The Septuagint: 7 facts about the Greek Old Testament

The name Septuagint, “the seventy”, comes from the Letter of Aristeas, which tells how seventy-two Jewish elders were brought to Alexandria by King Ptolemy II and translated the Law in seventy-two days. Later Jewish and Christian writers embellished the story, so that each translator worked alone and all produced identical versions.^[1] Scholars treat the letter as legend. What it preserves is the memory that the five books of Moses عليه السلام were translated in Alexandria in the third century BCE.

The rest of the Hebrew Bible was translated over the following two centuries or more, by different hands and with different methods. Some books are rendered word for word, others freely. The grandson of Jesus ben Sira, who translated his grandfather’s book into Greek about 132 BCE, warned his readers in a prologue that “what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have the same force when translated into another language”, and added: “Not only this book, but even the Law itself, the Prophecies and the rest of the books differ not a little when read in the original.”^[2]

So the oldest witness to the Septuagint, written by a Jew who used it, says that it differs from the Hebrew. The claim that it reproduces the Hebrew exactly is contradicted by the people who made it.

The Septuagint as Christians received it includes books that are not in the Hebrew Bible: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon عليه السلام, Sirach, Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. Many manuscripts also contain 1 Esdras, 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and a Psalm 151.^[3] The great fourth- and fifth-century codices of the Greek Bible include several of these books among the others, with no mark to set them apart.

This is why Christian Bibles still differ in their contents. The Catholic Church defined these books as scripture at the Council of Trent in 1546, and the Orthodox churches accept them and some others. Protestant churches, following the Hebrew canon, call them the Apocrypha. Luther placed them in a separate section of his 1534 Bible as books “not held equal to holy scripture, yet useful and good to read”.^[4] Jerome, translating the Latin Vulgate around 400, had already argued for the “Hebrew truth” against the Greek, while translating some of the extra books at the request of bishops.

The boundary was wider still in some churches. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, one of the oldest in the world, includes the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees in its Old Testament. The Letter of Jude, which every church accepts, quotes a prophecy of “Enoch, the seventh from Adam” (Jude 14–15), and the words are found in 1 Enoch 1:9.^[5] A book quoted as prophecy inside the New Testament is scripture for one ancient church and outside the canon for the rest.

The argument that the Septuagint “contains exactly the same books” is therefore false on the evidence of every Catholic and Orthodox Bible. It also raises a question that Muslims sometimes put to Christians: which Old Testament is the one Christians claim was never changed, the shorter Hebrew canon or the longer Greek one?

Beyond the extra books, several books that both canons share have a different form in Greek.

Jeremiah in the Septuagint is about one-eighth shorter than the Hebrew, and its chapters are in a different order: the oracles against the nations, which come at the end of the Hebrew book (chapters 46 to 51), stand in the middle of the Greek, after 25:13. Fragments of Jeremiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the manuscript known as 4QJer-b, follow the shorter form in Hebrew.^[6] Most textual critics conclude that the Greek preserves an earlier Hebrew edition of the book, and that the longer edition in the Hebrew Bible today grew out of it.

The Greek Job is about one-sixth shorter than the Hebrew. Origen, the third-century Christian scholar, filled its gaps from later Greek versions and marked the additions with asterisks, and Jerome noted that some seven or eight hundred lines were missing from the old Greek.^[7] Daniel in Greek contains the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men in chapter 3, and the stories of Susanna and of Bel and the Dragon. Esther has six additional passages, 107 verses in all, including prayers by Mordecai and Esther. The Hebrew Esther never mentions God; the Greek Esther names Him more than fifty times.^[8]

These are not variant spellings. They are differences of whole chapters and of the theological character of a book.

The Septuagint also differs on figures that the Bible presents as history.

In the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, the Greek gives most of the patriarchs a hundred years more before the birth of the son in the line. The result adds about 1,500 years to the span from creation to Abraham عليه السلام. In some Greek manuscripts, Methuselah lives fourteen years after the flood, although he was not in the ark.^[9] Early Christian chronographers who used the Greek, such as Julius Africanus and Eusebius, dated creation to about 5500 BCE, while the Hebrew figures used by later Jewish and Protestant writers give about 4000 BCE.

Exodus 12:40 says in the Hebrew that Israel lived in Egypt for 430 years. The Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch say that the 430 years were spent “in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan”, which halves the time in Egypt. Paul’s reckoning in Galatians 3:17, of 430 years from the promise to Abraham to the Law, agrees with the Greek.^[10] In 1 Samuel 17:4, Goliath is “six cubits and a span” tall in the Hebrew, about three metres; the Septuagint and the oldest Hebrew manuscript of Samuel from Qumran, 4QSam-a, make him “four cubits and a span”, about two metres.^[11]

The writers of the New Testament, writing in Greek, usually quoted the Old Testament from the Septuagint. Where the Greek differs from the Hebrew, they sometimes followed the Greek, and the difference carries weight in their argument.

Hebrews 10:5 quotes Psalm 40:6 as “a body you have prepared for me”, and applies it to the incarnation of Christ. The Hebrew of the psalm reads “ears you have dug for me”. Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 with the Greek word parthenos, virgin; the Hebrew has almah, a young woman, and Jewish critics from the second century onward pointed out the difference. Acts 7:14 has Stephen say that Jacob’s family that went down to Egypt numbered seventy-five; the Hebrew of Genesis 46:27 says seventy, and the Septuagint seventy-five. A Hebrew manuscript of Exodus from Qumran, 4QExod-b, also reads seventy-five at Exodus 1:5, so the larger figure also existed in Hebrew, in a reading that the later standard text did not keep. At the council of Jerusalem in Acts 15:16–17, James quotes Amos 9:11–12 to justify the mission to the Gentiles: “that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord”. The Hebrew of Amos reads “that they may possess the remnant of Edom”.^[12]

A Christian may reply that the apostles were free to quote the version their readers knew. The point stands that the New Testament itself depends, in places, on a text of the Old Testament that the Hebrew Bible does not contain. The two cannot both be “exactly the same”.

For the first four centuries most churches read the Septuagint as their Old Testament, and many Fathers held that it was itself inspired. Augustine, writing The City of God in the early fifth century, faced the problem that the Hebrew and the Greek disagreed. His answer was that the same Spirit who spoke through the prophets also spoke through the seventy translators, so that where the Greek differs from the Hebrew, both may be read as the word of God, the one saying what the other does not.^[13]

Jerome disagreed. When he translated the Old Testament into Latin directly from the Hebrew, Augustine wrote to warn him of the trouble it would cause, and gave an example. A bishop in the North African town of Oea had his congregation read Jerome’s new version of Jonah 4:6, where the plant that shaded the prophet was called an ivy instead of the familiar gourd. The people raised an uproar, the bishop consulted the local Jews about the Hebrew word, and to keep his congregation he had to restore the old reading.^[14] Jerome replied that he had translated what the Hebrew said.

The episode shows what was at stake. A church that took the Greek to be inspired and a scholar who took the Hebrew to be the original were reading two different texts, and both were Christian. The modern claim that the Greek and Hebrew are the same would have puzzled both of them, since each knew how far the versions differed and argued about which to follow.

Once Christians had adopted the Septuagint, Jews in the second century produced new Greek translations closer to the Hebrew, by Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. Christians suspected that these were made to remove the proofs they drew from the old version.^[15]

Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho written around 160, went further. He accused the Jewish teachers of having cut passages out of the scriptures because they spoke of Christ. One of his examples is Psalm 96:10, which he quotes as “the Lord has reigned from the tree”; the words “from the tree” are in no Hebrew manuscript and in almost no Greek one. Another is a passage he attributes to Jeremiah about the Lord remembering the dead of Israel and going down to preach to them, which no surviving text of Jeremiah contains.^[16] Trypho, the Jew in the dialogue, answers that he does not believe the passages were ever there.

The charge that scripture had been tampered with was therefore made inside the biblical tradition, by a Christian against Jews, four and a half centuries before the Quran. The history of the Septuagint shows that the text of the Old Testament existed in more than one form in the time of Jesus, that the churches still disagree about its contents, and that the question of alteration was debated from the start.