The Septuagint Before the Bible Was One Book

Open an English Bible and the seam seems neat. The first half is usually translated from Hebrew; the second was written in Greek. Timothy Michael Law’s 2013 book When God Spoke Greek begins where that neat seam starts to fray: for many Jews in the ancient Mediterranean, and then for the earliest Christian communities, the scriptures they read were Greek on both sides.

The better question is not only what the Bible says, but what form of scripture a community was actually reading. That is where the Septuagint enters the story.

The Bible did not arrive as one finished package

The word Septuagint comes from the Latin septuaginta, meaning “seventy,” and the collection is often abbreviated as LXX, the Roman numeral for 70. An ancient account called the Letter of Aristeas tells of Jewish scholars invited to Alexandria to translate the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, into Greek. The story gives us 72 translators and a miraculous agreement among their translations. Historians treat the details cautiously, but the account preserves a useful memory: Greek translation began as a real Jewish intellectual project in Alexandria.

The Torah was probably translated in the third century BCE. Other books followed over the next several generations, and not necessarily in one place or through one coordinated publishing effort. Some writings later grouped with the Septuagint were composed in Greek; others may have been translated from Semitic originals that no longer survive. The Septuagint is therefore an umbrella name for a developing collection, not the title of one ancient volume produced in a single sitting.

That distinction matters because scripture and canon are not identical. Scripture means a writing treated as sacred or authoritative. A canon is a community’s recognized list of such writings. Ancient Jewish and Christian groups shared many texts, but they did not always include the same books, arrange them in the same order, or agree on which writings held the highest authority.

Why Greek became the language of the moment

The Septuagint makes more sense once we picture the Hellenistic Age, the period shaped by Alexander the Great’s conquests from the late fourth century BCE onward. Greek culture spread across the eastern Mediterranean, but it did not wipe away local languages. Instead, Greek became a common language for trade, administration, education, and public life.

That everyday form of Greek is called Koine, which means “common.” It was not the polished literary Greek associated with Plato. It was a flexible language used by people moving between cities, professions, and cultures. Jewish communities in places such as Alexandria could preserve their religious traditions while expressing them in the language heard around them.

The New Testament was also written in Greek, although Jesus and many people around him spoke Aramaic in daily life. The region was multilingual, and Greek was available whenever people needed to communicate across communities. Early Christian writers frequently quoted Greek Jewish scriptures because those scriptures were already familiar, authoritative, and readable to their audiences.

Translation is interpretation in motion

A translation does not carry meaning like a sealed package from one language into another. Translators must decide how to handle metaphors, unusual grammar, ambiguous words, and cultural references. Every decision leaves a small mark on the text.

Psalm 40 offers a memorable example. In the Hebrew tradition, a line is commonly understood as describing ears that God has opened or prepared. In the Greek version, the same passage speaks of a body prepared for the speaker. The numbering also shifts: Psalm 40 in most English Bibles is Psalm 39 in the Greek Psalter.

The author of Hebrews uses the Greek wording when presenting a statement about sacrifice and obedience. A translation choice made centuries earlier thus becomes part of an early Christian argument. The translator may not have intended the later Christian interpretation, but the Greek wording made that interpretation possible.

A useful miniature of the process looks like this:

Hebrew tradition → Greek translation → New Testament reuse
“ears opened” → “body prepared” → Hebrews 10

Not every difference between the Hebrew and Greek traditions carries such theological weight. Sometimes a translator clarified a difficult sentence or chose a natural expression. The larger lesson remains: a translated scripture can become an authoritative text in its own right.

The manuscript trail is part of the story

This is where textual criticism becomes useful. Textual criticism is the method of comparing surviving manuscripts, ancient translations, and quotations in later writers to reconstruct the earliest wording that can reasonably be recovered. A manuscript is a handwritten copy, and handwritten copies rarely match perfectly. Spelling changes, accidental omissions, corrections, and deliberate revisions accumulate as texts move through time.

The Dead Sea Scrolls helped make this ancient variety impossible to ignore. Among the scrolls are biblical texts that sometimes reflect different forms of a book, showing that Jewish scripture existed in more than one textual shape before later traditions became more standardized. The Septuagint occasionally preserves a Hebrew reading that differs from the medieval Hebrew tradition known as the Masoretic Text, the form transmitted and carefully marked by Jewish scribes called the Masoretes.

That does not mean the Greek is automatically older or more reliable. A Greek translator could misunderstand a Hebrew phrase, paraphrase it, or interpret it creatively. Scholars compare the evidence passage by passage rather than awarding the Hebrew or Greek a permanent victory. The question is not “Which language wins?” but “Which reading best explains the evidence we have?”

From a Greek church Bible to competing traditions

Early Christian readers did not ignore these differences. Origen, a third-century scholar from Alexandria, assembled the Hexapla, a huge comparison of Hebrew and Greek versions arranged in parallel columns. It was an attempt to show where the versions agreed, where they differed, and how readers might navigate the differences.

Centuries later, Jerome translated and revised the Latin Bible using both Hebrew and Greek materials. His work contributed to the Vulgate, the Latin Bible that became central to Western Christianity. Over time, many Western Christians moved toward a Hebrew-based Old Testament in Latin translation, while Eastern Christian traditions continued to give the Septuagint a central place in worship and theology.

This was not a clean replacement of one Bible by another. It was a gradual change in habits, institutions, and preferred languages. Different communities inherited different answers to the question of what counted as the most authoritative form of scripture.

The work is still unfinished

Modern scholars face a problem familiar to anyone maintaining a large software project: there is no single master file. A critical edition is a reconstructed scholarly text accompanied by notes that record significant manuscript alternatives. For the Septuagint, producing such editions requires comparing codices, papyrus fragments, church quotations, daughter translations, and the surviving evidence for earlier revisions.

The Göttingen Septuagint project has been working on this task for more than a century. Its newer work includes a long-term project on the Greek Psalter, launched in 2020, intended to replace Alfred Rahlfs’s 1931 edition with a fuller account of the Psalms’ complicated textual history. A second edition of the Twelve Prophets appeared in 2024. The continued work is a reminder that scholars are not polishing a fixed ancient original; they are documenting a living trail of translations and copies.

A different way to read the Bible

When God Spoke Greek is valuable because it restores a missing stage to the Bible’s history. The Septuagint was not merely a rough draft of the Hebrew Bible or a disposable translation used until something better appeared. It was scripture for real communities, the source text behind many early Christian arguments, and sometimes the only surviving witness to an older form of a biblical passage.

Once that history comes into view, the Bible looks less like a finished object with one publication date. It looks like a long record of translation, interpretation, copying, and use. The Septuagint is one of the clearest places where that history remains visible.