Septuagint origins and significance

The Septuagint (abbreviated LXX) is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, produced in stages between the third and first centuries BCE in Alexandria, Egypt. It is the oldest translation of any part of the Bible, the form of the Old Testament most widely used in the Hellenistic Jewish diaspora, and the primary scriptural text of the early Christian church.^{1, 2} For the study of the Bible, the Septuagint is indispensable: it preserves readings that predate the standardization of the Masoretic Text, it shaped the theological vocabulary of the New Testament, and its divergences from the Hebrew illuminate the textual plurality that characterized the biblical text in antiquity.^{3, 7}

The Letter of Aristeas

The earliest account of the Septuagint's origin is the pseudepigraphical Letter of Aristeas, composed by an Alexandrian Jew probably in the second century BCE. According to this text, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (reigned 284–246 BCE) wished to include a Greek translation of the Jewish law in the great library of Alexandria and dispatched envoys to the high priest Eleazar in Jerusalem, who selected seventy-two translators — six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel — to undertake the task. The translators were received with honor, demonstrated their wisdom in philosophical dialogue with the king, and completed their translation of the Pentateuch in seventy-two days on the island of Pharos.⁴

The account is legendary in its details but preserves a historical kernel: the Torah was indeed first translated into Greek in third-century BCE Alexandria, almost certainly under royal patronage or at least within the milieu of the Ptolemaic court's interest in the cultures of its subject peoples. The name "Septuagint" (from the Latin septuaginta, "seventy") derives from the rounded number of translators in the Aristeas legend.^{1, 6} Later traditions, notably in Philo of Alexandria and the church fathers, embellished the story further: Philo claimed the translators worked independently and produced identical translations, a miracle that authenticated the Greek text as divinely inspired. This enhanced legend served to give the Septuagint an authority comparable to the Hebrew original in communities that relied on it.^{2, 10}

The process of translation

Despite the Aristeas legend's implication of a single coordinated project, the Septuagint was the product of multiple translators working over an extended period. The Pentateuch was translated first, probably in the early to mid-third century BCE, and the quality and approach of translation vary considerably from book to book. Some translators produced highly literal, word-for-word renderings of the Hebrew (as in much of the Pentateuch), while others adopted a freer approach that prioritized idiomatic Greek expression and interpretive paraphrase (as in parts of Job, Proverbs, and Isaiah).^{1, 2}

Seeligmann's pioneering study of the Greek Isaiah demonstrated that the translator of Isaiah was not merely converting Hebrew into Greek but was actively interpreting the text, incorporating allusions to contemporary Hellenistic events and theological commentary into the translation itself.¹³ The Prophets and Writings were translated over the following two centuries, and the process was effectively complete by the time of Ben Sira's grandson, whose prologue to the Greek translation of Sirach (c. 132 BCE) refers to "the Law and the Prophets and the other books" in their Greek versions.^{1, 3}

The Septuagint also contains books not found in the Hebrew Bible: Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Tobit, Judith, 1–4 Maccabees, Baruch, and additions to Esther and Daniel, among others. These works, composed in Greek or translated from Hebrew or Aramaic originals, circulated as part of the Septuagint collection and were treated as scripture by many early Christians. They are included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons as deuterocanonical books, while Protestants, following Jerome's distinction between hebraica veritas and the wider Greek collection, classify them as Apocrypha.^{3, 10}

Divergences from the Masoretic Text

The Septuagint differs from the Masoretic Text (MT) — the standardized Hebrew text preserved by medieval Jewish scribes — in thousands of passages, ranging from minor variations in wording to major differences in the arrangement and length of entire books. The book of Jeremiah in the Septuagint is roughly one-eighth shorter than in the MT and arranges the oracles against the nations in a different position. The Septuagint text of 1 Samuel (1 Kingdoms) preserves readings absent from the MT, and the Greek text of Job is substantially shorter than the Hebrew.^{7, 12}

These divergences have multiple explanations. In some cases, the Septuagint translator worked from a Hebrew text (Vorlage) that differed from the proto-Masoretic tradition. This explanation gained dramatic confirmation from the Dead Sea Scrolls, where Hebrew manuscripts of Jeremiah, Samuel, and Exodus were found to agree with the Septuagint against the MT, proving that the Septuagint translators were not inventing their readings but faithfully rendering a Hebrew text that happened to differ from the one later canonized by the Masoretes.^{8, 15} In other cases, divergences reflect the translator's interpretive choices, theological concerns, or the conventions of the target language. Emanuel Tov's typology of Septuagint translations distinguishes these categories and provides a framework for evaluating each variant on its own terms.⁷

Significance for the New Testament

The Septuagint was the Bible of the early church. The New Testament authors overwhelmingly quoted the Old Testament in Greek forms that follow the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew. In several theologically significant instances, the New Testament argument depends on a Septuagint reading that differs from the MT. The most famous case is Isaiah 7:14, where the Hebrew almah ("young woman") is rendered as parthenos ("virgin") in the Septuagint, a reading cited by the author of Matthew as a prophecy fulfilled by the virgin birth of Jesus (Matthew 1:23).^{3, 11, 14}

The theological vocabulary of the New Testament is thoroughly shaped by Septuagintal usage. Key terms such as ekklesia (assembly, church), diatheke (covenant, testament), nomos (law), christos (anointed one, messiah), and kyrios (lord) acquired their New Testament meanings through their use in the Septuagint to translate specific Hebrew concepts. The Septuagint thus served as the linguistic and conceptual bridge between the Hebrew scriptures and early Christian theology.^{1, 3}

Later revisions and text history

As the Septuagint became associated with Christianity, Jewish communities increasingly distanced themselves from it and produced new Greek translations that hewed more closely to the proto-Masoretic Hebrew. The translations of Aquila (early second century CE), Symmachus (late second century CE), and Theodotion (late second century CE) represent different strategies for producing a more literal Greek rendering of the Hebrew text.^{2, 6} Origen's monumental Hexapla (c. 240 CE) arranged the Hebrew text, its Greek transliteration, and the four Greek versions in parallel columns, providing the first systematic comparison of the textual traditions and establishing a critical text of the Septuagint marked with symbols indicating additions and omissions relative to the Hebrew.⁶

The Septuagint text was transmitted in major manuscript traditions represented by Codex Vaticanus (fourth century CE), Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century CE), and Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century CE), each preserving a somewhat different form of the text. The ongoing critical edition published by the Gottingen Academy of Sciences aims to reconstruct the earliest recoverable form of the Greek text for each book, with modern English translations such as NETS making the Septuagint accessible to a wider scholarly audience.^{5, 9} The Septuagint remains a living scripture in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, where it continues to serve as the authoritative Old Testament, and it is an indispensable tool for scholars seeking to understand the textual history of the Hebrew Bible, the intellectual world of Hellenistic Judaism, and the scriptural foundations of early Christianity.^{3, 10}

Theological innovations in translation

The Septuagint translators did not merely convert Hebrew words into Greek equivalents; in many passages they introduced theological nuances absent from the Hebrew source. The translation of the divine name YHWH as Kyrios (Lord) established a terminological precedent that proved decisive for early Christology: when New Testament authors applied Kyrios to Jesus, they were drawing on a title that Septuagintal usage had already invested with the full weight of Israel's God.^{3, 14} Similarly, the translators' rendering of key Hebrew terms sometimes shifted their semantic range in theologically significant directions. The Hebrew hesed (covenant loyalty, steadfast love) was variously rendered as eleos (mercy) or dikaiosyne (righteousness), introducing concepts that would shape New Testament soteriology. The Septuagint's translation of torah as nomos (law) narrowed the original Hebrew concept — which encompassed teaching, instruction, and guidance — toward the more juridical sense carried by the Greek term, a shift that influenced Paul's understanding of the relationship between law and gospel.^{1, 3}

The additions and expansions found in the Septuagint versions of certain books also reflect theological development. The Greek additions to Daniel (the Prayer of Azariah, the Song of the Three Young Men, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon) expand the book's theological scope, and the longer Greek text of Esther introduces explicit references to God that are entirely absent from the Hebrew version, addressing the theological problem of a canonical book that never mentions the deity.^{2, 12} These expansions demonstrate that the Septuagint was not a passive transmission of the Hebrew text but an active site of theological reflection and literary creativity within Hellenistic Judaism.³