BSN: The Septuagint (LXX)

The Septuagint (LXX) was a translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek.
- This translating began in the 3rd century BC and was completed over the next century or two.
- The production of the Septuagint coincided with the completion of the Old Testament. Another way of saying this is that the Septuagint was produced during the Intertestamental Period.
- The term “Septuagint” has come to mean simply the Old Testament in Greek – that is the Greek Old Testament as contrasted with the Hebrew Old Testament. Jesus and the apostles would have used both.
The word “septuagint” refers to “the seventy” translators who worked on it.
- Its abbreviation – LXX – is the Roman numeral for 70.
The need for this translation arose from the Diaspora of the Jews, because of which the Hebrew language fell into disuse as the Greek language had become commonplace throughout the Mediterranean world.
The Septuagint divided the single Hebrew book Samuel into 1 & 2 Samuel, and the single book Kings into 1 & 2 Kings. All four were combined and called the books of 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 Kingdoms, which is still the way they are laid out in the Greek Orthodox version of the Old Testament.
Contrast the LXX, which is the Greek OT and was produced in the 3rd-1st centuries BC, with the MT (Masoretic Text) which is the Old Testament in Hebrew and was produced in the 7th-10th centuries AD.
When the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they are sometimes doing so from the Hebrew text and sometimes from the Greek text (the Septuagint). The Old Testament of English translations is almost always based on the Hebrew text – not the Greek text. As a result, there’s seldom going to be a word-for-word match between the way an Old Testament verse appears in the Old Testament and the way it appears in the New Testament. When differences do occur, the degree of the difference varies.