You’ve likely heard about the Septuagint before. But what is it?
Well, it’s the Greek translation of the Old Testament.
Back when Alexander the Great was off conquering the known world, he didn’t neglect to seize the region of Israel. In the years following Alexander the Great’s death, his generals set up their own kingdoms.
One of these kingdoms was the Ptolemaic Kingdom. It controlled much of Egypt and the territory of Israel. But remember, this new kingdom was ruled by Greeks, the descendants of Alexander the Great’s generals and officers.
So, as this kingdom grew, the Greek language became more and more important in the area, even for the local Jewish population.
Soon enough, the Greek-speaking Jews had a problem: they wanted to worship God and read the Holy Scriptures, but they couldn’t. The Scriptures were all in Hebrew, not Greek.
Now, there is a very famous story about what happened next. I’ll explain this story, but just know: this is almost certainly hyperbole or even outright fiction.
The story goes like this. King of Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, son of one of Alexander’s generals, was consulting with the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. This librarian asked Ptolemy to send for some Jews from Jerusalem who could translate the Old Testament (not yet called the Old Testament) from Hebrew into Greek. So, Ptolemy did just that.
Once the Jews heard the request, they selected from amongst themselves six men from each of the twelve tribes. Then, these 72 men (6 X 12 = 72) headed off to Alexandria in Egypt. When they arrived, Ptolemy separated each of the men into separate rooms and asked each one to translate the Torah into Greek (i.e. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).
And as the story goes, each of these 72 men completed their work in exactly 72 days, and every single translation was entirely identical.
It is for this reason that we call the Greek translation of the Old Testament the “Septuagint”, from the Latin word septuaginta, which means “seventy”. This is in reference to the 72 scholars who completed their work in 72 days. (And yes, apparently whoever started calling it the Septuagint just decided to round 72 down to 70 to make it sound nicer).
Again, that is the story told about what happened. Is it true? Probably not. Is it partly true? Possibly.
What we do know for sure is that the Septuagint first came about in the 3rd century BC. As far as we can tell, this was the first ever major attempt to translate the Scriptures (or any religious text for that matter) into another language.
Due to lots of different reasons, the early church relied heavily on the Septuagint instead of the original Hebrew Scriptures. This makes sense because many early Christians were Greek-speaking Gentiles.
In fact, when Jerome was translating the Bible into Latin in the late 300s AD, it was very surprising that he translated straight from the Hebrew into Latin. Most translators of the time saw the Septuagint as an equally inspired work of God, so they translated from the Greek into Latin.
Overall, the Septuagint is just the general name for any ancient copy of the Old Testament that is in Greek. It’s got a fun story behind the name (septuaginta = 70). And it was the most common translation of the Old Testament for the first few centuries of the church.