolls show). Emanuel Tov describes the Septuagint as the most important single source for reconstructing Hebrew readings that differ from the Masoretic text.

Using it well takes skill. The textual critic must first work out what Hebrew the translator was reading, which requires knowing how that translator usually worked, before weighing that Hebrew reading against the Masoretic one.

The Septuagint today

The Septuagint is still the official Old Testament of the Eastern Orthodox churches. For scholars, the standard editions are the hand edition by Alfred Rahlfs (1935, revised by Robert Hanhart in 2006) and the large critical edition prepared in Göttingen since 1931, still in progress. An English translation, the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS), appeared in 2007.

For Open Word Bible, the Septuagint plays two roles. When a New Testament writer quotes the Old Testament, the reasoning record can note where the quotation follows the Greek rather than the Hebrew, which helps readers understand apparent differences. And in the Old Testament, where the Septuagint, perhaps supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls, preserves a reading that many scholars think is earlier than the Masoretic one, the decision whether to follow it is made openly and explained.

Sources

  • Barthélemy, Dominique. Les Devanciers d’Aquila. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 10. Leiden: Brill, 1963.
  • Dines, Jennifer M. The Septuagint. London: T&T Clark, 2004.
  • Fernández Marcos, Natalio. The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible. Translated by Wilfred G. E. Watson. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
  • Jobes, Karen H., and Moisés Silva. Invitation to the Septuagint. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015.
  • Law, Timothy Michael. When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Pietersma, Albert, and Benjamin G. Wright, eds. A New English Translation of the Septuagint. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Free online.
  • Tov, Emanuel. The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research. 3rd ed. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2015.
  • Wright, Benjamin G., III. The Letter of Aristeas. Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015.
  • Philo. On the Life of Moses 2.25–44.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.