Septuagint

The Septuagint (abbreviated LXX) is the oldest known Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, made in stages in Ptolemaic Egypt from roughly the third to the first century BC.¹ Its name recalls a tradition that seventy-two Jewish elders produced it in seventy-two days for the royal library at Alexandria.² Because Greek-speaking Jews, and after them the early church, read the Old Testament chiefly in this version, its vocabulary shaped the language of the New Testament, and its wording supplies most of the New Testament’s direct Old Testament quotations.³

Historical Development

Origin in Ptolemaic Alexandria

The traditional account of the Septuagint’s origin appears first, briefly, in a fragment of Aristobulus, then at length in a document purporting to be a letter from Aristeas, a courtier of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, king of Egypt from 285 to 247 BC.² By this account, Ptolemy’s librarian Demetrius Phalereus urged the king to obtain a Greek copy of the Jewish law for the library at Alexandria; Ptolemy freed the Jewish captives in his kingdom and asked Eleazar, the high priest in Jerusalem, for six elders from each of the twelve tribes. Eleazar sent seventy-two, who completed the translation on the island of Pharos in seventy-two days.² A later embellishment held that the translators worked in separate cells yet produced identical versions word for word, a detail Barrows judges was added, like the rest of the legend, “to exalt its character in the apprehension of the people, and to gain for it an authority equal to that of the inspired original.”⁴

The letter ascribed to Aristeas is “now generally admitted to be spurious,” bearing marks of Jewish rather than the claimed heathen authorship, but Barrows does not dismiss the whole account as fable: the version was probably made under Ptolemy’s patronage, by Jews native to Egypt for whom Greek, not Hebrew, was the vernacular.⁵ Only the Pentateuch was likely translated at first; the rest of the books followed over the next two centuries, complete by the time the Greek translator of Sirach could refer to “the law itself and the prophets, and the rest of the books” as already available in Greek.⁶

Translation quality and later Greek versions

The Septuagint’s quality varies markedly from book to book. Jerome himself judged the Pentateuch to “agree more than the others with the Hebrew”; among the historical books, Samuel and Kings are the most faulty; the prophets are “in general poor, especially that of Isaiah”; Daniel’s rendering was so unreliable that Christians substituted Theodotion’s later version for it; and among the poetical books, Proverbs fares best.⁷ Barrows’s summary judgment is that the Septuagint “cannot for a moment enter into competition with the Hebrew original,” yet remains “indispensable” to Old Testament scholarship as the oldest surviving version and a witness to a Hebrew text older than the Masoretic text.⁸

As the church increasingly relied on the Septuagint, Jewish opposition to it hardened, and three rival Greek versions appeared in the second century AD: Aquila’s, prized by Jews as “the Hebrew verity” for its slavishly literal rendering of the Hebrew idiom; Theodotion’s, closely resembling the Septuagint and probably dependent on it; and Symmachus’s, aiming at sense rather than word-for-word literalism.⁹ To compare these versions with the Hebrew and with each other, Origen spent twenty-eight years assembling his Hexapla, a six-column text (the Hebrew, the Hebrew transliterated into Greek letters, Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion) running to nearly fifty volumes.¹⁰ The work was never copied in full and was apparently destroyed when Caesarea fell to the Saracens in AD 653; only fragments, collected from patristic citations, survive.¹⁰

Content and Canon

The Septuagint contains Greek versions of every book of the Hebrew canon together with a number of additional Jewish works, the Apocrypha (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, 1-2 Maccabees, additions to Esther and Daniel, and others), that the Alexandrian Jews who produced and used the Septuagint were, in Barrows’s phrase, “very loose in their ideas of the canon” about including.¹¹ The Jews of Palestine never received these books into their own canon.¹² Josephus gives the ground for their exclusion in Against Apion: from the reign of Artaxerxes onward “the exact succession of the prophets” had ceased, so nothing written afterward carried prophetic authority; neither Josephus nor Philo ever cites any of these books as divinely authoritative.¹¹

Because most church fathers in the first three centuries knew no Hebrew and received the Old Testament only through the Septuagint, the line between the Hebrew canon and the Apocrypha blurred in patristic practice, and some fathers quote the apocryphal books as “divine scripture.”¹¹ Jerome, who translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew directly, “understood perfectly the distinction between the canonical and the apocryphal books,” and confined the Apocrypha’s usefulness to the edification of readers rather than to establishing doctrine.¹¹ Their status stayed unsettled through the Council of Hippo (AD 393), which listed them among the “ecclesiastical books,” until the Council of Trent placed most of them in the canon under anathema, while, as Barrows puts it, “the Protestant churches… unanimously adhered to the Hebrew canon.”¹¹ Charles Hodge states the same conclusion from the standpoint of systematic theology: the Apocrypha is excluded because its books “were not written in Hebrew and were not included in the canon of the Jews. They were, therefore, not recognized by Christ as the Word of God.”¹³

Objections and Responses

If the New Testament writers freely quote the Septuagint even where it departs from the Hebrew, does that undermine the inerrancy of the Old Testament they are quoting? A. A. Hodge describes the New Testament’s actual quotation practice: “In a majority of instances the New Testament writers quote those of the Old Testament with perfect verbal accuracy. Sometimes they quote the Septuagint version, when it conforms to the Hebrew; at others they substitute a new version; and at other times again they adhere to the Septuagint, when it differs from the Hebrew.”¹⁴ A smaller remaining class of quotations is free, adapting the sense of the original passage rather than reproducing its wording.¹⁴ Rationalist critics argued from this last class that if the Old Testament’s own wording (its ipsissima verba) were infallible, an infallible New Testament writer would have had to transfer it unchanged, so free quotation puts the inspiration of one writer or the other in question.¹⁵ Hodge answers that a human author may freely reword his own earlier statements to suit a new purpose without falsifying either version of what he said, and that “the same Spirit that rendered the Old Testament writers infallible in writing only pure truth, in the very form that suited his purpose then, has rendered the New Testament writers infallible in so using the old materials, that… they teach only the truth… with divine authority.”¹⁶

Related Doctrines

References

Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 16, “Ancient Versions of the Old Testament,” 199. ↩
Barrows, 199-200. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Barrows, 202-203. ↩
Barrows, 200. ↩
Barrows, 200-201. ↩
Barrows, 201. ↩
Barrows, 201-202. ↩
Barrows, 202. ↩
Barrows, 204-205. ↩
Barrows, 205-206. ↩ ↩²
Barrows, appendix to Part II, “The Apocryphal Books of the Old Testament,” 350-52. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Barrows, chap. 15, “Formation and History of the Hebrew Canon,” 198. ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. 6, “The Protestant Rule of Faith.” ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 4, “The Inspiration of the Bible,” 74. ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 74-75. ↩
Hodge, 75. ↩