What Is the Septuagint?

Long before Jerome's Latin Vulgate, before any Bible in English, Jewish scholars in Egypt translated their scriptures into Greek. The result shaped the New Testament's own vocabulary — and settled which extra books would travel alongside it.

A translation with its own legend

According to the Letter of Aristeas — a Jewish work of the second century BC, carried in full on this site — the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus wanted a Greek copy of the Jewish law for the great library at Alexandria. The high priest in Jerusalem is said to have sent seventy-two elders, six from each of Israel's twelve tribes, who completed the translation in exactly seventy-two days.

Historians treat the precise numbers, and the miraculous unanimity later writers added to the legend, with real skepticism — but the core claim, that Alexandria's large Greek-speaking Jewish community needed and produced a Greek translation of their scriptures across the third and second centuries BC, is not in dispute. The name “Septuagint” — Latin for “seventy,” abbreviated LXX — comes directly from that legend of seventy-two translators, rounded down.

What it included

The Septuagint did not stop at the Law. Over the following two centuries it grew to cover the whole Hebrew Bible, and — because it was assembled as a working library rather than a fixed canon — it also came to include books never accepted into the later, narrower Hebrew canon: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the rest of what this site's Apocrypha article covers. That single fact is a large part of why the Apocrypha exists as a category at all.

Why it matters

By the time of the New Testament, the Septuagint was the Bible most Greek-speaking Jews and the earliest Christians actually read. Most Old Testament quotations in the New Testament follow the Septuagint's wording rather than the Hebrew text behind it — sometimes with real consequences. Matthew's gospel, quoting Isaiah's promise of a coming sign, follows the Septuagint's Greek word parthenos, “virgin,” for a Hebrew word (almah) that more literally just means “young woman.”

Where to read its influence

This site doesn't carry the Septuagint's own Greek text as a standalone translation, but its legacy runs through the whole corpus here: every book of the Apocrypha it preserved, the Letter of Aristeas that tells its founding story, and Greek vocabulary — Christos for Messiah among the largest examples — that the New Testament inherited directly from it.