The Septuagint

After Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in the 330s BC, Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean. In Alexandria, Egypt, a large Jewish community grew up speaking Greek more easily than Hebrew.

So, beginning in the 3rd century BC, Jewish scholars translated the Torah into Greek. Over the next two centuries the Prophets and Writings followed. This Greek Bible is called the Septuagint, from the Latin for "seventy," and is often abbreviated LXX.

The name comes from a famous story in the Letter of Aristeas: King Ptolemy of Egypt invited 72 elders from Jerusalem to translate the law for his great library, and they finished in 72 days. Later retellings added that each translator worked alone and all produced identical versions. Scholars regard these details as legendary, but the translation itself is very real.

The Septuagint changed history. It let the whole Greek-speaking world read Israel's Scriptures. When the New Testament writers quoted the Old Testament, they very often quoted the Septuagint. It was the Bible of the early church.

What makes the Septuagint important

• It is a window into the Hebrew text as it was read in the last centuries BC, more than a thousand years before the oldest complete Hebrew Bible.
• Its book names became ours: Genesis ("origin"), Exodus ("departure"), Deuteronomy ("second law").
• It included books not in the later Hebrew Bible, such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and 1–2 Maccabees, which is one reason Christian Bibles differ today.
• In some books it reflects a different Hebrew edition. Its Jeremiah is about one-eighth shorter than the standard Hebrew and arranged differently.