The Septuagint is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, made in Alexandria, Egypt, between the third and second centuries BC. Its name comes from the Latin septuaginta, "seventy," after the seventy-two translators of legend — which is why scholars abbreviate it LXX. It was the first great translation of the Bible into another language, and it became the Bible of the early Christian church: when the New Testament quotes the Old, it usually follows the Septuagint's wording.
Few books have shaped history so quietly. The Septuagint gave Greek-speaking Jews their scriptures, gave the apostles their proof-texts, gave Christianity much of its core vocabulary, and gave several entire books their only path of survival. This guide covers where it came from, what it contains, how it differs from the Hebrew text behind modern Bibles, and why the world's fullest surviving biblical canon — the Ethiopian one — descends from it.
The story of the Septuagint's birth comes down to us in a Greek work called the Letter of Aristeas. In it, King Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt (reigned 285–246 BC) is assembling the Library of Alexandria — every book on earth, in Greek. His librarian, Demetrius of Phalerum, reports a gap in the collection: the laws of the Jews. So the king writes to Eleazar, the high priest in Jerusalem, who sends seventy-two elders — six from each of the twelve tribes — to Alexandria. After a week of royal banquets and philosophical questioning, the translators withdraw to the island of Pharos, beneath the great lighthouse, and complete the Greek Torah in exactly seventy-two days. The Jewish community of Alexandria acclaims the translation and pronounces a curse on anyone who would alter a word of it.
Later retellings improved on the miracle. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, writing in the first century AD, describes the translators as prophets whose Greek matched the Hebrew word for word. Christian writers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine went further still: the seventy-two worked in separate cells, without conferring, and produced seventy-two identical translations — proof, they argued, that the translation itself was inspired. Somewhere along the way the seventy-two were rounded down to seventy, and the name stuck.
Modern scholars read the Letter of Aristeas as legend rather than reportage: it was almost certainly written a century or more after the events it describes, by an Alexandrian Jew adopting a Greek persona, and it reads more like advocacy for the translation's authority than an eyewitness memoir. But the kernel is widely accepted. The Torah really was translated into Greek in third-century BC Alexandria — home to the largest Greek-speaking Jewish community in the world, and quite plausibly with royal encouragement. The remaining books followed over the next century or more, rendered by many different hands in styles ranging from woodenly literal to freely paraphrased. Strictly speaking, "Septuagint" names only that first Greek Torah; in practice, it has come to mean the whole Greek Old Testament.
The Greek Torah came first, then the Prophets and the Writings. But the Septuagint that early Christians inherited contained more than the Hebrew Bible does. Alongside Genesis through Malachi, its great manuscripts carry a further set of Jewish works composed or preserved in Greek: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and expanded editions of Esther and Daniel — the additions to Daniel include the stories of Susanna and of Bel and the Dragon. Some manuscripts reach further still: 1 Esdras, 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151.
These are the books Catholics call deuterocanonical and Protestants call the Apocrypha — and nearly every argument about them since has really been an argument about the Septuagint, because the Septuagint is where they entered the Christian Bible.
The Septuagint also arranged the books differently. The Hebrew Bible runs Law, Prophets, Writings, and ends with Chronicles; the Septuagint groups the books as law, history, poetry and wisdom, and prophecy, ending with the prophets pointing forward. Christian Old Testaments still follow that Greek arrangement today. Even readers who have never heard of the Septuagint are holding a table of contents it shaped.
Yes — in ways that are well mapped and genuinely fascinating. The comparison is really between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text: the Hebrew text standardized by Jewish scribes in the early Middle Ages, whose oldest complete manuscripts date to around 1000 AD, and which underlies the Old Testament of most modern Bibles. The Septuagint was translated more than a thousand years before those manuscripts were copied, from Hebrew scrolls that sometimes differed from the ones the Masoretes standardized. The notable differences:
The honest way to frame all this: before the biblical text was standardized, it circulated in more than one Hebrew edition, and the Septuagint is the oldest surviving witness to that variety. When the Dead Sea Scrolls surfaced in the twentieth century, reading after reading once dismissed as Greek sloppiness turned out to reflect real, ancient Hebrew. Scholars today set the two traditions side by side and weigh them case by case — which is exactly what the footnotes in your modern Bible are doing every time they say "Septuagint reads…"
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Get The Complete 88-Book Ethiopian Bible →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryFor the apostles, the answer is overwhelmingly yes — at least in writing. The New Testament was composed in Greek, and of its several hundred Old Testament quotations, the majority follow the Septuagint's wording, often precisely where the Greek differs from the Hebrew. The letter to the Hebrews leans on the Septuagint so heavily that some of its arguments only work in Greek: its treatment of Psalm 40 turns on the Septuagint's reading, which speaks of a body being prepared rather than ears being opened. Luke's account of Jesus reading Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue gives the passage in its Septuagint form, and Stephen's history of Israel in Acts 7 includes details found in the Greek text rather than the Hebrew.
Jesus himself taught in Aramaic and would have heard and read the scriptures in Hebrew in the synagogue, so the question of which "version" he personally used is more complicated — and partly unanswerable. What is certain is that the writers who recorded his words for the world quoted the scriptures largely in their Greek dress, because Greek was the language their readers shared.
The deeper debt is vocabulary. It was the Septuagint that rendered the Hebrew mashiach, "anointed one," as christos; that translated the divine name with kyrios, "Lord"; that turned "covenant" into the Greek word that gives us "testament"; and that used ekklesia, the word the New Testament adopts for "church," for the assembly of Israel. The theological language of Christianity was minted in Alexandria, generations before Bethlehem. In a very real sense, the church's first Bible was a translation.
This is one of history's quieter ironies, because the Septuagint began as a Jewish triumph. Philo reports that in his day the Jews of Alexandria kept an annual festival on the island of Pharos to celebrate the translation. Greek-speaking Jewish communities across the Mediterranean read it in their synagogues for centuries, and the historian Josephus retold Israel's story from its pages.
What changed was who else was reading it. As Christianity spread, it claimed the Septuagint as its own Bible and argued from the Greek text's distinctive readings — above all parthenos in Isaiah 7:14 — in its disputes with the synagogue. As church and synagogue pulled apart in the first and second centuries, rabbinic Judaism anchored its authority ever more firmly in the Hebrew text itself, and new Greek translations were produced for Jewish use that shadowed the Hebrew far more literally: Aquila's hyper-literal version around 130 AD, followed by those of Symmachus and Theodotion. The old translation drifted out of Jewish hands. Later rabbinic tradition looked back on it with something close to grief: the minor tractate Soferim says the day the Torah was turned into Greek was as hard for Israel as the day the golden calf was made.
One popular claim deserves a correction. Older books often state that a "Council of Jamnia" around 90 AD formally closed the Hebrew canon and rejected the Septuagint. Modern scholarship has largely abandoned that picture: Yavneh (Jamnia) was a rabbinic academy, not a church-style council, and there is no evidence of a formal vote on the canon. The parting of the ways with the Septuagint was a gradual drift of communities over generations — not a decree handed down on a particular afternoon.
Fourteen centuries later, the Reformation reopened the question the Septuagint had posed from the start: do the extra Greek books belong in the Bible? Jerome, the great fourth-century translator of the Latin Vulgate, had argued for what he called the "Hebrew truth" — full authority only for books found in the Hebrew canon — even as his own Vulgate carried the disputed books, which the medieval church read as scripture.
Luther sided with Jerome. His complete German Bible of 1534 pulled the Septuagint-only books out of the Old Testament and gathered them in a separate section between the testaments, under a now-famous heading: "Apocrypha — that is, books which are not held equal to the Holy Scriptures, and yet are useful and good to read." Not condemned; demoted. The King James Bible of 1611 printed the same books in the same intermediate position, and they remained in most English Bibles until the nineteenth century, when the British and Foreign Bible Society stopped funding their printing in 1826 and they quietly disappeared from the Protestant pew Bible. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, had responded to Luther at the Council of Trent by affirming the deuterocanonical books as fully canonical. The story of how those books came in, moved out, and vanished from most modern Bibles is told in our guide to the books removed from the Bible.
Start with age. The Septuagint is the oldest surviving translation of the Bible into any language, and for most of the Old Testament it remains a witness to a Hebrew text a thousand years older than the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts. The oldest complete Bibles in existence — the great fourth- and fifth-century codices Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus — are Septuagint Bibles.
It is also not a museum piece. The Greek Orthodox Church still uses the Septuagint as its official Old Testament, as it has without interruption since antiquity. Roughly half of Christian history, and the whole Christian East, has read the Old Testament through this translation.
For readers of the New Testament, it is simply indispensable: to understand what the apostles were quoting, you need the Bible they actually held. And for anyone drawn to the wider world of ancient scripture, the Septuagint is the great gateway — the collection through which Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees survived at all. Without it, they would sit among the lost books of the Bible instead of on its margins.
Here the story bends south. Christianity reached the kingdom of Aksum in the fourth century, and between roughly the fourth and sixth centuries the scriptures were translated into Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia — working largely from the Greek. The Old Testament of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church descends, in the main, from the Septuagint tradition, not from the narrower Hebrew canon that shaped Bibles in the Protestant West.
The consequence is remarkable. Ethiopia never inherited the whittled-down list. Its canon — traditionally counted as 81 books, with complete collected editions that print each work separately running to 88 — preserved the Septuagint's broad collection and reached beyond it, receiving books like 1 Enoch and Jubilees as scripture. Both survive complete only in Ge’ez. The broadest surviving biblical canon on earth lives in Ethiopia in large part because its Bible was born from the Septuagint — the fullest stream of the tradition, flowing on uninterrupted. If this guide has a single destination, it is that shelf: our guide to the Ethiopian Bible walks through it book by book.
The seventy-two translators of the legend probably never sat in separate cells beneath the lighthouse of Pharos. But what actually happened in Alexandria was stranger than the legend: a translation that outlived the library it was made for, carried whole books across two thousand years that would otherwise be dust, and quietly decided what half the world means by the word "Bible." Every argument about what belongs in scripture still runs, sooner or later, back through Alexandria.
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