SEPTUAGINT
1. Origin, date and transmission. The Septuagint is a tr. of the OT into Gr., along with certain additional books, some tr. into Gr. from Heb. in common with the rest of the collection, some originally composed in Gr. It is called “Septuagint” (Lat. septuaginta, meaning seventy—hence the familiar abbreviation in Rom. numerals, LXX) because of a tradition that the VS was the work of seventy (though some say seventy-two) Jewish elders, in the reign of the monarch Ptolemy II Philadelphus at Alexandria (284-247 b.c.).
Alexandria (q.v.) was the home of a major colony of the Jewish Dispersion, and indeed was considered its metropolis for a Jewish minority seemed to have found a resting place in Egypt since the days of Jeremiah, or perhaps even since the days of Shishak’s invasion of Pal. in the 10th cent. b.c. With the foundation of the Gr. city by Alexander, after whom it was named, in 331 b.c., this group of the Dispersion became coherent and numerous, and occupied the whole eastern part of the great port. Their strength grew with the city, and Alexandria rapidly became one of the great urban and maritime centers of the Mediterranean world, cosmopolitan, rich, the home of a remarkable Silver Age of Gr. lit., a center of scholarship, where men of learning found fellowship in the famous “Museum”; in short, one of those places of intellectual mingling and cross-fertilization which produced the world of the NT. In that world E and W fused to lay the foundations of modern Europe.
It was in this spiritual and mental context that the Hel. Jew first became a phenomenon of culture. In Alexandria the Jew of the Diaspora, proud of his Heb. heritage, conscious of his role in civilization, but emancipated from the weakening nationalism, exclusivism, and narrowness of metropolitan Jewry, found himself in challenging confrontation with the lit. and philosophy of the Greeks. The Alexandrian Jew spoke Gr., for such was a condition of citizenship. A knowledge of the Gr. lang. was a prerequisite of trade, business, and social intercourse. The Jew of Alexandria, like any Jew of Tarsus, was truly the intellectual citizen of two worlds of culture; hence the urge to tr. the Heb. Scriptures into their other tongue.
Hebrew was becoming a less familiar medium of communication to the Jews of Alexandria, almost an archaism of the synagogue. Added to the desire to exalt the wisdom and history of their own race, this was motive enough to inspire the undertaking. It was inevitable that legends should grow up about the origins of an achievement so remarkable. There is in existence a letter called the letter of Aristeas to Philocrates, around which a considerable lit. has arisen. It was first published in Lat. in a.d. 1471, and in a Gr. text ninety years later. The literary criticism of this document need not concern us. The writer, however, stated that he was a courtier of Ptolemy Philadelphus, a Gr. who was interested in the antiquities of the Jews. He wrote of a journey he had made recently to Jerusalem, with a specific purpose.
Demetrius Phalerius, librarian of the vast and famous library of Alexandria, says Aristeas had put before the monarch a proposal to add to the collection a tr. of “the Jewish laws.” The cultured Ptolemy fell in with the proposal, and sent an embassy to Jerusalem with a letter to Eleazar the high priest, requesting that six elders from each of the twelve tribes should be sent to Alexandria to execute the suggested tr. The seventy-two (who are named) duly arrived with a copy of the law written in letters of gold on rolls of skins. At a banquet the king tested the scholarship of his Heb. visitors with difficult questions, and appeared to have been satisfied. The trs. were provided with a satisfactory retreat on the island of Pharos, and Demetrius, the librarian, as Aristeas’ letter puts it, “exhorted them to accomplish the work of translation, since they were well supplied with all that they could want. So they set to work, comparing their results, and making them agree. And whatever they agreed upon was suitably copied under the direction of Demetrius....In this way the transcription was completed in seventy-two days, as if that period had been pre-arranged.”
The Jewish members of the community were delighted with the rendering, and asked for a copy. They pronounced an appropriate curse on any who might dare to take from the VS or add thereto. The king was equally pleased, and the LXX, thus born under dual blessing, was set in the library. Philo, the Jewish scholar of Alexandria, and later the Flavian Rom. Jew, Josephus, repeated the story, the latter’s testimony confirming the fact that Aristeas’ letter was current in Pal. toward the end of the 1st cent. a.d. Philo’s reference, on the other hand, may represent an Alexandrian tradition independent of the Aristeas document. He mentioned an annual festival of celebration on Pharos, a custom surely based on a standing tradition, and not dependent upon such a work as Aristeas’ letter. The evidence of another Alexandrian Jew, one Aristobulus, might even take the evidence back to the middle of the 2nd cent. b.c., to within a cent. of the alleged events.
Stripped of formalized and pseudo-miraculous details, the story of the origin of the LXX, somewhere in the middle decades of the 3rd cent. b.c., and as a direct result of royal policy, is not in any way incredible. Alexandria was a sophisticated literary society, and librarianship was born there. Aristeas’ letter approximates the truth, as H. B. Swete abundantly demonstrates (Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 15ff.). The king was a bibliophile, ecumenical (he welcomed a Buddhist mission), a universal historian (the Gr. history of Egyp. institutions by Manetho was produced during his reign), and a shrewd enough politician to wish to conserve the good will of a large and dynamic section of his urban populace. The joy of the Alexandrian Jews at the appearance of the tr., added to this desire of the king to conciliate their good will, may, indeed, point to the real core of fact in the story. Greek, too, was a unifying force in a polyglot environment, and the Ptolemies inherited from Alexander himself some notion of internationalism. On the other hand, precarious though this argument may be, the Gr. of the LXX may be Egyp. rather than Palestinian in its linguistic coloring. In such case, the descent of the Jerusalem elders might be marked as a less reliable element in the story (Swete, op. cit., 20, 21). The alleged collation of results is patently untrue.
It is true that Aristeas’ letter refers specifically only to the Pentateuch, and that fact has been fastened upon by those who followed the now abandoned obsession to late-date, as far as possible, the books of the Bible. No responsible critic today would maintain that the OT Canon was not available for trs. by the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Concrete evidence for the presence of the books of the OT Canon in the Gr. VS is hardly to be expected, for it must be confessed that the VS did not make a wide impact upon Alexandrian lit. There are traces to be sure, some of them surprising (e.g., Mahaffy in his History of Greek Classical Literature, I.2.195 and Ram-say in his Cities of Saint Paul, 63-70), but the matter need not detain us. There is a shred of evidence from 132 b.c. that “the Law, the Prophets and the rest of the books” of the OT were current at the time (Swete, op. cit. p. 24), and some inconsiderable fragments of similar contemporary testimony exist, but the matter is largely of academic interest, and the supposition can hardly be denied that the LXX legend had the whole Heb. Canon in view.
From the 1st cent. of the Christian era, of course, evidence is abundant. Philo (30 b.c.a.d. 45) quotes most of the books of the canon, and the NT quotes all of the books except Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, and one or two minor prophets. As Philo says, the VS was received in Egypt with the same reverence accorded the original text. This was prob. true of the whole Hel. world, with the possible exception of Pal., seat of orthodox and metropolitan Jewry.
Fragments remain of later Gr. VSS, for when the LXX became an element in Judaeo-Christian controversy, it was inevitable that the discrepancies between the earlier text represented in the LXX, and the text which was currently used by later Jewry, should prompt attempts to provide Gr.-speaking Jews with a more reliable VS. The names of such scholars as Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus are associated with these surviving fragments. The history of such VSS, the scholarship which surrounded them, and their associated recensions, is an important ch. in patristic history, with ramifications embracing the Ethiopic, Arabic, Syriac, Gothic, Armenian, and Slavonic VSS of the Bible. The LXX itself exists in over 300 VSS, some of them coeval with the major ancient MSS of the NT with which they are associated. Printed VSS go back to the beginning of the 16th cent.
The survival of so solidly authenticated a Gr. text is a matter for considerable satisfaction, for Jerome’s Lat. Vul., rapidly accepted as the Bible of the ascendant Roman Church, was a blow to the survival of the Gr. VS. In Western Christendom, Lat. began to dominate Gr., and in the Middle Ages the knowledge of Gr. became as rare as the knowledge of Heb. It was the Renaissance, and the revival of Gr. learning, with the fortunate survival, over a millennium of eclipse, of numerous and adequate MSS in the sequestered security of monastic libraries, which revived interest in the Bible of the writers of the Early Church. (R. R. Ottley tells the story well in his Handbook to the Septuagint [1920]. His 3rd ch. traces the story from the Renaissance to the present cent.)
2. Evaluation of the Septuagint. The VS manifests considerable variety. The hands of separate trs. are to be detected, but dogmatism in such a sphere would be a highly hazardous exercise. The Pentateuch, in general, is a fair VS. In the historical books there is much uneven work, “tr. Greek,” and, in the case of 2 Kings, e.g., considerable evidence of inadequate Heb. scholarship. In 1 Kings, better though the Gr. itself undoubtedly is, the tr. is marred by pious interpolation, and paraphrases which reflect haste, ignorance, or carelessness, and sometimes all three. Perhaps amplification was more widely prevalent in contemporary Heb. scholarship than has been hitherto realized. Qumran texts might be quoted to support this view.
The Psalms represent a fair rendering of the MT, though the extent of revision and correction in a book principally used liturgically cannot, of course, be determined. Proverbs and Job, which could be the work of one tr., present a fair standard of Gr., but some odd variations of text. For example, one-sixth of the traditional Heb. VS of Job is missing, and must be supplied from Theod., in whose text the missing vv. are found. On the other hand, there is found an astonishing freedom in amplification in some passages. For example, here is 2:9, designed, as Swete puts it, “to heighten the effect, and at the same time to soften the harshness of the words uttered by Job’s wife” (p. 256, op. cit.).
9. And much time having elapsed, his wife said to him, How long wilt thou persist saying, Behold I will wait yet a little longer, in hope and expectation of my deliverance? For behold the memorial of thee—those sons and daughters, whom I brought forth with pangs and sorrow, and for whom I toiled in vain, are vanished from the earth; and thou thyself sittest among the putrefaction of worms, all night long in the open air, while I am wandering about, or working for wages, from place to place and from house to house, wishing for the setting of the sun, that I may rest from the labours and sorrows I endure. Do but say something for the Lord and die.
10. Whereupon he looking stedfastly at her said, Like one of the women without understanding hast thou spoken? If we have received good things at the hand of the Lord, shall we not bear up under afflictions? In all these things which befell him, Job transgressed not with his lips against God. (Thomson’s translation.)
It would appear that, while the LXX trs. treated the Pentateuch with traditional reverence, as a part to be rendered mainly for use in the worship of the synagogue, they approached the prophets “with a diminished sense of responsibility” (Swete’s phrase), and such books as Job, Esther, and Daniel with a freedom accorded works of a national lit., rather than with the reverence accorded a sacred text. It is suggested that the tr. of Job was an Alexandrian Hellenist who had an eye on the general public, rather than the devout reader of the Heb. Bible; hence, both reduction and expansion as his primary object dictated.
In Esther, interpolation lifts the 107 vv. of the surviving Heb. text to 270 vv., in additions spread through the book in sections of length comparable with the present chs. In Proverbs, possibly the work of the Hel. Jew who tr. Job, expansions are possibly the doublet versions of revisers who were not satisfied with the rendering before them. The heavily Hebraized text of Ecclesiastes is so marred by such unidiomatic tr. that it may have been almost incomprehensible to monolingual Greeks. Ezekiel is not well done, while Jeremiah renders a Heb. text quite at variance with the traditional one. The tr. of Isaiah is a very free one, similarly at variance with the MT.
In short, the LXX, besides manifesting those faults of carelessness, weariness, and ignorance common enough in tr., shows also attempts to correct an existing text which may be well- or ill-founded, deliberate tampering with the story, and a quite unusual freedom in interpolation, improvisation, and modification. It is an uneven tr., but a monument both of literary and historical endeavor, a social as well as a religious contribution to human history.
It remains under this heading to say a word about the Gr. of the LXX. It is not, of course, a unified phenomenon, for the LXX has none of that unity of style and language which is so remarkable a feature of the KJV, though the latter also must have been tr. by a varied group of men. The work of various hands, the LXX gives evidence of varied degrees of Heb. scholarship and different sensitivities to style. This is duly analyzed in Swete’s fine compilation of the raw materials of LXX scholarship, already several times quoted in this article.
It will be sufficient to make some general remarks. The common dialect, found in the papyri of Egypt, shows that the NT is in many ways a monument of that colloquial speech which formed a species of bridge between the Gr. of the classical authors as well as of the Alexandrians of the Silver Age of Hellenic lit. and the Gr. of modern Athens. Hence the above reservation “in many ways.” The NT was written by Palestinian Jews (Matthew, Mark, John, Peter, James, Jude); by one of the best-educated men of his age—a Hel. Jew of the Asian Dispersion (Paul); by a Gentile from Antioch or Philippi, or both (Luke); and by one who was prob. an Alexandrian Jew (the writer of Hebrews). Their Gr. ranges from occasionally plain “tr. Greek,” an idiom infected by turns of speech from Heb. or Aram., to the Gr. of the 1st cent. at its best (Luke and Paul), a language recognizably similar to that written by near-contemporaries, such as Plutarch and Josephus, imperfect in style though both of these writers are.
These remarks about the Gr. of the NT are made because the Gr. of the OT manifests similar characteristics. The position this article has taken is that the whole of the VS was prob. produced near the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, but, even if the contributions spanned a cent., the characteristics of the language employed remain beyond unification, classification, or full explanation in terms of dialect or style. All that can be said is this: the language of the LXX resembles that of the NT in many ways, but cannot be regarded as a demonstration of the common dialect of its time. Furthermore, it is more heavily invaded by Hebraisms than any part of the NT. Josephus and Philo, who quote the LXX in paraphrase, obviously feel themselves under some constraint to smooth and adapt the language. R. R. Ottley sums up thus: “My own feeling, after endeavouring to read the Septuagint continuously, is that an impression of ugliness, which may make itself felt at first, soon wears off, and does not return. In some ways, the style is uneven...and there is no sign of an attempt to revise the whole to any uniform standard. We can also see that many sentences are not well-balanced; the translators were almost debarred from making them so, and even those that are originally admirable in this respect are apt to lose their character in the version. Especially is this the case in poetical passages. The terseness of the original loses its effect, not merely in spite of, but because of, the literalness of the rendering....Finally, there is either no ability, or no attempt, to shape a telling sentence, which may strike the ear and linger in the memory. Anyone who cherishes the sounds and cadences of a favourite text, either in the Hebrew or in the more familiar English, is liable to meet with disappointment on turning to the Septuagint. If anyone is to be stirred, terrified, cheered or consoled by it, it must be by the underlying thought and not by the music or word-power of the language” (A Handbook to the Septuagint, 175, 176).
Swete lists specialities of vocabulary, peculiarities of style, and specific instances of phenomena of language and expression to which general reference has been made, in Part II of his compendium, esp. chs. IV and V.
3. The Septuagint in the NT. It will be seen from the evaluation attempted above, that, as a literary effort, the LXX must be marked as a failure. It did not, in general, penetrate the Gentile literary world. As a landmark in history, the LXX can hardly be overestimated. It was a major element in preserving the continuity of the synagogue worship, and therefore both the coherence of the dispersed Jews, and their ability to win Gentile converts. It was the Bible of the Diaspora, and as such became the Bible of the Church, which was given its global form and mission by Hel. Jews.
This is evident, when the quotations from the OT, which abound throughout the New are examined. Westcott and Hort’s New Testament in Greek prints an exhaustive list (581ff.), and distinguishes the same by uncial type in the body of the text. Swete similarly lists them (382-393). The synoptic gospels quote the OT in forty-six distinct citations, of which eighteen are peculiar to Matthew, and three each to Mark and Luke. John has twelve quotations, of which only three are also found in the synoptics. The twenty-three quotations in Acts are mainly in speeches. Paul has seventy-eight quotations, seventy-one of which are in the epistles to the Romans, the Corinthians, and the Galatians. Hebrews has twenty-eight quotations, twenty-one of which are not to be found in the rest of the NT. The Apocalypse, without direct quotation, is permeated with OT language.
In general, most of the quotations agree with the Gr. VS, as it is known today. The ancient world was not as careful as writers are today in the matter of accurate quotation, and this must be taken into account when any attempt is made to draw conclusions from the variety of text to be distinguished in the quotations. Perhaps the writer was quoting loosely, paraphrasing, fusing one or two passages, or even adapting, and not using a variant text. The ancient writer would have felt free to quote or use a text in such fashion. Some, however, maintain that the evangelists, at least, used a recension of the LXX, and even discern a tendency to quote Theod. instead of the traditional LXX text. This, of course, in the absence of the greater part of Theodotion’s text, is a matter which cannot be pressed with any certainty. Matthew’s gospel esp. seems to be independent of the LXX, but there is no demonstrable reason why this should be so, or any means of proving that the evangelist used another Gr. VS, or made independent renderings from the Heb. John’s gospel, on the other hand, makes quotations which agree almost word for word with the LXX, as does Acts. Paul, in quite half of his OT quotations, makes little change from the LXX, but in the remainder quotes with some freedom, paraphrases, fuses, or abandons the Alexandrian VS for an otherwise unknown alternative, perhaps his own.
Swete who, with his customary diligence, lists and analyzes all these literary phenomena, says: “It has been reasonably conjectured that the writers of the New Testament used a recension which was current in Palestine and possibly in Asia Minor, and which afterwards supplied materials to Theodotion....” It is surely inevitable that well-informed Jewish scholars of the Dispersion should quite frequently revise and improve what again and again would appear to them as a faulty text, and equally inevitable in a literary age, that such revisions should be copied and widely circulated.
Apart altogether from quotations, the LXX exerted a deep influence on the NT, and words, phrases, and verbal echoes abound in the text. Some of the great theological words of the apostolic age “seem to have been prepared for their Christian connotation” by their use in the LXX, to quote Swete (p. 404) again. He concludes: “Not the Old Testament only, but the Alexandrian version of the Old Testament, has left its mark on every portion of the New Testament, even in chapters and books where it is not distinctly cited. It is not too much to say that in its literary form and expression the New Testament would have been a widely different book had it been written by authors who knew the Old Testament only in the original, or who knew it in a Greek version other than that of the Septuagint” (loc. cit.).
4. Prognosis. In the absence of further major literary discoveries, some large find, for example, of the magnitude of the DSS, nothing further can be added to the basic raw material for LXX study. Much will remain in the realm of conjecture, though new insights, new alignment of available data, and more detailed analysis, may add to or simplify present literary theories and suggestions. There is room for a clarification of the grammar of LXX Gr., and the style of the contributors to the corpus may admit of more careful analysis. Beyond this, there is not much more, in the present state of the available data, to be usefully done.
That data is collected and magnificently classified in the book by Henry Barclay Swete, revised by Richard Rusden Ottley, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, which has already been quoted. The Cambridge University Press has included an appendix by H. St. J. Thackeray which includes Aristeas’ famous letter. Ottley’s own Handbook to the Septuagint covers the same ground in less detail. To these may be added Frederic G. Kenyon’s book, The Text of the Greek Bible, which has useful pages on the LXX. All three books are equipped ch. by ch. with detailed bibliographies which provide abundant material for anyone wishing to pursue one or another aspect of LXX studies further.
Of trs. of the LXX, there are two in Eng. Charles Thomson, one of the founding fathers of the U.S.A. produced the first in 1808. It was republished in 1954. In 1844 Messrs. Bagster of London produced the second Eng. VS by Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, along with their ed. of the Gr. text.