Did the Vulgate translate the Old Testament from Hebrew or Greek?

Hebrew — a controversial choice at the time, since most earlier Latin translations relied on the Greek Septuagint instead. Jerome defended it as a return to the 'Hebrew truth' behind that Greek translation.

Why do some Bible verse numbers differ between the Vulgate and the King James Version?

Mostly the Psalms — the Septuagint merged Psalms 9 and 10 into one, and the Vulgate followed that Greek numbering even while translating from Hebrew, so most of the Psalter runs one number behind the Hebrew/KJV numbering until the very end.

Is the Vulgate the same as the Septuagint?

No. The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament from around the third and second centuries BC. The Vulgate is Jerome's Latin translation from around AD 400, which follows the Septuagint's numbering in places, like the Psalms, even though Jerome translated its Old Testament from Hebrew rather than Greek.

What Is the Latin Vulgate?

The Septuagint's companion article covers the Bible's first great translation, into Greek. This one covers its second — into Latin, by one scholar, against the advice of his own allies — and the numbering tangle it left behind.

A single scholar's translation that lasted a thousand years

In AD 382, Pope Damasus I commissioned the scholar Jerome to revise the “Old Latin” translations then circulating — a patchwork of inconsistent, sometimes rough Latin renderings of the Greek New Testament and the Greek Old Testament alike. Jerome started with the Gospels, then the rest of the New Testament, and eventually undertook something far more ambitious: a fresh Old Testament translation made directly from the Hebrew text, not from the Septuagint's Greek that nearly every earlier Latin version had relied on.

Why translating from Hebrew was controversial

Augustine of Hippo, among others, objected. The Septuagint had been read as scripture by Greek-speaking Jews and the earliest church for centuries, and some considered its translation itself divinely superintended — the same legend of seventy-two inspired translators the companion Septuagint article covers. Jerome defended his choice as a return to the veritas hebraica, the “Hebrew truth” standing behind the Greek translation, rather than a translation of a translation. His instinct anticipated, by more than a thousand years, the same move Reformation-era translators like Tyndale made back toward Hebrew and Greek instead of relying on Jerome's own Latin (see the companion articles on the Reformation and the King James translators).

What it included

Jerome's Old Testament, based on the Hebrew canon, treated the Apocrypha unevenly. He translated Tobit and Judith quickly and somewhat reluctantly, by his own account working from Aramaic sources with a translator's help, and left several other apocryphal books essentially untouched from the older Old Latin versions rather than retranslating them himself. Despite Jerome's own reservations about their standing, the whole collection circulated together as “the Vulgate,” and the Council of Trent later declared it, deuterocanon included, the church's authoritative biblical text (see the companion Trent article).

Its numbering problem, inherited from the Septuagint

The clearest, most practical difference a reader runs into is the Psalms. Where the Hebrew — and every English Bible descended from it, including the King James — numbers Psalm 9 and Psalm 10 as two separate psalms, the Septuagint's Greek translators had combined them into one, and Jerome's Vulgate followed that Greek numbering even while translating the words themselves fresh from Hebrew. The result: from Psalm 10 through Psalm 147, most Vulgate references sit one number behind their Hebrew/King James equivalent.

The most famous case: the penitential psalm known by its Latin opening word, Miserere, is Psalm 50 in the Vulgate but this verse, Psalm 51, in the King James:

Psalm 51:1

1Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.
See also: Acts 3:19, Isaiah 44:22

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A similar naming tangle affects Esdras: what this site's own Apocrypha calls 1 and 2 Esdras, the Vulgate calls 3 and 4 Esdras — because in Jerome's system, Ezra and Nehemiah themselves already hold the titles 1 and 2 Esdras.

Why this matters for a wider-canon library like this one

A site that already carries several traditions' differing numbering — the Septuagint's extra Apocrypha, the Eastern Orthodox additions, the Ethiopian broader canon, even 1 Enoch's own history of incompatible chapter systems between translations — has faced this kind of mismatch before. Any future Vulgate text on this site would need the same careful verse-by-verse alignment check against the King James numbering already in use here, book by book, before a single verse gets seeded — never assumed to match just because both are called “the Psalms.”

Where to read its legacy, if not yet its own text

This site doesn't yet carry the Vulgate's own Latin text — unlike the Textus Receptus Greek, which is already live alongside every King James New Testament verse (see the companion article) — but its influence runs through the corpus regardless: the very shape of “the Apocrypha” as a category Protestant Bibles set apart, the Trent-era declaration of an authoritative biblical text, and a thousand years of Western biblical scholarship all worked from Jerome's Latin before any of this site's other original-language texts were rediscovered or prioritized.

Common questions

What is the Latin Vulgate?: Jerome's Latin translation of the Bible, commissioned in AD 382, which became the Western church's standard biblical text for over a thousand years and was declared authoritative at the Council of Trent in 1546.
Did the Vulgate translate the Old Testament from Hebrew or Greek?: Hebrew — a controversial choice at the time, since most earlier Latin translations relied on the Greek Septuagint instead. Jerome defended it as a return to the 'Hebrew truth' behind that Greek translation.
Why do some Bible verse numbers differ between the Vulgate and the King James Version?: Mostly the Psalms — the Septuagint merged Psalms 9 and 10 into one, and the Vulgate followed that Greek numbering even while translating from Hebrew, so most of the Psalter runs one number behind the Hebrew/KJV numbering until the very end.
Is the Vulgate the same as the Septuagint?: No. The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament from around the third and second centuries BC. The Vulgate is Jerome's Latin translation from around AD 400, which follows the Septuagint's numbering in places, like the Psalms, even though Jerome translated its Old Testament from Hebrew rather than Greek.