The Septuagint

By the third century BC there were more Jews in Egypt who spoke Greek than spoke Hebrew, and they needed their scriptures in the language they used. The translation they made is called the Septuagint, from the Latin septuaginta, seventy, and is usually abbreviated with the Roman numerals LXX. The name comes from a legend told in a document called the Letter of Aristeas, probably written in the second century BC: that seventy-two Jewish elders, six from each tribe, translated the law of Moses in Alexandria for the library of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who reigned from 285 to 246 BC, and finished in seventy-two days. Scholars regard the details of the letter as legendary, but its central claim is widely accepted: the five books of Moses were translated into Greek in Alexandria in the third century BC.

The rest of the Hebrew Bible followed over the next two centuries or so, translated by different people with different methods. Some books are rendered almost word for word, so literally that the Greek reads awkwardly. Others are free: the Old Greek of Job is about a sixth shorter than the Hebrew, Proverbs has material not in the Hebrew and lacks some that is, and the Old Greek of Jeremiah is roughly an eighth shorter and arranges some chapters differently, as the previous lesson noted. Strictly, then, the Septuagint is not one translation but a collection of translations, and scholars often call the original translation of each book the Old Greek, to distinguish it from later revisions.

This was the Old Testament of the earliest church outside Palestine, and of the New Testament writers more often than not. Most of the New Testament's Old Testament quotations stand closer to the Septuagint than to the Hebrew as we have it, though some agree with the Hebrew against the Greek and some agree with neither. The Koine Greek lesson Why Learn Any Greek, in its section on the Greek Bible before the New Testament, introduced the Septuagint as the background to New Testament vocabulary. This lesson looks at it from the Hebrew side: what it tells you about the Hebrew text, and what to do when the apostles quote the Greek where it differs from the Hebrew.

In the second century AD, as Christians used the Septuagint in arguments with Jewish teachers, new Jewish Greek translations appeared, closer to the Hebrew, made by Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. Around the middle of the third century the Christian scholar Origen set the Hebrew, a Greek transliteration, and four Greek versions side by side in six columns, a vast work called the Hexapla. Later, Jerome translated the Old Testament for the Latin church directly from the Hebrew, appealing to what he called the Hebrew truth. Augustine worried about this, and in The City of God (book 18) argued that both the Hebrew and the Septuagint were given by the Spirit, so that where they differ, both may be heeded. The church's two great traditions on this question go back that far.

A translation shows you the text its translators were reading. Where the Septuagint differs from the Masoretic Text, there are three possibilities. The translator may have had a different Hebrew text in front of him. He may have read the same consonants differently, since he had no vowel points. Or he may have interpreted, paraphrased or made a mistake. Deciding which of these happened is a large part of Old Testament textual criticism, and it is often hard.

The Dead Sea Scrolls made the first possibility far more credible than it had been. At Deuteronomy 32:8, as the previous lesson showed, the Septuagint's angels of God reflects a Hebrew reading, sons of God, now found in a scroll from Cave 4. At Deuteronomy 32:43 the BSB includes a line the Masoretic Text lacks, 'let all God's angels worship Him', found in a Cave 4 scroll and the Septuagint, and quoted in Hebrews 1:6. In such places the Greek translators were faithfully rendering a Hebrew text that the Masoretic tradition does not preserve.

The second possibility, rereading the consonants, has a famous New Testament case. In Amos 9:12 the Masoretic Text promises that Israel will possess the remnant of Edom. When James quotes the passage at the council in Jerusalem, in the Greek form, it becomes 'so that the remnant of men may seek the Lord' (Acts 15:17). The difference is explained by two small readings of very similar Hebrew. אֱדוֹם (edom, Edom) and אָדָם (adam, humankind) have the same consonants apart from a vowel letter, and the Hebrew verb for possess, יָרַשׁ (yarash), looks much like the verb for seek, דָּרַשׁ (darash), with one letter different. The Septuagint read humankind and seek. James's point, that the nations would come to the God of Israel, stands on the whole passage, which in both forms speaks of all the nations that bear God's name.

You saw rereading in the last lesson too. At Isaiah 53:11 the Septuagint has God showing the Servant light, a causative sense, where the scrolls' Hebrew has the Servant seeing light. The same consonants could be read either way before vowels were written.

The third possibility is real as well. Translators interpret. When they render a Hebrew metaphor with a plainer Greek phrase, or soften a bold picture of God, the difference tells you about the translator, not about his Hebrew text. A student should not assume that every difference in the Septuagint is a better Hebrew text waiting to be recovered, any more than he should assume every difference is a mistake.

Here is the clause in the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC), the Hebrew text behind your interlinear, in what the Hebrew Bible numbers as Psalm 40:7: אָזְנַיִם כָּרִיתָ לִּי (oznayim karita li). אָזְנַיִם (oznayim) is the dual of אֹזֶן (ozen, ear), the form Hebrew uses for things that come in pairs: ears. כָּרִיתָ (karita) is Qal perfect second masculine singular of כָּרָה (karah), whose basic meaning is to dig, as one digs a pit or a well. Literally: ears you have dug for me. The BSB renders the sense, 'my ears You have opened.'

What does it mean? Most interpreters take it as a picture of an opened, attentive ear: God has hollowed out the passage so that the psalmist hears and obeys, close to Isaiah 50:5, 'The Lord GOD has opened My ears.' Some have connected it with the ear of the servant in Exodus 21:6, pierced with an awl as a sign of lifelong service, though the verb there is different. Either way, the point of the line is plain. God did not finally want the sacrifices; he wanted a servant who listens and does his will, which is what Psalm 40:8 goes on to say: 'I delight to do Your will, O my God.'

Now the Greek. Hebrews 10:5 quotes the line as σῶμα δὲ κατηρτίσω μοι (soma de katertiso moi, but a body you prepared for me). Here is the surprising part. The Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint are divided. The great early codices, Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus, read σῶμα (soma, body), as Hebrews does. But the modern critical editions of the Septuagint, Alfred Rahlfs's edition of 1935 and the Göttingen edition of the Psalms, print ὠτία (otia, ears), which matches the Hebrew, on the evidence chiefly of the Latin tradition, including the Gallican Psalter that Jerome revised from the Greek. That is why the Septuagint text on Blue Letter Bible, in the inquiry, read ears. Brenton's English translation of the Septuagint, published in 1844 and based mainly on Vaticanus, reads: 'Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not; but a body hast thou prepared me.'

A word about numbering, because it will save you confusion on your phone. The Hebrew Bible counts a psalm's heading as verse 1 (and a long heading as verses 1 and 2), so in psalms with a heading the English verse numbers are usually one or two lower than the Hebrew: the English Psalm 40:6 is Psalm 40:7 in the WLC. The Septuagint also numbers the psalms themselves differently. It joins Psalms 9 and 10 into one, so from there to Psalm 147 its numbers usually run one lower than the English, with further splits and joins around Psalms 114 to 116 and 147. The English Psalm 40 is Psalm 39 in the Septuagint. So one line of scripture is Psalm 40:6 in the BSB, Psalm 40:7 in the WLC and Psalm 39:7 in the Septuagint, and all three are right.

So there are two questions, and it helps to keep them apart. The first is textual: what did the Old Greek translator of Psalm 40 write, ears or body? The second is theological: how should a Christian understand the writer to the Hebrews quoting a wording that differs from the Hebrew psalm?

The first explanation is that body arose by accident in the copying of the Greek, before Hebrews was written. Written in capital letters without spaces, the end of the previous word and the word ears, ΗΘΕΛΗΣΑΣΩΤΙΑ, could be misread as ΗΘΕΛΗΣΑΣΣΩΜΑ, if the final sigma of the verb was written twice and the letters ΤΙ were taken for Μ. Many scholars have found this a neat and sufficient account: the writer to the Hebrews quoted the Greek Bible he had, which already read body. Its strength is that it explains why the major Greek codices agree with Hebrews and why a minority of witnesses preserve ears. Its weakness is that the misreading requires two slips at once, which some think too convenient.

The second explanation is that the Greek translator himself wrote body, deliberately, as an interpretation. On this view he took the Hebrew's ears as a part standing for the whole, the obedient person, and rendered it with a word for the whole: you prepared a body for me, that is, you made me a servant fit to do your will. The ears reading in the Latin witnesses would then be a later correction toward the Hebrew. Its strength is that it treats the agreement of the oldest Greek codices seriously and does not need a scribal accident. Its weakness is that the Septuagint of the Psalms is usually quite literal, so a free rendering here would be unusual.

The third explanation is that the writer to the Hebrews shaped the wording himself, from a Greek text that read ears, and that the reading body later spread into the Septuagint manuscripts from Hebrews, through Christian copyists. Rahlfs's choice of ears in his edition reflects the judgment that body is secondary in the Greek Psalter. Karen Jobes argued, in an article in Trinity Journal in 1992, that the writer altered the wording of the psalm with deliberate rhetorical skill, creating sound patterns in the Greek, and that he did so as an interpreter who saw the psalm's meaning fulfilled in Christ. Its strength is that it accounts for the other small changes Hebrews makes, such as 'You took no delight' where the psalm has 'You did not require'. Its weakness, for some readers, is that it raises a question about how freely an apostolic writer may handle the words of scripture.

On the theological question, the answers are fewer than the explanations, and they overlap. Those who hold the first or second explanation say that the writer used the Bible of his readers, as preachers do, and that the Spirit who inspired him ensured that what he drew from it is true. Those who hold the third say the same of the writer's own interpretation. All three agree on what Hebrews is claiming. The psalm says God wanted a servant who would do his will rather than animal sacrifices; Hebrews says that the Son came into the world as that servant, and did God's will by offering, not a sacrifice of animals, but himself, in a real human body, once for all (10:10). The opened ears of the psalm and the prepared body of Hebrews are two pictures of one obedience, and the argument of Hebrews 10 does not depend on denying that the Hebrew says ears.

What is settled, and what is not? Settled: the Masoretic Text reads ears, the great Greek codices read body, and the critical editions print ears. Not settled: which reading the original Greek translator wrote, and how far the writer to the Hebrews was quoting or shaping. A student should be able to explain all three explanations without telling his hearers which one is obviously right, because it is not obvious.

Behind this one verse stands a larger question on which Christians have long differed, and a pastor will meet both sides.

The Protestant churches, following Jerome's appeal to the Hebrew truth, have taken the Hebrew text as the Old Testament to be translated, consulting the Septuagint as a witness where the Hebrew seems damaged. The case for this is strong. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, with some Aramaic; a translation cannot have more authority than what it translates; and the Masoretic consonants, as the scrolls showed, are ancient and carefully kept.

The Eastern Orthodox churches, by contrast, have kept the Septuagint as their Old Testament, and read it in worship. The case for this is also strong, and it is not only a matter of custom. The Septuagint was the Bible of the apostles' mission; the New Testament quotes it more often than any other form of the Old Testament; it sometimes preserves a Hebrew text older than the Masoretic one, as the scrolls have confirmed; and it was the Old Testament of the church fathers for centuries, as Augustine's argument shows. To the Orthodox, it is strange to treat as secondary the very form of scripture the apostles chose to quote.

Most modern translations, including the BSB, take a path that borrows from both: the Masoretic Text as the base, with the Septuagint and the scrolls adopted in particular places, and footnotes to say so. That is a sound practice, and it is what the footnotes you have been reading record. But it is a decision, and you should know it is one.

Notice also what the Septuagint question does not threaten. The places where the New Testament quotes the Greek against the Hebrew are not many, and in each the apostolic point stands on the meaning of the passage, not on a disputed word alone. The Koine Greek track's lesson Weighing a Translation Yourself gave a method for testing an English rendering against the Greek. The same habit applies here: find the difference, name its kind, give each explanation its strength, and say what remains true whichever is right.

Open your notebook to your capstone passage and start a new page headed Septuagint.

First, on your phone, find your passage in Brenton's English translation of the Septuagint, which is in the public domain and free on several sites, including ebible.org. Remember that the Septuagint numbers some books differently, especially most of the Psalms, which are usually one number lower than in English Bibles. Read your passage in Brenton beside the BSB and mark every place where the meaning differs, not only the wording.

Second, for each difference, open the verse in the Septuagint Greek on Blue Letter Bible and in the Hebrew interlinear, and decide which of the three possibilities in section 2 seems most likely: a different Hebrew text, the same consonants read differently, or the translator's own interpretation. If you cannot decide, write that down; it is an honest answer.

Third, check whether any New Testament writer quotes your passage. Blue Letter Bible's cross-references and the BSB footnotes on Bible Hub will help. If it is quoted, write the New Testament wording beside the Hebrew and the Greek and note which it stands closer to.

Finally, choose the most important difference you found and write three sentences about it: what the Hebrew says, what the Greek says, and what you would say to your church about the difference, using the habit at the end of section 5. If your passage has no difference that matters, write that down too. You will have learned that the oldest translation of your passage agrees with the Hebrew, which is worth knowing before you preach it.