Septuagint
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Septuagint
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[edit] Definition
The Septuagint, also sometimes known as the LXX, is the name given to the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures made in the third century BC and afterwards.
[edit] History
According to legend the translation was made by six scholars apiece from the twelve tribes of Israel (making 72 in total) over a 72 day period, at the behest of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt. Early Christians generally believed that the Septuagint was a perfect and inspired translation: the quasi-miraculous story of their origin is told, amongst others, by the early Christian writer Irenaeus:
- "But he, wishing to test them individually, and fearing lest they might perchance, by taking counsel together, conceal the truth in the Scriptures, by their interpretation, separated them from each other, and commanded them all to write the same translation. He did this with respect to all the books ... But when they came together in the same place before Ptolemy, and each of them compared his own interpretation with that of every other, God was indeed glorified, and the Scriptures were acknowledged as truly divine. For all of them read out the common translation in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end, so that even the Gentiles present perceived that the Scriptures had been interpreted by the inspiration of God."
[edit] Discussion
We should be careful when speaking of the Septuagint. According to Philo of Alexandria, writing in the 1st century AD, only translations of the first five books of the Bible (the Torah) were translated by the seventy-two scholars. The other books of Hebrew scripture --- the histories, the prophets, the wisdom literature --- were translated at a later date by unknown authors in an order that is still not clear.
As soon as the Septuagint was copied, it was copied wrongly. By the third century AD, the problem was severe enough that the Christian scholar Origen edited an official recension of the Septuagint. The result of this is that most of the available manuscripts reflect what Origen thought the Septuagint said, and, of course, the manuscripts which followed Origen were also subject to copying errors. Only a small part of Origen's own manuscript remains.
The upshot of all this is that despite the much earlier date of "the" Septuagint as compared to the Masoretic Text, we do not happen to have "the" Septuagint to hand, in the sense of the original (or even Origen-al) version; so it is not clear whether we should correct the Masoretic text by the light of the Septuagint, or vice versa.
One famous difference between the two texts is two be found in Isaiah 7:14. In the Septuagint, this passage prophecies that a virgin ("parthenos") will give birth. In the Masoretic text, we have the much less startling prophecy that a woman will give birth. We might suppose that the translator was at fault with his Hebrew, or that his Hebrew manuscript was defective (this, remember, is the book of Isaiah, and not part of the original Septuagint), or that his Greek was at fault --- or we can suppose that he got it absolutely right, and that it is the Masoretic text which is faulty. This issue is vexed still further by the question of whether we should be reading the Greek word "parthenos" to mean virgin! The word had a certain ambiguity to it, rather like the ambiguity of the archaic English word "maiden".
The Gospel of St Matthew, of course, relies on the notion that the word means "virgin", as shown in Matthew 1:18-23. It is hardly surprising that someone writing a gospel in Greek would refer to the Septuagint rather than going back to the original Hebrew.
Despite the apparent reliance of the gospellers on the Septuagint, modern recensions and translations of the Old Testament are based on the Masoretic text.
