It has been a while since I’ve done anything in my “6 Things” series, but I thought I’d return to it focusing on the Septuagint.
For those who don’t know, the Septuagint is the Greek Translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew Bible (HB). According to legend/convention/history, the translation of the Torah was done in Egypt in the third century by “72” translators, hence the name “Septuagint,” which is is abbreviated as “LXX” from the Roman numeral for the number 70.
Here are the interesting facts you should know about the LXX!
1. There was no official LXX in Judaism or the early church. While there might well have been an effort to translate the Hebrew Torah into Greek with Ptolemaic patronage in third-century Alexandria, there was no standard Greek text of the OT. That is because Greek translations of the OT became increasingly common among Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean where Greek was the lingua franca. But there was no “control” over the translations. Some of these translations were literal, others were paraphrastic, and some were even speculative when the Greek translator was simply guessing what a Hebrew word meant (esp. for animals, musical instruments, and people’s names). What emerged was a number of Greek translations of Hebrew Books which we call the OG or “Old Greek.” There is a fascinating Greek translation of the Twelve Minor Prophets from the first century as part of the Nahal Hever collection. Christians eventually became the main consumers and users of the LXX and had a propensity to Christianize it to suit their theological interests. It is hardly surprising then that the primary textual witnesses to the LXX are the fourth and fifth-century codices Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Alexandrinus. Later, several attempts were made to revise the Greek text and bring it closer to the original Hebrew while also trying to resist “Christianizations” of the Greek text by some Jewish translators (i.e. Theodotian, Symmachus, and Aquila).
2. The LXX contains books not found in the HB. The LXX was not a recognized “collection” or a “canon” in its own right. An earlier generation of scholars used to talk about an “Alexandrian Canon” as if Egyptian Jews had a “canon” larger and more fluid than the HB, but such a view is not really held anymore. That said, a number of Jewish books not found in the HB are found in the LXX. Some of these had a Hebrew original (e.g., Tobit, Ben Sira, and probably 1 Esdras), but others were composed in Greek and never had a Hebrew original (e.g., Wisdom of Solomon). These extra books form the basis of what is called the “Apocrypha.”
3. The primary edition of the LXX used today is Rahlfs-Hanhart. The Rahlfs-Hanhart edition is an eclectic text that is put together by weighing up several different textual witnesses from Christian codices and the OG. I also learned, from my time working on 1 Esdras, that Rahlfs-Hanhart contains a lot of conjectural emendations, i.e, the scholars sometimes offer a Greek translation of the Hebrew that is not found in any manuscript because in their mind it makes for a better translation of the Hebrew!
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