Septuagint

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The Septuagint (

Biblical scholars agree that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were translated from Biblical Hebrew into Koine Greek by Jews living in the Ptolemaic Kingdom, probably in the early or middle part of the third century BCE.^[8] The remaining books were presumably translated in the 2nd century BCE.^[4][9][10] Some targums translating or paraphrasing the Bible into Aramaic were also made during the Second Temple period.^[11]

Few people could speak and even fewer could read in the Hebrew language during the Second Temple period; Koine Greek^{[3][12][13][14]} and Aramaic were the most widely spoken languages at that time among the Jewish community. The Septuagint therefore satisfied a need in the Jewish community.^[8][15]

Etymology

The term "Septuagint" is derived from the

in addition to ${\displaystyle {\mathfrak {G}}}$ or G.

Composition

Jewish legend

According to tradition, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (the Greek Pharaoh of Egypt) sent seventy-two Hebrew translators—six from each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel—from Jerusalem to Alexandria to translate the Tanakh from Biblical Hebrew into Koine Greek, for inclusion in his library.^[20] This narrative is found in the possibly pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas to his brother Philocrates,^[21] and is repeated by Philo of Alexandria, Josephus (in Antiquities of the Jews),^[22] and by later sources (including Augustine of Hippo).^[23] It is also found in the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud:

King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: "Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher". God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.^[6]

Philo of Alexandria writes that the number of scholars was chosen by selecting six scholars from each of the

According to Aristobulus of Alexandria's fragment 3, portions of the Law were translated from Hebrew into Greek long before the well-known Septuagint version. He stated that Plato and Pythagoras knew the Jewish Law and borrowed from it.^[26]

In the preface to his 1844 translation of the Septuagint, Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton acknowledges that the Jews of Alexandria were likely to have been the writers of the Septuagint, but dismisses Aristeas' account as a pious fiction. Instead, he asserts that the real origin of the name "Septuagint" pertains to the fact that the earliest version was forwarded by the authors to the Jewish Sanhedrin at Alexandria for editing and approval.^[27]

History

The 3rd century BCE is supported for the translation of the Pentateuch by a number of factors, including its Greek being representative of early Koine Greek, citations beginning as early as the 2nd century BCE, and early manuscripts datable to the 2nd century BCE.^[28] After the Torah, other books were translated over the next two to three centuries. It is unclear which was translated when, or where; some may have been translated twice (into different versions), and then revised.^[29] The quality and style of the translators varied considerably from book to book, from a literal translation to paraphrasing to an interpretative style.

The translation process of the Septuagint and from the Septuagint into other versions can be divided into several stages: the Greek text was produced within the social environment of

The Septuagint is written in Koine Greek. Some sections contain Semiticisms, which are idioms and phrases based on Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Aramaic.^[34] Other books, such as Daniel and Proverbs, have a stronger Greek influence.^[20]

The Septuagint may also clarify pronunciation of pre-Masoretic Hebrew; many proper nouns are spelled with Greek vowels in the translation, but contemporary Hebrew texts lacked vowel pointing. However, it is unlikely that all Biblical Hebrew sounds had precise Greek equivalents.^[35]

Canonical differences

The Septuagint does not consist of a single, unified corpus. Rather, it is a collection of ancient translations of the Tanakh, along with other Jewish texts that are now commonly referred to as apocrypha. Importantly, the canon of the Hebrew Bible was evolving over the century or so in which the Septuagint was being written. Also, the texts were translated by many different people, in different locations, at different times, for different purposes, and often from different original Hebrew manuscripts.^[8]

The

The Septuagint became synonymous with the Greek Old Testament, a Christian canon incorporating the books of the Hebrew canon with additional texts. Although the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church include most of the books in the Septuagint in their canons, Protestant churches usually do not. After the Reformation, many Protestant Bibles began to follow the Jewish canon and exclude the additional texts (which came to be called the Apocrypha) as noncanonical.^[44][45] The Apocrypha are included under a separate heading in the King James Version of the Bible.^[46]

Final form

All the books in Western Old Testament biblical canons are found in the Septuagint, although the order does not always coincide with the Western book order. The Septuagint order is evident in the earliest Christian Bibles, which were written during the fourth century.^[20]

Some books which are set apart in the Masoretic Text are grouped together. The

It is unclear to what extent Alexandrian Jews accepted the authority of the Septuagint. Manuscripts of the Septuagint have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and were thought to have been in use among various Jewish sects at the time.^[56]

Several factors led most Jews to abandon the Septuagint around the second century CE. The earliest

Perhaps most significant for the Septuagint, as distinct from other Greek versions, was that the Septuagint began to lose Jewish sanction after differences between it and contemporary Hebrew scriptures were discovered. Even Greek-speaking Jews tended to prefer other Jewish versions in Greek (such as the translation by Aquila), which seemed to be more concordant with contemporary Hebrew texts.^[33]

Christian use

The

Jerome broke with church tradition, translating most of the Old Testament of his Vulgate from Hebrew rather than Greek. His choice was sharply criticized by Augustine, his contemporary.^[65] Although Jerome argued for the superiority of the Hebrew texts in correcting the Septuagint on philological and theological grounds, because he was accused of heresy he also acknowledged the Septuagint texts.^[66] Acceptance of Jerome's version increased, and it displaced the Septuagint's Old Latin translations.^[33]

The Eastern Orthodox Church prefers to use the Septuagint as the basis for translating the Old Testament into other languages, and uses the untranslated Septuagint where Greek is the liturgical language. Critical translations of the Old Testament which use the Masoretic Text as their basis consult the Septuagint and other versions to reconstruct the meaning of the Hebrew text when it is unclear, corrupted, or ambiguous.^[33] According to the New Jerusalem Bible foreword, "Only when this (the Masoretic Text) presents insuperable difficulties have emendations or other versions, such as the [...] LXX, been used."^[67] The translator's preface to the New International Version reads, "The translators also consulted the more important early versions (including) the Septuagint [...] Readings from these versions were occasionally followed where the MT seemed doubtful"^[68]

Textual history

Textual analysis

Modern scholarship holds that the Septuagint was written from the 3rd through the 1st centuries BCE, but nearly all attempts at dating specific books (except for the Pentateuch, early- to mid-3rd century BCE) are tentative.

Although much of Origen's Hexapla (a six-version critical edition of the Hebrew Bible) is lost, several compilations of fragments are available. Origen kept a column for the Old Greek (the Septuagint), which included readings from all the Greek versions in a critical apparatus with diacritical marks indicating to which version each line (Gr. στίχος) belonged. Perhaps the Hexapla was never copied in its entirety, but Origen's combined text was copied frequently (eventually without the editing marks) and the older uncombined text of the Septuagint was neglected. The combined text was the first major Christian recension of the Septuagint, often called the Hexaplar recension. Two other major recensions were identified in the century following Origen by Jerome, who attributed these to Lucian (the Lucianic, or Antiochene, recension) and Hesychius (the Hesychian, or Alexandrian, recension).^[20]

Manuscripts

The oldest manuscripts of the Septuagint include 2nd-century-BCE fragments of Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Rahlfs nos. 801, 819, and 957) and 1st-century-BCE fragments of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and the

The text of the Septuagint is generally close to that of the Masoretes and Vulgate. Genesis 4:1–6[69] is identical in the Septuagint, Vulgate and the Masoretic Text, and Genesis 4:8^[70] to the end of the chapter is the same. There is only one noticeable difference in that chapter, at 4:7:^{[citation needed]}

The differences between the Septuagint and the MT fall into four categories:^[71]

1. Different Hebrew sources for the MT and the Septuagint. Evidence of this can be found throughout the Old Testament. A subtle example may be found in Isaiah 36:11;^[72] the meaning remains the same, but the choice of words evidences a different text. The MT reads "...al tedaber yehudit be-'ozne ha`am al ha-homa" [speak not the Judean language in the ears of (or—which can be heard by) the people on the wall]. The same verse in the Septuagint reads, according to the translation of Brenton: "and speak not to us in the Jewish tongue: and wherefore speakest thou in the ears of the men on the wall." The MT reads "people" where the Septuagint reads "men". This difference is very minor and does not affect the meaning of the verse.^{[citation needed]} Scholars had used discrepancies such as this to claim that the Septuagint was a poor translation of the Hebrew original. This verse is found in Qumran (1QIsaa), however, where the Hebrew word "haanashim" (the men) is found in place of "haam" (the people). This discovery, and others like it, showed that even seemingly-minor differences of translation could be the result of variant Hebrew source texts.
2. Differences in interpretation stemming from the same Hebrew text. An example is Genesis 4:7,^[73] shown above.
3. Differences as a result of idiomatic translation issues: A Hebrew idiom may not be easily translated into Greek, and some difference is imparted. In Psalm 47:10,^[74] the MT reads: "The shields of the earth belong to God"; the Septuagint reads, "To God are the mighty ones of the earth."
4. Transmission changes in Hebrew or Greek: Revision or recension changes and copying errors

Dead Sea Scrolls

The Biblical manuscripts found in Qumran, commonly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), have prompted comparisons of the texts associated with the Hebrew Bible (including the Septuagint).^[75] Emanuel Tov, editor of the translated scrolls,^[76] identifies five broad variants of DSS texts:^[77][78]

1. Proto-Masoretic: A stable text and numerous, distinct agreements with the Masoretic Text. About 60 per cent of the Biblical scrolls (including 1QIsa-b) are in this category.
2. Pre-Septuagint: Manuscripts which have distinctive affinities with the Greek Bible. About five per cent of the Biblical scrolls, they include 4QDeut-q, 4QSam-a, 4QJer-b, and 4QJer-d. In addition to these manuscripts, several others share similarities with the Septuagint but do not fall into this category.
3. The Qumran "Living Bible": Manuscripts which, according to Tov, were copied in accordance with the "Qumran practice": distinctive, long orthography and morphology, frequent errors and corrections, and a free approach to the text. They make up about 20 per cent of the Biblical corpus, including the Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a).
4. Pre-Samaritan: DSS manuscripts which reflect the textual form of the Samaritan Pentateuch, although the Samaritan Bible is later and contains information not found in these earlier scrolls, (such as God's holy mountain at Shechem, rather than Jerusalem). These manuscripts, characterized by orthographic corrections and harmonizations with parallel texts elsewhere in the Pentateuch, are about five per cent of the Biblical scrolls and include 4QpaleoExod-m.
5. Non-aligned: No consistent alignment with any of the other four text types. About 10 per cent of the Biblical scrolls, they include 4QDeut-b, 4QDeut-c, 4QDeut-h, 4QIsa-c, and 4QDan-a.^[77][79][j]

The textual sources present a variety of readings; Bastiaan Van Elderen compares three variations of Deuteronomy 32:43, the Song of Moses:^{[76][failed verification]}

Print editions

The text of all print editions is derived from the recensions of Origen, Lucian, or Hesychius:

• The editio princeps is the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. Based on now-lost manuscripts, it is one of the received texts used for the KJV (similar to Textus Receptus) and seems to convey quite early readings.^[80]
• The Brian Walton Polyglot [it] by Brian Walton is one of the few versions that includes a Septuagint not based on the Egyptian Alexandria-type text (such as Vaticanus, Alexandrinus and Sinaiticus), but follows the majority which agree (like the Complutensian Polyglot).
• The Aldine edition (begun by Aldus Manutius) was published in Venice in 1518. The editor says that he collated ancient, unspecified manuscripts, and it has been reprinted several times.
• The
  textus receptus of the Greek Old Testament and has been published in a number of editions, such as: those of Robert Holmes and James Parsons (Oxford, 1798–1827), the seven editions of Constantin von Tischendorf which appeared at Leipzig between 1850 and 1887 (the last two published after the death of the author and revised by Nestle), and the four editions of Henry Barclay Swete
  (Cambridge, 1887–95, 1901, 1909). A detailed description of this edition has been made by H. B. Swete in An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (1900), pp. 174–182.
• Grabe's edition was published in Oxford from 1707 to 1720 and reproduced, imperfectly, the Codex Alexandrinus of London. For partial editions, see Fulcran Vigouroux, Dictionnaire de la Bible, 1643 and later.
• Alexandrinus and presents a critical framework with variants from these and several other sources.^[82]
• The
  Göttingen Septuagint (Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum), a critical version in multiple volumes published from 1931 to the present, is not yet complete; the largest missing parts are the historical books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles), Proverbs and Song of Songs, as well as a new edition of Psalms. Its two critical apparatuses present variant readings in the Old Greek text and variants of the other Greek recensions (i.e., the Hexapla, Theodotion, Symmachus, Aquilla, Lucian).^[83]
• In 2006, a
  revision of Alfred Rahlfs' Septuaginta was published by the German Bible Society. This revised edition includes over a thousand changes.^[84] The text of this revised edition contains changes in the diacritics, and only two wording changes: in Isaiah 5:17 and 53:2, Is 5:17 ἀπειλημμένων became ἀπηλειμμένων, and Is 53:2 ἀνηγγείλαμεν became by conjecture ἀνέτειλε μένà.^[85]
• The
  Sixtine, and the Aldine texts.^[86]
• Septuaginta: A Reader's Edition, a 2018 reader's edition of the Septuagint[87] using the text of the 2006 revised edition of Rahlf's Septuaginta.^[88]

Further reading

• Siegfried Kreuzer, ed. Introduction to the Septuagint (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press; 2019) 671 pages; general information on the history and transmission of the Septuagint; information on each book of the Septuagint.
• Eberhard Bons and Jan Joosten, eds. Septuagint Vocabulary: Pre-History, Usage, Reception (Society of Biblical Literature; 2011) 211 pages; studies of the language used
• W. Emery Barnes, On the Influence of Septuagint on the Peshitta, JTS 1901, pp. 186–197.
• Hengel, Martin (2004). Septuagint as Christian Scripture. A&C Black. p. 5.
  ISBN 978-0567082879
  .
• Joosten, Jan (2008). "The Septuagint as a Source of Information on Egyptian Aramaic in the Hellenistic Period". Aramaic in its Historical and Linguistic Setting. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. pp. 93–105.
  ISBN 978-3447057875
  .
• Joosten, Jan (2010). "The Aramaic Background of the Seventy: Language, Culture and History". Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. 43: 53–72.
• Andreas Juckel, Septuaginta and Peshitta Jacob of Edessa quoting the Old Testament in Ms BL Add 17134 Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies.
• Kreuzer, Siegfried, The Bible in Greek. Translation, Transmission, and Theology of the Septuagint, Septuagint and Cognate Studies 63, Atlanta: SBL Press 2015.
• Timothy Michael Law, When God Spoke Greek, Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Makrakis, Apostolos, Proofs of the Authenticity of the Septuagint, trans. by D. Cummings, Chicago, Ill.: Hellenic Christian Educational Society, 1947. N.B.: Published and printed with its own pagination, whether as issued separately or as included together with 2 other works of A. Makrakis in a single volume published by the same film in 1950, wherein the translator's name is identified on the common t.p. to that volume.
• Meer, Michaël N. van der (2020). "The Greek and Aramaic Versions of Joshua 3–4". Septuagint, Targum and Beyond: Comparing Aramaic and Greek Versions from Jewish Antiquity. Leiden-Boston: Brill. pp. 58–100.
  ISBN 978-9004416727
  .
• Messo, Johny (2011). "The Origin of the Terms Syria(n) and Suryoyo: Once Again"
  . Parole de l'Orient. 36: 111–125.
• Mihăilă, Alexandru (2018). "The Septuagint and the Masoretic Text in the Orthodox Church(es)". Review of Ecumenical Studies Sibiu. 10: 30–60.
  S2CID 171863532
  .
• Alfred Rahlfs, Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften des Alten Testaments, für das Septuaginta-Unternehmen, Göttingen 1914.
• Rajak, Tessa, Translation and survival: the Greek Bible of the ancient Jewish Diaspora (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Alison G. Salvesen and Timothy Michael Law, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint (Oxford University Press; 2021) 776 pages;
  ISBN 978-0191644009
• Sanders, Paul (2020). "No Death without Sin on the New Earth: Isaiah 65:20 in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic". Septuagint, Targum and Beyond: Comparing Aramaic and Greek Versions from Jewish Antiquity. Leiden-Boston: Brill. pp. 129–140.
  ISBN 978-9004416727
  .
• Shepherd, David J. (2020). "See God and Die? Job's Final Words (42:6) according to His First Aramaic and Greek Interpreters". Septuagint, Targum and Beyond: Comparing Aramaic and Greek Versions from Jewish Antiquity. Leiden-Boston: Brill. pp. 228–248.
  ISBN 978-9004416727
  .
• ISBN 978-9004191181
  .
• ISBN 978-1575063676
  .
• Wevers, John W. (2001). "Aram and Aramaean in the Septuagint". The World of the Aramaeans. Vol. 1. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. pp. 237–251.
  ISBN 978-1841271583
  .

External links

Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The complete Greek text of the modern Septuagint by Rahlfs

Texts and translations

• Elpenor's Bilingual (Greek/English) Septuagint Old Testament Greek text (full polytonic unicode version) and English translation side by side. Greek text as used by the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
• Titus Text Collection: Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interpretes (advanced research tool)
• Septuagint published by the Church of Greece
• Plain text of the whole LXX
• Bible Resource Pages – contains Septuagint texts (with diacritics) side-by-side with English translations
• The Septuagint in Greek as a Microsoft Word document. Introduction and book abbreviations in Latin. Non-free Antioch (Vusillus Old Face, Vusillus) TrueType font file required.
• The New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS), electronic edition
• LXX2012: Septuagint in American English 2012 – The Septuagint with Apocrypha, translated from Greek to English by Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton and published in 1885, with some language updates by Michael Paul Johnson in 2012 (American English)