What Is the Septuagint?

Around 250 years before Jesus, the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek — and that Greek Bible, the Septuagint, became the Bible of the early church. It is also where the “extra” books came from. Here is the whole story, plainly.

The world’s first Bible translation

After Alexander the Great, Greek became the common language of the ancient world — and huge numbers of Jews, especially in Egypt, no longer read Hebrew. So in Alexandria, beginning around 250 BCE, Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. It was the first time the Bible had ever been carried into another language.

Why it is called “the Seventy”

Its symbol is LXX — the Roman numeral for seventy. An ancient account (the Letter of Aristeas) says about seventy-two elders did the translation, and the name “Septuagint” (Latin for “seventy”) stuck. Whatever the exact history, the number is how the world has known it for over two thousand years.

The Bible the apostles used

By Jesus’ day the Septuagint was the everyday Bible of Greek-speaking Jews — and then of the first Christians. Here is the striking part: when the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, it most often quotes the Septuagint’s Greek wording, not the Hebrew. When Matthew cites Isaiah’s “a virgin shall conceive,” that word virgin comes from the Septuagint’s Greek.

Where the “extra” books come from

The Septuagint held more books than the Hebrew Bible — a set written mostly in the roughly four centuries between the Old and New Testaments. These are the deuterocanon (“second canon”): Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, the Maccabees, and the rest. They stayed in Christian Bibles — the Latin Vulgate, the 1611 King James Version — for more than a thousand years, until the Reformation set them apart. Catholics and the Orthodox still hold them as Scripture.

Next: About the Deuterocanon →

How the AIT uses it

Our Old Testament is translated from the Hebrew; but where the Hebrew and the Septuagint disagree, the Septuagint is one of the witnesses we weigh — and every deuterocanonical book here is translated from its Greek (with Sirach preferring its surviving Hebrew). As always: we show you the reading and the reason, and let you judge.