despite the bible being one of the most widely read books in history, most readers of religious literature have no knowledge of the septuagint, the bible that was used almost universally by early christians, or in what it differs from the bible used as the basis for most modern translations.
Timothy Michael Law, author of When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible, explains what the Septuagint is and why it is so important to the study of Christianity.
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What is the Septuagint?
The name Septuagint refers to what is primarily a collection of ancient translations. Jewish scriptures were translated from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek from about the 3rd century BC. c. in Alexandria, a place booming with Hellenistic learning, until perhaps as late as the second century AD. c. in palestine originally the translation was only from the Hebrew Torah.
A legend was written in the 2nd century BC. c. to explain how the collection came about. in legend, seventy learned men from the twelve tribes of israel came to alexandria to translate, so later when this tradition was passed down, the name septuagint (seventy) was given to the entire collection of books that make up what Christians call the old testament.
The ancient world knew of translation activity, but there had never been a project of this size and certainly none for religious reasons on this scale. I have always thought it to be one of the most important cultural artifacts from ancient times, but it is often dismissed as interesting only to those who care about biblical studies. but there is also information in the Septuagint about the Greek language of the time, the socio-religious context of the Jewish diaspora, and the very science of translation.
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For me, the Septuagint’s creation story, what it tells us about the growth of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, and its role in the birth and early development of Christianity, is compelling.
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Not much is known about the Septuagint outside of academia. why do you think that is?
In the West, we have a cultural tradition dominated by Protestant and Catholic Christianity. An early Latin version of the Bible was made as a translation of the Septuagint, but in the late fourth century, Jerome began to argue that the Bible needed revision. he thought that the old testament should be translated from the hebrew to match the bible of the jews. Jerome’s New Translation, later called the Vulgate, was the first significant challenge to the Septuagint’s position as the “Bible of the Church”. As the Latin Church split from the Greek East over the next half millennium, Jerome’s Vulgate eventually became the Standard Bible. Protestant Reformers basically accepted Jerome’s position on the authority of the Hebrew Bible, and for that reason vernacular translations were made from the Hebrew. So for the last 1,500 years, the Septuagint has struggled to find a readership in the West, although it is still read in the Greek Orthodox Church. the same bias for the hebrew bible also affects scholars. because the reformation spread throughout europe and left its mark on the creation of the modern european (and later american) university, the hebrew bible has been studied and the septuagint seen as a mere “witness” to the hebrew text . it was thrown into the bible scholar’s toolbox to be used only when the Hebrew was difficult to understand.
when we think about biblical manuscripts, the dead sea scrolls have, of course, gained a lot of attention since their discovery in the 1940s. in a way, the septuagint benefited of the rolls.
The Septuagint is commonly treated only as a translation of the known Hebrew Biblical text, and in some places it is very bad! But discoveries in the Judean desert fueled interest in the Septuagint. Until then, the texts of the Hebrew Bible that were studied were the medieval editions. The Dead Sea Scrolls revealed for the first time many biblical texts that were a millennium older than the medieval editions. most spectacularly, these manuscripts showed significant divergences from the standard medieval text in some well-known biblical books.
the scrolls showed that some books of the Hebrew Bible were still being edited, supplemented, reduced, etc., well into the common era. but if you were reading the septuagint before the 1940s, you knew that it was produced in the hellenistic period, so you could still have concluded, even without the help of the actual hebrew manuscripts, that the bible was constantly changing at this time based on the way these books appear in Greek in those alternate forms.
Imagine if you knew Russian, and when you were reading Dostoevsky in English, you suddenly discovered that there was an entire passage lengthy, or one that was significantly abbreviated. You have two options: either you conclude that the translator exercised a tremendous, even scandalous, amount of freedom, or you believe that the English translator had a different manuscript than any other you would have known existed in Russian.
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Those were the two basic options for understanding the Septuagint, and most scholars chose the first route. But when the Dead Sea Scrolls showed these divergent text forms in Hebrew, and when some of them were rendered word for word in the Septuagint translation, the calculus suddenly changed. Now that we had the Dead Sea Scrolls, we knew that the Septuagint translators in many of these cases were translating actual biblical texts.
Scholars of the Septuagint are as grateful as anyone for the discovery of the scrolls. Biblical texts from the Judean desert now confirm what those familiar with the Septuagint already suspected: divergences in some biblical books open a window into the history of the early formation of the Bible.
What role did the Septuagint play in the formation of Christianity?
Beginning with the New Testament itself, we see the influence of the Septuagint because these writers of what would become Christian scripture are writing in Greek. it is natural for them to turn to the Jewish Greek scriptures, but in some cases we can see how the Septuagint provided the perfect phrase, different from the same passage in Hebrew, for them. The Apostle Paul, for example, constructs much of his magnum opus, the Book of Romans, with quotations from the Septuagint, not the Hebrew Bible.
Most of the early Christian movement was a Greek-speaking movement, so they also adopted the Greek Jewish scriptures as their new “old testament.” the early development of theological, homiletical, and liturgical language is due almost exclusively to the Septuagint. More needs to be done in this area, but it is clear that the Septuagint lies at the foundation of early Christianity.
timothy michael law is editor and editor-in-chief of the marginalia book review. he is the author of when god spoke greek: the septuagint and the making of the christian bible and tweet @tmichaellaw.
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