This name is given to that ancient Greek translation of the Bible which was executed in Egypt sometime before the advent of Christ, and which was called the Septuagint (that is, the seventy), because of the tradition that it was performed by that number of translators.
This version had obtained so high a reputation—in many cases quite superseding the original Hebrew—that numberless incredible stories were once extant as to its origin. These have been rejected by modern research: and the following is generally allowed to have been the true account.
The Ptolemies—especially Ptolemy Philadelphus not only patronized Greek learning, and strove to make their metropolis Alexandria the literary, as well as the commercial, center of the world; but they were also very anxious to cultivate the friendship of the Jews, whose country, consisting of a succession of natural fastnesses, has ever formed an important outpost of Egypt. Both literary curiosity, therefore, and political prudence, conspired in making those kings desirous to possess, in the vulgar tongue, the venerable law of the Jews. Hence Ptolemy Philadelphus (or his father—it is uncertain which) requested of the high priest at Jerusalem to procure competent scribes for him, who might translate the laws of Moses from the Hebrew into the Greek. The translation, thus effected, became one of the valuable treasures he had collected in his library at Alexandria. Its composition must have been somewhere about the year 280 B.C. It seems to have been gradually followed at different times by translations of other parts of the Jewish Scriptures; and the whole, executed indeed by various hands, was completed sometime before the advent of Christ.
This is the simple account, in substance quoted by one Aristobulus, who is cited by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History; and it is corroborated in the Prologue to the Apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, written (as the author there tells us) in the time of Ptolemy Physcon, rather more than 100 years before Christ. From 280 B.C. to 120 B.C. may therefore be safely taken as the period of its execution. And we may be satisfied that the law of Moses was translated by royal command, to which the rest of the book was gradually added.
This Alexandrian or Septuagint version, being thus made in the common speech of the East, was read even in Palestine, where Greek had become the ordinary language of intercourse. It alone is quoted by the philosopher Philo, and the historian Josephus: and (which is of more interest to us) the writers of the New Testament almost constantly refer to it: for at that epoch it stood in the same relation to the Hebrew as our common English version does, and was therefore used by all who wrote books for universal perusal.
On account of its celebrity, the most extravagant stories were current as to its source. Josephus says that seventy-two elders were chosen for the work, six from each tribe, and that their labors occupied exactly seventy-two days. Philo even asserts that these seventy-two men were shut up in separate cells; that each of them-translated the entire Bible, apart from all intercourse with his coadjutors; and that these seventy-two independent translations were found to agree exactly, in every particular, with each other. These marvelous fables seem to have been invented, for the purpose of giving to this version the authority of the high priest, and of the council at Jerusalem. They obtained nearly universal credit, as is evident from the fact that the name of Septuagint (i.e., seventy), arose from the fiction of the seventy-two elders. There is no doubt that these stories are fictitious, for there is positive internal evidence that the several books were executed at different times, and by different hands; and indeed there are strong reasons for believing that the translators were natives of Alexandria, and not of Palestine.
There can be little doubt that our Lord and his apostles referred to this version, when they quoted the ancient Scriptures. It was for many ages the only Bible known in the Church. Very few Christians, indeed, before the Reformation era, knew anything of the Hebrew language, or suspected the existence of a Hebrew Bible. All old translations of the Bible were made (with the exception of the Syriac) from this. The Vulgate, for centuries the authorized text in the Latin church, was made from the Septuagint, and not directly from the Hebrew. And from the first, the Greek church has never acknowledged any other version except this venerable translation, now more than 2,000 years old.
It must be remembered that the Hebrew original, and the Greek translation, have come to us through two absolutely independent, and even hostile channels. The Hebrew we owe entirely to the Jews; our copies are simply what they have given to us. Whereas the Septuagint has reached us through the hands of the Christian church. These two guardians of the Scriptures had no intercourse whatever with each other. And their united testimony is of the strongest possible description. Where they differ, as they occasionally do, in unimportant details, we have only the firmer confidence that these two venerable recensions have descended to us by quite separate streams. And it may be observed that these differences, however embarrassing they may be to the critic, are really of no consequence to the Christian. We may hesitate in pronouncing sentence upon those points where the two versions are at variance; but every item of our faith is unaffected by them. We might cast out every passage where they do not agree, without shaking a single article out of the Creed.
Looking upon the matter, however, with the eye of the critic, opinions are divided as to which of these is to be preferred. Till the reformation, there was no doubt at all about this subject. The Latin church knew and recognized only the Vulgate; the Greek church only the Septuagint; the reformers, with one voice, preferred the Jewish Old Testament to what was only a translation of a translation from it. They have been followed by most modern scholars. Of late, however, some among ourselves have seen reason for giving precedence to the Septuagint over the Hebrew; and they ground their judgment mainly upon the circumstance, that our Lord and his apostles quoted, almost uniformly, from the Greek version.
But, in reality, no conclusion ought to be drawn from this. The founders of Christianity, as a thing of course, quoted from the Bible in common use, which was the Septuagint at that time. And whenever this Septuagint differs from the Hebrew in an important respect (as when some point of doctrine is concerned), then it will be found that the quotation comes from the Hebrew, Thus, in the beginning of Matthew's Gospel, the names in our Lord's genealogy are spelled as the Septuagint spells them; for it was of no importance which way they were written. Whereas, in the second chapter, the quotation from Hosea, “Out of Egypt I have called my son,” is from the Hebrew, and not from the Septuagint, which has “Out of Egypt I have called his children,” and which does not convey a sense applicable to Christ.
In all probability, the Hebrew text represents the recension used in the synagogues everywhere except in Egypt; while the Septuagint was another edition, in private use, also read in the synagogues by the Hellenists of Alexandria. This supposition is corroborated by the fact, that the existing Targums, or Aramaic paraphrases (which arose from the custom of interpreting the Hebrew into the vulgar tongue of Palestine, during the synagogue service), agree not with the Septuagint, but with the Hebrew.
It seems to follow necessarily that the synagogue edition must have been the authorized copy. The Septuagint must have occupied the same place as our own English version now does; very good and excellent, doubtless, but yet containing some faults, which at once prevent its being put into the same rank with the original. We have, moreover, positive assurance that the Jews have taken the most scrupulous, and even superstitious, care of their text; so that accidental mistakes in transcription are hardly supposable; and we are as sure that the Greek text has never been so carefully preserved, and is faulty in many places.
There are two parts of the New Testament which follow the Septuagint exactly, even where this differs decidedly from the Hebrew. These two parts are the speech of Stephen, recorded in the seventh chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. In both of these documents we are certain that we are reading the words of men who had the Septuagint translation, and not the Hebrew original, in their hands. Stephen, we know, was a deacon of the Grecians (i.e. of the Hellenists—the very community which produced this version). And there are unmistakable marks, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, of its having been written by a native of Alexandria, the birth-place of the Septuagint. Now, in each of these two documents, the name Jesus occurs in rather an embarrassing manner. In Stephen's speech, we are told of the “tabernacle of witness, which our fathers brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles.” And in the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, we read, “If Jesus had given them rest.” In both of these places it is Joshua that is meant, of which name Jesus is only the Greek form, and is the form always used in the Septuagint.
Then again Stephen speaks of 75 persons going down to Egypt with Jacob; whereas our copies of the Book of Genesis distinctly assert that there were but 70. The truth is, that our English Bible here follows the Hebrew, whereas Stephen quoted the Septuagint. Then in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, we find the following quotation from Psa. 40 “Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not; but a body hast thou prepared me"; and yet on returning to the 40th Psalm itself in our Bibles, we find the expression to be, “Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears past thou opened"; which is a literal translation from the Hebrew of the Psalm in question, and different from what we read in the Epistle. But if we refer to the Septuagint version of the 40th Psalm, we at once see that the passage, as it stands in the Epistle to the Hebrews, was taken directly from it.
The Psalms in our English Prayer Books are taken from an older translation than the Psalms are which appear in our English Bibles; and as all modern translations started from the Septuagint (through the Vulgate), and by degrees were brought nearer and nearer to the Hebrew; so the Prayer-book Psalms, taken from Archbishop Parker's translation of 1568, lean much more towards the Septuagint than do the Bible Psalms, which were not translated till 1611. If we compare Psa. 14 in one of these English versions with Psa. 14 in the other version, we shall be able very easily to see one instance where the Hebrew and the Septuagint are at variance. In the Prayer-book, this 14th Psalm has eleven verses; in the Bible it has but seven; the former following the Septuagint, the latter the Hebrew. And we shall also find that Paul, when he quotes this Psalm in the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, agrees with the Prayer-book version, i.e., with the Septuagint.
In some other respects we may readily perceive the influence of the old Greek edition on our modern editions. The names we give to the five books of Moses are unknown in the Hebrew Bible, which calls the books by the first words in each. They appeared first in the Septuagint, then they were transferred to the Vulgate, and from that to our modern Bibles.
There is another trace of the Septuagint, which is much more serious. The Jews, from time immemorial, never pronounce the word Jehovah, or write it in any but in the Hebrew characters. Now the translators of the Septuagint were Jews, imbued with the common prejudice of their nation. In consequence the word Jehovah does not at once appear in the Septuagint; it is invariably rendered by Κνριος, or Lord, which was a common title of respect between man and man. This peculiarity passed into the Vulgate, where Dominus is the equivalent term for Jehovah; and, for some unexplained reason—probably on account of the influence exercised by learned Jews over the reformers—it has been almost always retained in our common English Bibles. From this circumstance, a great deal of the meaning of the Bible is sometimes neglected; and the proper name of the invisible God does not appear where it ought to be. In our printed Bibles, it will be seen that when Lord stands for Jehovah, it consists of four capital letters, thus—LORD.
The writers of the Septuagint were all Jews, and therefore never wrote the word Jehovah with Greek letters. The word Jehovah never once occurs in the entire New Testament. There is no kind of doubt that they used the title Κνριος, or the LORD, just as the Septuagint translators had done—as a well-understood equivalent for Jehovah. And when this title of LORD became, in an emphatic manner, fixed upon the Redeemer, he was thereby proclaimed to be Jehovah.
As might have been expected, the text of the Septuagint was never so carefully preserved as that of the Hebrew. From an early epoch it seems to have been in an imperfect condition. At the beginning of the third century of the Christian era, the illustrious Origen devoted a large portion of his life to the amendment of this text; and, for this purpose, he published his celebrated work, The Hexapla (or Six-fold; containing six parallel columns of different editions of the Bible). By comparing these together, he produced an improved text, known as the Hexaplarian. It would have been of the utmost interest to have preserved this work: but, from its great size (it is said to have been in fifty volumes) transcription was, in a manner, impossible. After lying for many years in the library of Ctesarea, it is believed to have perished when the Arabs took that city in the seventh century. But the amended text was preserved; and has been almost universally adopted as the text of the Septuagint, since the days of Origen.
There are two principal MSS. of the Septuagint in existence. The one, called the Alexandrian, is in the British Museum. It was sent over as a present to Charles I. by the Patriarch. of Alexandria. It is written on parchment, in four volumes; mutilated in some parts, and so old, that the ink of the letters has, in some places, eaten right through the page. It is believed to belong to the 5th or 6th century; and represents the Hexaplarian text, or the text amended by Origen. The other is called the Vatican, because it is in the library of that name in Rome. Its history is unknown, but it is thought to be rather older than the Alexandrian; and it represents the text as it existed before Origen.
There is one circumstance connected with the Septuagint that must not be passed over. It was here that first appeared the books called Apocrypha; which from it were transferred to the Vulgate, where the church of Rome decided that they are to remain. The reformers rejected them from the Canon, because they had never been in the Hebrew, and did not therefore form part of the Jewish Bible, when our Savior fixed the seal of his authority upon it.
It ought to be mentioned that the book of Daniel, as it appears in all extant editions of the Septuagint, is not the original Septuagint vetsion of Daniel. A Greek translation of this book by Theodotion was put in its place, soon after Christ, on account of its acknowledged imperfections. The proper Septuagint translation of Daniel was lost until the end of the last century, when it was discovered in the library of Cardinal Chigi at Rome. NV. H. J.