The Greek Old Testament

Old Testament Texts Translated into Greek

As discussed in the previous post (here), the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and passed down for thousands of years to form the basis of our Old Testaments today. However, the New Testament was written in Greek, as by the first century AD the common language of the Roman Empire – which Israel was a part of – was Greek and a majority of the people spoke it (often in addition to their indigenous languages). When the New Testament authors came to quote the Old Testament (their Bible), they would quote from a Greek translation known today as the Septuagint. It had existed alongside the Hebrew for several hundred years by the first century AD.  

Even after the return of the Jews from their exile in the 6th century BC, many Jews remained scattered throughout the rest of the world, choosing not to return to their homeland. As the Greek Empire expanded throughout the Ancient Near East in the 4th century BC, all the nations incorporated into it began to speak Greek. Many Jews spoke more Greek than Hebrew, and eventually they were unable to read their own scriptures. As a result the Hebrew Bible (HB) was gradually translated into Greek. 

The Septuagint (LXX) – a translation from Hebrew to Greek

There is one legend preserved in a text called The Letter of Aristeas, which claims to be an eyewitness account of the translation of the whole of the Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy) by a group of seventy-two Jewish scribes (six from each tribe) over the course of seventy-two days in Alexandria, Egypt, at the request of Ptolemy II in the 3rd century BC. This would have been an impressive feat and as a result it is not likely to be authentic in all its details, but there could be some truth behind it. Several hundred years later, the Jewish writer Josephus also mentions the translation of the Pentateuch, but there are slight differences in his account. The most important is the number of scribes. Although there are still six from each tribe, Josephus refers to them as ‘the seventy’. It is from this idea of the seventy that the Greek Old Testament gets the name the Septuagint (abbreviated as LXX). Septuaginta means seventy in Latin (LXX is seventy in Roman numerals). The legend also expanded to include such details as the scribes each being in separate houses in a special area and each of their translations being identical despite their being in isolation.

The translation of the Old Testament began with the Pentateuch, as these books of the law are the most important to the Jews in the Greek Empire. But the rest was also translated as well, by different translators at different times. The various books of the Old Testament were translated over a period of several hundred years by numerous translators. As a result there are differences between the translators concerning how close they stuck to the Hebrew they were working with. There are also considerable differences between the some of the biblical books in their Hebrew and Greek forms (as we have them). For example, Jeremiah and Job are considerably shorter in Greek than Hebrew by 2700 and 389 verses respectively. Proverbs and Ezekiel different chapter orders and Daniel and Joshua have two distinctly different versions in Greek.

Sometimes the original Greek translation is referred to as the Old Greek (OG), to help distinguish it from later revisions. Most on the manuscripts which survive today and form the basis of the Greek text available to us are these revised texts.

Revision of the text of the Septuagint

As mentioned above, the Septuagint is not one book or one text, like the Masoretic text is. In fact, it was constantly being edited and revised by both Jews and Christians, especially in the early centuries of Christianity when the Septuagint was the Bible of the church throughout the Empire. These revisions fall into two different groups. Firstly there were the Jewish revisions and later the Christian revisions. The Jewish revisions were a reaction to the Christian use of the Septuagint in their defence of their belief in Christ. In order to counter the Christian claims, several Jewish scholars revised their Septuagint in order to bring it closer to the Hebrew in places where they thought that the translation was too loose. This made the translation distinctive compared to the LXX used by the church. 

The Christian revisions were also sparked by debates with Judaism and internal debates among Christians. Over many centuries two things had happened to the Old Testament texts. Firstly, through the process of manual copying, many errors had crept into the texts. And secondly, there were numerous different versions of the LXX in existence, sparking a movement towards creating one text that could be used by all. There is evidence for several different Christian revisions, further adding to the pool of manuscripts which form the basis of the critical editions of the LXX today (such as Rahlf’s or Göttingen). 

One revision does stand out, however. In the 3rd century AD, the Christian scholar and theologian Origen undertook the mammoth task of bringing together several different versions of the Old Testament to form a six columned parallel text, called the Hexapla. The content of the columns is as follows:

1.    A Hebrew text, with no pointing
2.    The Hebrew letters converted into Greek letters and vowels added
3.    A Jewish revision by a pagan convert to Judaism called Aquila
4.    A second Jewish revision by a Jew called Symmachus
5.    The LXX text used by Origen
6.    A third Jewish revision by Theodotion which is closely aligned to the Masoretic Text (MT)

This work was meant to assist Christian scholars rather than replace the version used by Origen at the time. It demonstrates just how many different versions of the Greek text were circulating at the time. This remained the case until the Latin Vulgate (translated by Jerome from Hebrew and Greek texts) took over as the Christian Bible (both the Old and New Testaments) as the predominant language of the church had become Latin.

So, what is the Septuagint?

All in all there were many different versions of the Old Testament in Greek, which leads to the question: what, then, is the Septuagint? 

As I see it, the term “Septuagint” is a blanket term for the Old Testament translated into Greek. It covers the Old Greek text (the original translation) as well as the later Jewish and Christian revisions. Some of these revisions are singled out as especially important because they are distinctive, such as the Jewish Theodotian revision (some places it is very different from other versions) or Origen’s Hexapla.

In some ways the term “Septuagint” is used in a similar way to the general label of “Old Testament.” The Old Testament has a defined content, but includes every translation in any language. The Septuagint is defined by both its language (Greek) and the books it includes. It includes all the books of our Old Testament but also a small group of other books (including Judith, Tobit, Sirach and the Psalms of Solomon). These other books, usually called the Apocrypha, are included in some Catholic Bibles and translations such as the NRSV where they are grouped together in their own section. They weren’t included in the Hebrew Bible for two reasons. Firstly, they were all written much later than the books included in the Old Testament, from about the 3rd century BC onwards into the early centuries AD. And secondly, many were only written in Greek. They were considered inferior by the Christians who eventually defined the canon in the 4th century and were included in a separate section from the rest of the Old Testament and known as the Deuterocanonical (second canon) books (Deuterocanonical is what the Apocrypha are called when they are included in the Bible). They were finally expelled from the Bible during the Reformation (16th century). The Jews removed them at the end of the 1st century AD.

From this it is possible to say that the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, with a few other Greek books added. It was used from the time of its translation (3rd century BC onwards) until the early centuries AD by the Jews and many centuries more by the Christian church. For all of this time it did not exist as a bound book, but as a collection of manuscripts, of which there were many revisions. It was from a world dominated by the Septuagint that the New Testament writers wrote their gospels and letters, which are the foundations of Christianity today.

Today, we expect the text of the Old Testament to be more or less the same regardless of which translation we open. Its meaning is constant except for the language chosen by the translators. It can be somewhat startling to learn that this was not always the case. It is true that the text of the Old Testament did not fall from heaven in its current form but was in fact the work of human authors, transmitted over the centuries through human scribes in various forms and languages. This does not make it any less the word of God. It is God’s word because he has chosen it as the text through which he will speak to the world. As with all human things it has its flaws, but God still chooses to use it despite them. 

Click on  the image below to enlarge.

The Development of Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek