What is the Septuagint?

This is a tricky one, but I think a fun one. Sometime in the third century BCE, someone decided that the Hebrew scriptures, at least the texts that ultimately became scripture and some others, should be translated into Greek. The legend goes that they were translated for the library of Alexandria at the behest of the Ptolemaic king of Egypt. He wanted a copy of every book in the world for his library. That, of course, would include the Hebrew scriptures of the Jewish community in Alexandria. For them to be understandable to the contemporary audience, they need to be translated into Greek. Thus, experts would be needed to translate the Hebrew texts into Greek. The legend continues that 70 (actually 72, i.e., six from each of the twelve “tribes of Israel”) men would translate the scriptures. Christian recensions of this legend recount that the 72 men translated for 72 days and – miraculously – all produced an identical Greek translation of the Hebrew text. The number 70 (in Greek) became the name for this translation: the Septuagint. (Cf. the most accurate adjective for all of the major-party candidates for president of the USA in the 2020 election: Septuagenarian.)

Obviously, not every element in this story can be regarded as historical. Additionally, not every element of the story is clearly defined. For example, it seems improbable that the whole of the scriptures was translated at once. It even seems unlikely that the first translation included the whole of the Torah, called “Pentateuch” in Greek, i.e., the first five books of the Bible, traditionally called the books of Moses. So, is there anything in the legend that is believable or trustworthy?

Linguistic analysis of the oldest (reconstructed) translations suggests that Egypt from about the third century BCE seems a likely historical circumstance for the beginning of the translation. However, the process of translating the Hebrew scriptures was ongoing and certainly not undertaken at only one time. It continued for centuries and even included revisions of older translations. It is questionable whether the translation of the Hebrew scriptures was initiated at the monarch’s behest. The historical circumstances permit it, at least. Perhaps it was initiated because of the construction of the library of Alexandria, making the monarch at least indirectly responsible. Alexandria was home to a large Jewish community at the time, so it seems likely that they might have initiated it in accord with the Zeitgeist. Another matter remains unclear: namely what the first translated text was, of what it consisted. That still remains a problem. Likely candidates are Genesis and Deuteronomy. And that brings us to another problem, to what does the term “Septuagint” refer?

The term’s original referent was to the initial translation of the Torah, i.e., the Pentateuch. Over time, the term lost some of its specificity and referred to the Greek translation of the whole of the Hebrew scriptures. Most use the term today to cover basically everything biblical in Greek that isn’t the New Testament. Due to the loss of specificity and clarity, scholars in the field have since begun to distinguish the terms they use. “Septuagint” can still basically refer to anything Greek and biblical that is not the New Testament. When referring to the original translation of a specific text or book, they now prefer the term “Old Greek”. This is necessary since some Greek translations, maybe all of them, have been revised and some, probably all, have been corrupted over the course of their transmission.

The corruption is easy to explain: when people copy texts, errors creep in. Texts are misread. Handwriting becomes illegible and difficult to read and copy. Copyist’s eyes skip over words and lines. Words get copied twice and so on.

More complicated are the revisions of the text. This occurs in limited contexts, on the one hand. That is, some superficial conscientious changes creep in to the text. Several reasons for this are readily recognizable: replacing one word with a more understandable or contemporary word, removing something that is ideological problematic (at least from the translator’s or editor’s perspective), avoiding difficulty in a text, revising towards internal or external consistency within a body of works, and so on. The Old Greek, as far is it has been reconstructed to date, has many such revisions throughout its text. (One should not overstate this, though; taken on a whole probably 98% of the Old Greek’s text reflects a Hebrew text consistent with the Masoretic Text, at least in books that do not have markedly distinct Greek versions like Exodus, Samuel, Kings, and Jeremiah.)

On the other hand, several of these revisions, present even essentially new translations of the Hebrew into Greek. Such broad revisions are historically documented with distinct monikers even from Antiquity. One such larger school of revision was only identified in Modernity. Ironically, it is probably the oldest revision that we now recognize. Some of these revisions occurred within Jewish circles, while others were undertaking by Christians. To the terminology: in general, scholars refer to these larger, distinct revisions as “recensions” and identify most of them with the names of specific individuals with whom they have historically been associated. Here’s a graphic that I made to describe the relationship of these various recensions to the Old Greek, to the Hebrew, and to each other for one of the more complicated cases in the Bible’s textual history: Samuel and Kings.

This graphic reflects a few different points. The black line along the top represents the development of the Hebrew parent text with the boxes representing distinct phases or versions of that text. The red material all reflects Greek translations or revisions of the Greek text from the first Greek translation of the Hebrew (i.e., “the Old Greek”). The dotted red lines reflect postulated influence or development from one Greek version to another. The distance between the red and black lines represents the proximity of the versions to one another. That is, the closer a red version is to the black line, the more closely it reflects its Hebrew parent text. For example, generally, the Old Greek of Kings seems to be good translation Greek, that is, Greek that is obviously a translation and not a compositional Greek. It generally follows the strictures of good Greek grammar and would have been cogent for native Greek speakers, if somewhat curious in its phrasing and syntax. The kaige elements of Kings are much closer to the Hebrew text and often reflect elements of the Hebrew that are superfluous or even damaging to the Greek. An example will hopefully suffice: Hebrew has two words for the first-person singular pronoun “I”, אנכי and אני. These two terms, one longer than the other by one consonant/syllable, are semantically identical. They bear no distinction on the understanding of a text. However, the kaige translator(s) distinguished between these two terms in Greek, translating the short form with ἐγώ (“I”) and the long form with ἐγώ ειμι (“I am”), even when it was followed by a finite verb and therefore incomprehensible in Greek. (That would be like the difference between “I go” and “I am go” in English; the first makes sense, the second does not.)

But why is all of this in a discussion about the Septuagint? Well, with time, the term “Septuagint” changed from referring to the Greek translation of the Torah (i.e., “the Pentateuch”), to the Greek translation of each book in the Hebrew canon, to basically everything biblical in Greek, but not the New Testament (which is, of course, also in Greek), including all of the different versions and recensions of the Greek text. What is more, these versions were known, at least some of them, in Antiquity and were recognized as distinct. Origen collected and collated different versions in a monumental text-critical project called the “Hexapla”. There, he transmitted no fewer than four Greek versions of the Bible: his version of the “Old Greek” (wherever he had gotten that from) and the recensions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. It also included a column with the Hebrew text as well as a column with a transliteration of the Hebrew with Greek letters. In the preface to his translation of Chronicles, Jerome mentions three Greek recensions known to him, including those of Origen and Lucian.

So, the recognition of different versions of the Bible is something that even the ancients were aware of. The idea that the biblical text never changed with time or was identical in every case is a modern idea, actually a reaction to Darwinism in its most vociferous forms and, therefore, quite recent – from the perspective of ancient Near Eastern literature. None of these various Greek versions is identical to another. And none of them is identical to the Hebrew text we know from the Medieval manuscripts of the Masoretic tradition or other known Hebrew manuscripts (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls). The moral of this particular post, however, remains within the confines of the Greek text: be careful when people tell you about “the Septuagint”. Find out what that means to them, to what they are referring. The odds are, they haven’t thought much about it. The Septuagint is an unknown quantity to us. The best that we have are some manuscripts that agree across the vast majority of their text (although not necessarily in the same way for every book in what became the canon), as well as academically recreated, modern postulates based on these manuscripts (in addition to principles the editors may in some instances apply to the text).

In conclusion then, the question at the outset: What is the Septuagint? Well, it depends on whom you ask. Sorry about that.

Recently, I have encountered a number of tweets about biblical transmission and some YouTube videos about “the Original Hebrew Bible” as contrasted to the Masoretic Text or the Septuagint. (I’m not going to link them, since they’re offensive, innaccurate, dangerous, or some combination of these and I don’t want them to get views etc.) I think that it is important for people to know where the Bible they read came from, particularly if they are going to regard it as “holy scripture” or similar. Since this is a field that I happen to know something about, I thought that I could write some notes here for anyone interested in an extremely simplified overview in the matters for laypeople (or experts who want to argue with me). This will have to be a series. The best place to start is with the Hebrew text that serves as the basis of most modern English translations (as well as those of many other modern languages) of the Bible.

Part 1: The Masoretic Text (Hebrew)

Most modern English translations of the Hebrew Bible (the Jewish Tanakh or the Christian Old Testament) are based primarily on a textual tradition known as “the Masoretic Text”. This refers not to an individual manuscript, as many seem to think, but rather to a substantial group of Hebrew manuscripts (with some small portions of the text in Aramaic) that attest essentially the same consonantal Hebrew/Aramaic text as well as paratextual elements. It is important to emphasize that “the Masoretic Text” refers not to a specific manuscript, but is an abbreviation for a larger group of more or less consistent manscripts. The paratextual elements consist of vowels, accents, and marginalia. These paratextual elements serve a few important purposes, but the most important (for my purposes, at lesat) is securing the text to prevent errors from creeping in when the text is copied from one manuscript to another. To this end, the paratextual elements note things like unusual grammatical forms or orthography, the number of verses in the book, where the midpoint of the book is, wordcounts, recommendations for correcting or understanding the text, etc. For this reason, the Masoretic textual tradition is remarkably stable and an excellent tradition for the basis of the translation and study of the primary religious text of the Jews and one portion of the Christians’ canon.

However, the Masoretic Text is not the oldest version of the Bible that we know (whether in Hebrew or another language). It is a product of the Middle Ages. That does not mean that the whole text stems from the Middle Ages. The consonantal text is older, but the stabilizing paratextual elements developed in the Middle Ages and appended and inserted into the text during that era. In fact, the oldest complete Manuscript of the whole Hebrew Bible is the so-called Leningrad Codex, Codex B19A of the State Library of St. Petersburg. It is from ca. 1008 CE (i.e., it is only about 1012 years old). Here is a picture from a facsimile edition, to give you some idea of what it looks like.

This particular folio presents the end of Exodus 14 and the opening of Exodus 15, which is written with special formatting. Normally the text appears in justified columns without so many gaps (the breaks here should resemble bricks in a wall). The primary text is clearly recognizable in the middle with the paratextual elements surrounding it in the margins and the accents and vowels above and below the consontal text.

An older complete manuscript exists, but parts of it have been destroyed or gone missing. This is the so-called Aleppo Codex. The beginning and end (and some other pieces throughout) are now lacking and their status unknown, presumably destroyed. This version is about a century older than the Leningrad Codex, though from a related family of texts. Here is a picture.

So, the oldest known complete biblical manuscripts in Hebrew are from the 10th-11th centuries of the Common Era, though there are older manuscripts of portions of the text (like the Torah or the Prophets). These oldest manuscripts attest a text from the Middle Ages. We can be pretty sure that the text has been remarkably stable since at least the fourth century CE, when Jerome translated the Bible into Latin from a consonantal Hebrew text almost identical to the text we know now. Nonetheless, we can say with some certainty that the consonantal text was pretty stable much earlier based on some finds from Qumran. Some of the biblical (and other) manuscripts from Qumran attest a consonantal text (these predate the existence of Masoretic vowels) similar or identical to the Masoretic text (though often with a distinct orthography), though other manuscripts demonstrate the textual fluidity of that period of transmission. That, however, merits a further blog post.

I hope this presents a clear, general overview of the Hebrew/Aramaic text that serves as the basis of modern translations of the Bible. It’s a younger text than many assume, but still a reliable text for much of what it records. Feel free to post comments or questions (though they will be moderated), particularly if there is something specific you want further information about.