Why use the septuagint

They do appear in some early Bibles and some Dead Sea Scrolls and offer insight into the composition of the various Bibles. Supersessionist theology argues that Christians have replaced Jews as the people of God, and often refers to the quotation of Jeremiah in Hebrews ; but how ought these texts to be understood? Jesus' virgin birth as described in the Gospel of Matthew is based in part on a mistranslation of Isa The Hebrew designation for the book of Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, a book of instruction and proverbs.

Literally, "second canon"; refers to texts accepted by Catholics and Eastern Orthodox as sacred scripture, but not included in the Hebrew Bible. Not to be confused with Apocrypha, which include noncanonical works.

Hebrew is regarded as the spoken language of ancient Israel but is largely replaced by Aramaic in the Persian period. An early second-century B. Jewish document considered part of the Pseudepigrapha and dealing mostly with the circumstances and rationale for the creation of the Septuagint, a Hellenistic Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Shorthand title for the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures fabled to have been completed by 70 translators LXX is 70 rendered in roman numerals.

Relating to the Masoretes, a group of medieval scribes who preserved and transmitted the written Hebrew text of the Bible. A collection of first-century Jewish and early Christian writings that, along with the Old Testament, makes up the Christian Bible.

Also called the Hebrew Bible, those parts of the canon that are common to both Jews and Christians. The designation "Old Testament" places this part of the canon in relation to the New Testament, the part of the Bible canonical only to Christians.

Because the term "Old Testament" assumes a distinctly Christian perspective, many scholars prefer to use the more neutral "Hebrew Bible," which derives from the fact that the texts of this part of the canon are written almost entirely in Hebrew.

Of or belonging to any of several branches of Christianity, especially from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, whose adherents trace their tradition back to the earliest Christian communities. Lowercase "orthodox" , this term means conforming with the dominant, sanctioned ideas or belief system. Site HarperCollins Dictionary. The Dead Sea Scrolls for the first time revealed many biblical texts that were a millennium older than the medieval editions.

More spectacularly, these manuscripts showed significant divergences with the standard medieval text in some well-known biblical books. The Scrolls proved that some books of the Hebrew Bible were still being edited, supplemented, reduced, etc.

But if you were reading the Septuagint before the s, you knew that it was produced in the Hellenistic period, and so you still might have concluded—even without the help of actual Hebrew manuscripts—that the Bible was in flux at this time based on the way these books appear in Greek in such alternative forms. Imagine if you knew Russian, and when you were reading Dostoevsky in English you suddenly discovered that there was an entire extended passage, or one that was significantly abbreviated.

You have two options. You either conclude the translator exercised a tremendous, even scandalous, amount of freedom, or you believe the English translator had a manuscript different to any others you ever knew existed in Russian. Those were the two basic options for understanding the Septuagint, and most scholars chose the first route. But when the Dead Sea Scrolls showed these divergent text forms in Hebrew, and when some of these were represented verbatim in translation in the Septuagint, the calculus suddenly changed.

Now that we had the Dead Sea Scrolls, we knew the Septuagint translators were in many of these cases translating actual biblical texts.

Septuagint scholars are about as grateful as any for the discovery of the Scrolls. Beginning with the New Testament itself, we see the influence of the Septuagint because these writers of what would become Christian scripture are writing in Greek. The apostle Paul, for example, builds much of his magnum opus, the Book of Romans, with quotations from the Septuagint, not the Hebrew Bible. More needs to be done in this area, but it is clear that the Septuagint lies at the foundation of early Christianity.

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We will only use your personal information to register you for OUPblog articles. Or subscribe to articles in the subject area by email or RSS. Thank you for helping draw more attention to our Scripture. As an Orthodox Christian, it is much appreciated. One point of clarification: the icon depicted above of Christ is the Christ Pantocrator almighty, from El Shaddai , and he is holding the open Book of Life.

This is a reminder that, while Christ will return for the last judgment, the book is not yet closed. We have time to repent. But it […]. Thanks for so many ellucidations about the Septuagint version.

I have some historical and eastern christian religious comments I want to make. My uncle, Father Butrus Sowmy butrus is arabization of aramaic peTros which comes from latin Petrus, i. But reading the Septuagint allows you to approach the same passages in a language you already know fairly well, but with enough differences to pause your background track of English.

Reading the Septuagint regularly will make you slow down and smell the Old Testament roses even more than reading the Hebrew Old Testament. Instead, let it supplement and sharpen it. Even the Gospels, with their primarily-Jewish context, have major players that are entirely absent in the Old Testament: Pharisees, Synagogues, Centurions, and Sadducees, just to name a few. From where did this milieu come, and how did intertestamental and first-century Jews process the changes?

Reading the Septuagint provides a window into the thought world of the New Testament in two ways: First, readers will notice the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle shifts in phrasing from the Hebrew OT to the Septuagint, shedding some light on the understanding of the translators. Second, readers will pick up on deuterocanonical books not included in the Old Testament canon, which provide fascinating insights into the theology and worldview of Second Temple Judaism.