Septuagint

The Septuagint (often abbreviated LXX, "the Seventy") is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, made for the large Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria beginning in the third century BCE. The legend preserved in the Letter of Aristeas holds that seventy-two Jewish elders produced the translation of the Torah in seventy-two days at the request of King Ptolemy for his library, hence the name, and later books were added over the following centuries. Its historical importance is enormous and runs in two directions.

For Judaism it made scripture available to Jews who no longer read Hebrew and shaped Hellenistic Jewish thought. For Christianity it became, in effect, the Old Testament of the early church: the New Testament writers quote scripture overwhelmingly in its Greek form, and the Eastern Orthodox churches still regard it as authoritative. Because it sometimes differs from the later standardised Hebrew (Masoretic) text and includes books (the deuterocanon/Apocrypha) not in the Jewish canon, it lies at the root of lasting differences between Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Bibles.

Because the Septuagint diverged from the Hebrew text as both were copied and recopied over centuries, restoring or even just describing what it originally said became a scholarly problem in its own right, and one of the earliest attempts to address it was also one of the most ambitious works of the ancient world. In the third century CE, the Christian scholar Origen compiled the Hexapla, a six column comparison setting the Hebrew text, a Greek transliteration of it, and several Greek translations, including the Septuagint, side by side, marking every place the Septuagint added to or omitted from the Hebrew column. Most of that enormous work is now lost, known only through fragments and quotations, but it shows the tension between the Greek and Hebrew texts was recognized and studied within a few centuries of the Septuagint's own composition rather than only in modern scholarship.

Modern textual criticism reopened the question with new evidence: the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the twentieth century, included Hebrew manuscripts of some books, notably Jeremiah and Samuel, that agree with the Septuagint's Greek against the later, standardized Masoretic Hebrew text, showing that in places the Greek translators were working from a genuinely different and sometimes older Hebrew original rather than simply mistranslating the text later Judaism settled on.