Septuagint

The story of how the Jewish scriptures were translated into the Greek language appears in The Letter of Aristeas, which claims to have been written by a Greek pagan in the third century B.C.E. In actuality it was probably written by a Hellenized Jew about a hundred years later.

The story begins with Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who ruled Egypt between 285 and 246 B.C.E. Since Ptolemy wanted to make his city's library the best in the world, he made a point of seeking out all the world's great literature. His librarian, one Demetrius of Phalarus, suggested that his lord acquire a copy of the Jewish scriptures for his collection. To this end, Ptolemy summoned seventy scribes and asked them to translate the Jewish Bible (in some versions just the Torah) into Greek. As "payment" for their labour, Ptolemy offered to free a hundred thousand Jewish slaves from his territory.

The translation that the scribes supposedly made under these conditions was known as the Septuagint, which comes from the Latin word septuaginta, meaning "seventy." (For this reason it is frequently referred to by the short form "LXX".) According to some versions of the story, there were actually seventy-two scribes -- six from each tribe of Israel -- rather than seventy. But, as Jim Davila dryly points out in his article (cited below), "septuaginta et duum" is a real bother to say.

The Letter of Aristeas was extremely popular and its legend appears often in late antique sources. Josephus, the Jewish historian from the first century C.E., quotes it in his Antiquities of the Jews. The Hellenic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria alludes to it in his Life of Moses. Two centuries later, the Christian historian Eusebius quotes it in his Ecclesiastical History, and the legend was taken at face value by Christian historians for centuries afterward. Occasionally the story was embroidered: in some versions, the scribes are locked up in separate cells, and yet they all miraculously create an identical Greek translation. Epiphanius of Salamis provides extra details about the lengths to which Ptolemy went to prevent the scribes from colluding with one another: they were assigned separate cooks, they had skylights rather than windows, and so on.

The LXX and Christianity

Though the story was originally Jewish, and though its author claims to be a pagan, it was eventually appropriated by Christian authors and rejected by Jews. This is because Christians had a special attachment to the Greek Bible: the New Testament is also written in Greek, and most of the scriptural citations that can be found in it refer to the Septuagint version rather than being on-the-fly translations of the original Hebrew. Therefore, Christians were invested in preserving the tradition that the LXX was divinely sanctioned and that its creation was accompanied by miracles. After the council of Jamnia convened around the year 90 C.E., the Jews, uneasy with the way their scriptures had been hijacked by Christians, made the decision to reject the Greek Bible wholesale and to stick with the original Hebrew.

This had consequences for the history of Jewish and Christian Bibles, because the Septuagint is actually somewhat different from the Hebrew Bible in content as well as language. A number of books, called variously the apocrypha or the deuterocanonical books, were written in Greek; in other words, Hebrew "originals" never existed for them. There was a time when these Greek books were read and enjoyed by both Christians and Hellenized Jews; after Jamnia, however, Jews excluded these extra materials from the canon while most Christians continued to draw inspiration from them. (A millennium and a half later, Martin Luther would declare that the apocrypha were not inspired scripture, echoing the Jewish decision to remove them from the canon. This is why Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles are longer than Protestant ones today.)

The Septuagint has caused a lot of bitter arguments between modern Protestants and modern Catholics. Protestants claim that the Catholics are reading uninspired books and ignorantly calling it scripture only because the Pope told them to. Catholics say that the Greek Bible has been important for the formation of Christian identity from the very beginning and that it is foolish to reject its insights. In any case, since the extant manuscripts of the LXX are much older than the Masoretic Hebrew text, we are forced (for better or worse) to rely on it to reconstruct some difficult Biblical passages.

Interestingly, the idea that the LXX was a "new" version of the Bible filled with Hellenistic inventions took something of a blow upon the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As it happens, the unusual form of the book of Jeremiah that can be found in the LXX is closer to the Dead Sea Scrolls in structure than it is to the Masoretic Hebrew. This opens up the intriguing possibility that in some places the LXX actually witnesses a more ancient, rather than a less ancient, scriptural tradition.

Septuagint is the established name for the translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Meaning seventy it is frequently written in Roman numeral shorthand as LXX which comes from a legend arising from the second century BCE. Michael D Coogan, Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College in North Easton, Massachusetts explains:

...at the request of Ptolemy II (285-246 BCE), seventy two elders of Israel translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek in seventy-two days in Alexandria in Egypt. Most scholars accept the substance of the legend that the earliest Greek versions of the Bible were created in the third century in Egypt for Greek speaking Jews. The earliest manuscripts of the Septuagint are from Qumran and are dated to the second century BCE. The relationship between the Greek and Hebrew textual traditions was complicated and fluid, with frequent revision of the Greek to bring it closer to the Hebrew as the latter developed.

Located approximately nine miles (13 km) south of Jericho Qumran, or more accurately Khirbit Qumran, is the contemporary Arabic name of the site at the northeast corner of the Dead Sea. Nearby is the location where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered early in 1947. Later archeological digs have uncovered evidence that the site was in use from the middle of the second century BCE up until the First Jewish Revolt (66-7 CE). The constructions found there are commonly accepted that it was built by the Essenes and house publicly shared spaces. Some examples include cisterns fed by aqueducts, kitchens, a dining hall, and a large room enclosing long rectangular tables at which some imagine the scrolls were composed.

The Septuagint includes a number of writings not found in the traditional Hebrew canon, some translations are from Hebrew or Aramaic originals and others are composed in Greek. These became the Apocrypha and the New Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible notes in its preface to the reader that, "For the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books of the Old Testament the Committee has made use of a number of texts. For most of these books the basic Greek text from which the present translation was made is the edition on the Septuagint prepared by Alfred Rahlfs and published by the Wuttemberg Bible Society (Stuttgart, 1935)." It goes on to further note that some books, like Tobit have followed the form of the Greek text found in codex Sinaiticus "supported as it is by the evidence from Qumran." In 1957 a translation of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical collection was published in the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible. In 1977 it was issued in an expanded edition and received by Eastern Orthodox communions. Since then the RSV has "gained the distinction of being officially authorized for use by all major Christian churches: Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox." The Apocrypha accepted by some Christian churches as canonical but not part of the Bible for Jews and Protestants.

The Apocrypha is accepted by some Christian churches as canonical but not part of the Bible for Jews and Protestants. It is still openly studied and every scholarly effort is made to determine its accuracy as new information is gleaned from the origins of the texts. "The Septuagint was the primary form of the Bible for the Hellenized Jewish communities," adds Professor Coogan, "and as a result the text that was used by the majority of the early Christians. When the Bible is quoted in the New Testament, " concludes Coogan, "is it almost always from the Septuagint version, which elevated its status for Christian theologians. "

Sources:

The Holy Bible with the Apocrypha, New Revised Standard Version Oxford University Press, 1989.

Michael D. Coogan, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 636, p. 687, 1993.

Sep"tu*a*gint (?), n. [From L. septuaginta seventy.]

A Greek version of the Old Testament; -- so called because it was believed to be the work of seventy (or rather of seventy-two) translators.

⇒ The causes which produced it [the Septuagint], the number and names of the translators, the times at which different portions were translated, are all uncertain. The only point in which all agree is that Alexandria was the birthplace of the version. On one other point there is a near agreement, namely, as to time, that the version was made, or at least commenced, in the time of the early Ptolemies, in the first half of the third century b.c.

Dr. W. Smith (Bib. Dict.)

Septuagint chronology, the chronology founded upon the dates of the Septuagint, which makes 1500 years more from the creation to Abraham than the Hebrew Bible.

© Webster 1913.