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The Septuagint - The First Bible of the Church
125 Plays7 months ago
Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures helped prepare the way for the message of Jesus and the spread of Christianity. These translations (the Septuagint) were the Scriptures used by the earliest churches, and help us understand connections between our Old and New Testaments. Nick and Matt take a look at some of the interesting and significant differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text like the inclusion of Apocryphal writings. They consider the disagreement between Augustine and Jerome around which version to use when developing the Vulgate, Finally they discuss the multiple text forms present in the Dead Sea Scrolls which raise important questions for Bible translators considering the importance of the Septuagint.
Resources Referenced: Invitation to the Septuagint by Karen Jobes and Moises Silva, The Septuagint, What is is and Why it Matters by Gregory Lanier and William Ross, When God Spoke Greek: the Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible by Timothy Michael Law, Koine Greek Reader, Selections from the New Testament, Septuagint, and Early Christian Writers by Rodney Decker, A Plea for the Septuagint by Mogens Muller, Was There only ONE Version of the Old Testament In Ancient Times? by Michael Heiser
Interlude Music: Between Moments by Amber Glow, After the Fight by Cherry the Penguin
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction to the Septuagint
00:00:01
Speaker
It's the Reparadigm Podcast, and today we have a conversation about the Greek translation of the Old Testament that Paul probably used, and it's called the Septuagint. If you've never heard of it, well, consider this deep dive.
00:00:15
Speaker
think there's some practical takeaways from this conversation as well. So, I hope you enjoy.
00:00:28
Speaker
Nick, finally, the day has arrived. It's the topic that everyone keeps requesting, the Septuagint. Whenever i tell someone about our podcast, they immediately ask, have you done an episode on ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible?
00:00:42
Speaker
Now, finally, I'll be able to tell them that yes, we have. No one has ever asked about the Septuagint. Literally, right before we started recording, I was talking to you about some more relevant topics that we should talk about.
00:00:52
Speaker
But instead, we're stuck with this boring stuff like ancient Greek translations of the Bible. yeah Make fun of me all you want, but I'm actually really excited about this conversation. I'm into it. I think it'll be important.
Historical Context and Origin
00:01:03
Speaker
The Septuagint was the scripture used by the first church, but it's interesting for more than just its importance in history. It offers insight into ancient Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. It can illuminate connections between the New and Old Testaments, and given some recent discoveries, it may even change what we consider to be the oldest text of the Hebrew Bible. Adolf Deisman wrote that, A single hour lovingly devoted to the text of the Septuagint will further our exegetical knowledge of the Pauline epistles more than a whole day spent over a commentary.
00:01:33
Speaker
That's some pretty high praise. Yeah, so let's go ahead and spend an hour lovingly devoted to the text of the Septuagint, Nick. All right, let's do it. Put very simply, the Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.
00:01:44
Speaker
The Greek language became widespread after Alexander the Great did his thing, conquering the known world. No biggie, whatever. Jewish communities living in Hellenized areas translated their Hebrew scriptures into Greek over the course of a few centuries.
00:01:56
Speaker
These translated texts came to be used widely in Jewish communities, and And they became the scriptures used by early Christians, who were made up largely of Greek-speaking Gentiles. The name Septuagint comes from a later tale that was told about the translation of this Hebrew Torah.
00:02:11
Speaker
According to this story, 72 translators were selected, six from each of Israel's 12 tribes. Apparently, two of the translators didn't do well enough to get remembered by history, so later writers record the same story but only mention 70 of these translators.
00:02:25
Speaker
Their names are probably matt and Nick. Easily forgettable by history. This translation of the Torah, along with the rest of the Hebrew Bible and some other texts that were written in Greek, all got put together and came to be called the Seventy, which in Latin is Septuaginta, or just Septuagint in English.
00:02:42
Speaker
Got it. Yep. Now, subduigent is quite a mouthful and takes up a lot of space when it's written, so it often gets abbreviated with the Roman numeral 70, LXX. I don't use a lot of Roman numerals, but we just watch the Super Bowl, which kind of functions as my annual reminder of how Roman numerals work.
00:02:58
Speaker
This year's Super Bowl was 59 LIX, which means in 11 years, we're going to have Super Bowl 70, the LXX, subduigent Super Bowl. I was thinking maybe we should have waited 11 years to release this episode.
Textual Discrepancies and Theological Implications
00:03:11
Speaker
We'll have to re-release it in 11 years, I think.
00:03:13
Speaker
If you have heard of it, it's probably because the New Testament quotations of the Old Testament usually come from the Septuagint. Sometimes these Septuagint versions that get quoted are a little different from the Hebrew Masoretic text that English translators use for the Old Testament. Oh. Oh, give me an example.
00:03:30
Speaker
Sure. So in Luke 4, Jesus reads a passage from Isaiah 61, where he says, the spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to. And then he goes ahead and lists all these things that he's anointed to do, including recovery of sight to the blind.
00:03:45
Speaker
This is interesting because recovery of sight to the blind comes from the Septuagint. It's not in the Masoretic Text version of Isaiah 61. Okay, wait. So if I go read the text Jesus read, but in my English Old Testament, I won't read what he read?
00:04:00
Speaker
That seems kind of weird. Like I should be reading the Bible Jesus is using, right? It does seem quite strange. And there's actually one more layer of complexity here. All right, let's get into it. It's that we're not sure what Jesus was actually reading.
00:04:12
Speaker
He may have been reading in Hebrew. He might have been reading in Greek. He might even have been reading in Aramaic. But Luke records these events for Greek speakers. So he quotes the Septuagint Greek translation.
00:04:23
Speaker
My point stands. I should be using the same Bible as Luke, if not Jesus, right? You would think so. So it's a bit odd. If you look at Luke 4 and you see this quotation and then you flip in your Bible back to Isaiah 61, you're going to see that this phrase recovery of sight to the blind isn't in the Isaiah 61 section.
00:04:41
Speaker
Not the same. Right. This is part of what makes the Septuagint so interesting. It's that it doesn't always match the Hebrew Masoretic text that we use for our translations of the Old Testament today.
00:04:51
Speaker
Now, obviously, any translation is have some stylistic differences from its original text. Sure, yeah. And kind of who cares about that? That's not a big deal. Yeah, but the differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text are way more sometimes than just stylistic. Okay.
00:05:05
Speaker
There are small changes, like in 1 Samuel 17. Goliath's height in the Masoretic text is six cubits in a span, which works out to about nine foot nine. But in Septuagint, he's four cubits in a span, about six foot nine.
00:05:19
Speaker
Oh, you call that a small change? I think that's a giant discrepancy. Boo. I saw a preview for an Amazon series called House of David, and they show Goliath. He looks like he's about 12 feet tall in this preview. At least 9-9. At least 9-9. They were definitely going with a Masoretic text version of Goliath.
00:05:37
Speaker
In Exodus 1, the Masoretic text says that Jacob went to Egypt with 70 descendants, but the Septuagint says he went with 75. Now, Acts 7.14 in the New Testament records that 70 people went. So, it agrees with the Septuagint against the Masoretic text.
00:05:54
Speaker
So, again, I feel a little bit shortchanged here. Like, why is my English text not translating the Old Testament text that the New Testament authors use? That's a good question.
00:06:04
Speaker
We'll get to it. yes There are also some larger changes between the Septuagint the Masoretic text. In the account of David and Goliath, there are sections of the narrative that get removed, other sections that get added.
00:06:17
Speaker
The Septuagint version of Jeremiah is about one-sixth shorter than the Masoretic text version. i mean, that's significant. We're talking about a book in our Protestant canon, Jeremiah, that you're telling me is one-sixth shorter in the Septuagint, likely the version that Paul and the apostles were using.
00:06:35
Speaker
They potentially were using a version of Jeremiah that's a sixth shorter than the one I'm reading. Yeah, they very well may have been. Annoyingly, some of the Psalms get grouped and split differently in the Septuagint, so the numbering doesn't match up with the Hebrew Bible numbering.
00:06:50
Speaker
Our English Bibles follow the Hebrew numbering system, so if you're comparing an English Bible to a Septuagint, in the Psalms, the numbering won't match for many of the Psalms. Mm-hmm. The Septuagint contains additional writings like Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ben Sirah that aren't included in the Hebrew Bible, books that we call the Apocrypha today.
00:07:08
Speaker
Some of these books were originally written in Greek, so it makes sense that they would get included with the Greek collection, but they wouldn't get included along with the Hebrew Bible. Yeah. So that's why it wasn't really surprising that a lot of early Christians included these texts in their canon tradition and still do. It makes sense, I think. like They were collected with the other Old Testament texts in the Subtuagint, so it's not surprising that they just continued to include those.
00:07:33
Speaker
It's also not surprising that these texts were removed from the canon in certain traditions once there was like a heavy emphasis placed on translating the Hebrew Bible into English and other languages.
00:07:44
Speaker
instead of the Septuagint into English or other languages. As soon as the Hebrew Bible is emphasized in translating, voila, the other Jewish texts written in Greek fall out of the tradition.
00:07:55
Speaker
Something like that? Yep. If you have a book that has a Greek form but doesn't have a Hebrew form because it was written originally in Greek, it's really hard to say, oh well, I'm going to work with the Hebrew text without kind of getting rid of it. Sure.
00:08:07
Speaker
This whole phenomenon of there being like different texts that were included, not included, very early in canon history, it kind of all makes sense through the lens of like what you're prioritizing when you're translating into Latin or into these other languages. If you're prioritizing the Hebrew versions, well, then you're going to exclude these other Jewish texts that were written only in Greek, the texts that we find in the Apocrypha.
Authority and Reception Among Early Communities
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It would be really weird to have a Hebrew Bible and then have a bunch of extra writings in Greek kind of tacked onto the end. So when you focus on keeping stuff in Hebrew, those Greek texts naturally fall away.
00:08:43
Speaker
There are some significant theological differences that show up in the Septuagint. Oh, like within the text included in the Protestant canon. Correct. So in some places, God is depicted as less violent in the Septuagint. In Exodus 15.3, the Masoretic text describes the Lord as a warrior.
00:09:00
Speaker
Well, in the Septuagint, it says that he shatters wars. In Psalm 9.21, the Masoretic text says, strike them with terror, Lord, where the Septuagint has set a lawgiver over them.
00:09:12
Speaker
Yeah, but at the same time, this seems a little bit petty. Like, I'm pretty certain that the genocide in Joshua is probably still in the LXX. It is, and you make a really good point. It's that we cannot look at the Septuagint and try to describe a single, consistent theology, because it's a group of translations done by a bunch of different people, probably over the course of a couple hundred years.
00:09:32
Speaker
We can look at all of these kind of individual, sporadic changes and sometimes start to see, oh, there's a few of these that are following the same type of pattern.
00:09:54
Speaker
The Subtuition tends to place a heavier emphasis on the idea of a coming Messiah. So in Isaiah 28.16 in the Masoretic Text, See, i am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation.
00:10:09
Speaker
One who trusts will not panic. Now, in the Septuagint, this phrase is changed to, and the one who believes in him will not be put to shame. So in the MT, it says, one who trusts will not panic. In the Septuagint, it says, the one who believes in him will not be put to shame.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, it clarifies the object of this trust. And not only clarifies it as the stone, but clarifies it as a person. Yeah. Genesis 49.10 in the Masoretic text.
00:10:38
Speaker
The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him, and the obedience of the peoples is his. In the Septuagint, it reads, a ruler shall not be wanting from Judah, and a leader from his thighs until the things stored up for him come, and he is the expectation of nations.
00:10:56
Speaker
So this kind of generic scepter that won't depart from Judah is turned into a specific person, a ruler, who will come. Interesting. It sort of takes these underlying, somewhat messianic themes in the Mesoretic texts and makes them very specific.
00:11:12
Speaker
It emphasizes that it's a coming ruler. So some of these differences really aren't petty. It leaves us with kind of the interesting conclusion that the apostles used an Old Testament text tradition, perhaps that I don't use, like we just mentioned.
00:11:26
Speaker
But another interesting thing to consider is that when Paul says that the Old Testament scriptures are God-breathed, is he referring to the Greek version or the Hebrew version of the Old Testament?
00:11:39
Speaker
Like, Paul was a trained rabbi who could certainly handle the Hebrew texts too, I'm sure. but It's interesting that he didn't care to specify which text tradition was God-breathed, right? oh That seems like an important question.
00:11:52
Speaker
He seems to be content that whatever text tradition the folks were reading was good enough for training in righteousness so that God's people would be mature. It sort of kind of shatters, I think, our paradigm of this biblicist verbal plenary inspiration doctrine that 20th century American evangelicals kind of came up with.
00:12:11
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely shows us that in Second Temple Judaism, and in fact, for the New Testament authors, they just weren't preoccupied with inspiration the way many are today. So with a very strict view of verbal plenary inspiration of the original text, the fact that the New Testament authors quote the Septuagint when it differs from the Hebrew text is really kind of a wrench in the system.
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it is. Now, I've seen this explained through sort of a tiered understanding of authority, where the original text is the authoritative version, where translations and other versions have a sort of derived authority insofar as they're faithful to the original.
00:12:46
Speaker
Okay, so that's why we see in our doctrinal statements things like the original manuscripts are inerrant or whatever. That's what they're getting at is like, our modern translations might not be, but insofar as they faithfully translate the originals, then they have that derived authority.
00:13:03
Speaker
The problem is, of course, we don't have the originals. But I guess like the problem is exacerbated when we consider that like Paul might have not had the originals. Or like what what originals?
00:13:13
Speaker
Again, Septuagint text tradition for the Old Testament or another text tradition. We don't even know what the originals are.
Translation and Preservation Challenges
00:13:20
Speaker
Yeah, you could argue that Paul is talking about the text that they do have and the inspiration he's referring to is just the inspiration of those as far as they're faithful to the originals. I guess you could say that he doesn't have to be making any specific reference to finding the original. Right, but that doesn't help us if we don't know what the originals are. It's like, cool, I'm glad you thought that, Paul. I don't know what those are. Can you please help me here? Should we go with the Masoretic text or should we go with Dead Sea Scrolls?
00:13:44
Speaker
And what version of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Yeah, it leaves a big question hanging over us today, especially when we go to try to translate a Bible or specify what is the text that we believe is inspired. Right. Yeah.
00:13:55
Speaker
Among the earliest Christians, these sort of textual critical questions don't actually seem to have been a big deal. Hmm. The New Testament was written in Greek, a language widely known by both Jews and Gentiles.
00:14:07
Speaker
So not surprisingly, it was the Septuagint that was the scripture of the church. Right. Because it was written in Greek. A Hebrew Bible wasn't going to be very helpful to a bunch of people who didn't speak Hebrew. Right. Right.
00:14:18
Speaker
Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are two of the oldest New Testament manuscripts we have, and both include Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Sinaiticus is partial, like a bit of it is missing, but Vaticanus is nearly a complete Septuagint, including the Hebrew Bible books we know and the Apocrypha.
00:14:34
Speaker
Oh, it includes both. Yep. Again, that's not surprising. So this this is sort of like proof positive that a lot of early Christians were using and collecting together what we had called the Apocrypha and what we had called the Protestant canon together into one bound document.
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah. And these are actually bound as codices. So they're shockingly similar to what we would call a Bible. Yeah. Codices meaning books. Yep. Yeah. Not just scrolls anymore. Right. But Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament, all in Greek. Right.
00:15:02
Speaker
My Protestant self wants to go back and correct those fellas. They didn't know what they were talking about. Come on, Jerome, where are you? We got to correct these early Christians. As an interesting side note, many of the names we use today for the books of the Hebrew Bible come from the Septuagint.
00:15:19
Speaker
Genesis from the Greek for beginning. Exodus means road out. Deuteronomy from the Greek for second law. Yeah, it is kind of funny. So though our English Bibles are translated from the Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic Text, we use the translations of the Greek Old Testament for our book titles.
00:15:38
Speaker
It's really funny, actually. So we arrange the texts, minus the Apocrypha, in a more Septuagint-like fashion, and we don't follow the Hebrew Bible book orders at all. So in our English translations of the Old Testament, we have Greek Old Testament book names, Hebrew Bible texts, Greek Old Testament book order, and the Hebrew Bible book list.
00:16:00
Speaker
We have such a Frankenstein's monster. In fact, what we know as 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings in the Septuagint is just 1, 2, 3, and 4 Kings. Right.
00:16:11
Speaker
So we've taken 1 and 2 Kings, but we've renamed them 1 and 2 Samuel following the Hebrew Bible, and we've renamed the Septuagint's 3 and 4 Kings to 1 and 2 Kings. We haven't even neatly followed the Septuagint. Yeah, we're making up our own version and names of these, sometimes mix-mashing the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint together.
00:16:32
Speaker
Works well for we Americans. We also came up with the imperial system of measurements. Freedom units. That's right. Many in the early church believed that the Septuagint had been divinely inspired message in Greek, given, in fact, in preparation for Jesus.
00:16:46
Speaker
This was part of God's plan to ready the world for the coming of the Messiah. Many Christians also saw the quoting of the Septuagint by the New Testament authors as evidence that it was God's word, and many believe it held equal authority to the scriptures written in Hebrew.
00:17:00
Speaker
was actually really similar to the way some people today think of the King James Version as God's inspired word for English speakers. It's kind of ironic, though. King James Version onlyists do not like the Septuagint because the King James Version was translated from Hebrew texts. Okay, that's funny.
00:17:16
Speaker
So they agree on the methodology. They just disagree strongly on which text to use. But let's be fair. Not all defenders of the Septuagint will appeal to it in the same way that KJV-only people will appeal to the KJV.
00:17:27
Speaker
But a subsect would. Yeah, there were some early Christians who talked about the Septuagint in a similar language that KJV-onlyists today talk about the KJV. The idea that the Septuagint was an inspired translation wasn't exclusively Christian either.
00:17:42
Speaker
Philo of Alexandria was a Jew living about the same time as Jesus. He argued that the Greek translation was an inspired text. Now, over the course of kind of the first few centuries of the church, Latin became the dominant language spoken on the Western side of Christianity.
00:17:56
Speaker
not surprisingly, the first translations of the Bible into Latin were made from the Septuagint. These early versions usually get called the Old Latin translation. Now, in the 4th century, after Christianity became the religion of the empire, leaders working to unify Christianity wanted a uniform Latin Bible.
00:18:13
Speaker
For good political reasons and such, I'm sure. Of course. A guy named Jerome was commissioned to develop this new Latin translation. Now, this Jerome fellow had spent some time in Israel and learned Hebrew, which is actually pretty rare for Christians at this time.
00:18:27
Speaker
He felt that the church should have a Latin Bible with the Old Testament translated from Hebrew, the true source, the Hebraica Veritas, as he called it. He didn't view the Septuagint as an inspired work like many others in the early church did.
00:18:40
Speaker
Kind of strangely, he even claimed that the New Testament quotations of the Hebrew scriptures were not from the Septuagint. He's wrong on this, though, right? Like, we can kind of verify this? Yeah, you can just go pull up a Septuagint and look at a Greek New Testament and see that most of the quotations match almost perfectly.
00:18:57
Speaker
With the Septuagint. Exactly. And Jerome's desire to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew wasn't well received by all. While he was preparing to do this, he wrote that, I prepare to send forth my hand into the flame.
00:19:10
Speaker
He knew he was going to get some criticism for this. Augustine was a contemporary of Jerome's. Augustine argued Septuagint was the correct Old Testament for the church, and he was afraid that if the Latin church started translating from the Hebrew, while the Greek-speaking Christians in the East continued to use the Septuagint, it was going to lead to division in the church.
00:19:29
Speaker
Augustine was also a little bit skeptical of Jerome's knowledge of Hebrew, and was concerned that nobody was going to be able to check this translation against the Hebrew because so few people in the church knew hebrew ah Augustine wasn't equally skeptical of his own knowledge of Greek. He famously butchered Romans 5.12 and Christians in the West today are still feeling the repercussions.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yes, he very admittedly never mastered Greek. Now, despite all these concerns, Jerome continued with his translation from Hebrew. And now his translation of the Old and New Testament came to be known as the Vulgate, the official Bible of the Western Latin Church.
00:20:04
Speaker
Now, the Eastern Church continued working in Greek. so they kept using the Septuagint. Even today, many Orthodox churches still consider the Septuagint their authoritative text for the Old Testament. So I guess kids in Orthodox Sunday school get the 6'6 version of Goliath. A mere Luka Doncic-sized Goliath.
00:20:22
Speaker
Do you think the Philistine general managers ever had concerns about Goliath's conditioning? They probably did. They should have traded him to the Israelites. I'll give you one old mighty man for him. You could have Saul.
00:20:55
Speaker
So how do we do Bible translation today? Most of our English translators today will use a Hebrew Bible for the Old Testament. When you're translating the Old Testament, you'll typically work from what we call the Masoretic text.
00:21:06
Speaker
Specifically, they work from the Leningrad Codex from the 11th century. It's a codex currently kept the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. Time out here. This is not an ancient version really at all.
00:21:19
Speaker
but we're We're talking about the 11th century yeah of the Common Era. That is the Masoretic text that we are translating our English Bibles from. Yeah, I'll say this. If you were to go back 100 years and try to translate the Old Testament...
00:21:34
Speaker
This is about the best text you would have had Yeah, sure. Fair enough. I'm not knocking. I'm just making this observation. Yep. This is not an ancient text. No. In the world of text criticism and like if you're accustomed to the world of New Testament text criticism, this is very, very old. Right. Yeah. Texts in the 11th century aren't even considered or regarded in translations of the New Testament because we have so many varied texts that are far, far earlier for the New Testament text. Yeah.
00:22:01
Speaker
A New Testament text has to be third, fourth, fifth century to really be considered yeah yeah be considered really useful. right yeah But this codex in Russia, it's this big, beautiful codex with lots of cool decorative pages on it.
00:22:13
Speaker
We know that there's a long Jewish tradition of really precise scribal culture that keeps accurate and consistent versions of the text. Right. And to that point, so that's no reason to like think this 11th century text is a bad text.
00:22:26
Speaker
Right. Not at all. that's That wasn't my point either. Yeah. In fact, we can be
Impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls
00:22:30
Speaker
pretty confident that this Leningrad Codex that we have in Russia and other manuscripts yeah you know in this Masoretic text family are very close to older versions yeah of the Hebrew text that we don't have. Fair enough. Yep.
00:22:41
Speaker
For a long time, there was a broad consensus that the Septuagint, wherever it was different from these Masoretic texts, was just kind of a bad or sloppy translation. It was thought that the translators removed the parts they didn't like, added parts where they wanted more detail, changed some translation elements to fit their ideas, and kind of reorganized the text as they wanted.
00:23:00
Speaker
So the differences between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint were explained just as the work of the translators. Hmm. so bible translators didn't give the subtuagint a whole lot of consideration when they were translating the old testament it's only real use for them was when there was a word in hebrew that nobody knew what it meant then they would go look at the subtuagint as kind of like a piece of evidence like hey can you help me out a little bit here i don't know what this word means but largely the subtuin got brushed aside as kind of an oddity of history we've got the masoretic text to the hebrew bible so what does the subptuagint really matter anyway to think that older texts, i.e. the LXX, are the ones that have potentially fudged with things, while your 11th century text is the one that maintains a more pure reading, it just seems like maybe an odd assumption. Like, shouldn't the LXX have been consulted for more than just word oddities, but since it's preserving an older text?
00:23:50
Speaker
It's a good question because we had copies of the Septuagint that were much older than the Leningrad Codex. But I will say we know and we have good evidence that the scribal culture, especially of the Masoretes, was really good.
00:24:03
Speaker
They did a really good job at preserving text over long periods of time. They had it down to a science. We also know, obviously, that at some point the Septuagint went through a translation. And a translation kind of opens the door for changes to be made.
00:24:17
Speaker
When we look at ancient translations of any text, it's not uncommon to see big changes made. When somebody sits down to translate a text, they often take liberties to kind of make that text accessible to their new audience with a new language.
00:24:31
Speaker
So I don't think it's a crazy idea to think, oh, well, the Septuagint translators were likely the ones responsible for these big changes that we see between the Septuagint and the Mesoretic text. So the Masoretes would pride themselves in preserving a very ancient version of the Hebrew Bible text.
00:24:47
Speaker
And they would bank on it that their text is faithful to the originals as close as they can get. Yeah. That was the general consensus of both Jewish and Christian translators of the Old Testament. Okay.
00:24:58
Speaker
At the end of the day, though, until the Dead Sea Scrolls, we still didn't have really older versions of the Hebrew text. Yeah. So there's no way to check if that assumption was right.
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah. The discovery of a bunch of very old Hebrew texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls about 80 years ago in Qumran, has forced some serious change in the way we think about the Septuagint and really our approach to Old Testament textual criticism on the whole.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah. So about half of the scriptural texts that were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, like the Great Isaiah Scroll, were very close to the Masoretic text. Kind of confirming that the Masoretes did a good job preserving a very old text tradition. Exactly. Incredibly close in a lot of places.
00:25:40
Speaker
However, what was very surprising at Qumran was the discovery of other versions of these texts written in Hebrew. Yeah. sometimes in text forms that closely match the structure of the Septuagint.
00:25:54
Speaker
So this has shown us that the difference between the Septuagint and the Masoretic texts is sometimes not that the Septuagint translators made changes, but that the Septuagint translators were working from a different form of the Hebrew text.
00:26:08
Speaker
Wow. Okay. Yeah. So this is getting complicated. Yeah. Yeah. Just pause for a moment with me here and think about this. At Qumran, were discovered versions of these scriptural texts in different forms alongside each other.
00:26:22
Speaker
The community at Qumran doesn't seem to have been obsessed with finding one single scriptural tradition that represented the true and proper Bible. I think this is something that we evangelicals are uncomfortable with.
00:26:34
Speaker
We want the inspired text. The Second Temple Jews, or at least the Jews at Qumran, were like, here are some text traditions. We preserve them all for you. Here you go. And the question of canon was a question of canons, plural.
00:26:49
Speaker
It doesn't really help to appeal to Jesus here either because the Hebrew canon was not formally recognized until after his advent. Michael Heiser actually has a nice little YouTube video on this where he talks about how the Jews at Qumran preserved the different text traditions that were handed down to them without weighing in on what one was the true one.
00:27:11
Speaker
Yeah, we don't have any evidence that Jesus gathered together a group of scrolls and put a seal on it and said, I hereby approve these as the like the original and authoritative ones. And it would be nice. We evangelical Christians have built our Biblicism with that assumption.
00:27:25
Speaker
that we have a very fixed text tradition that Jesus believed in. i am confident in the general contents of the Hebrew Bible that Jesus was likely using, but it's not that there was just one text tradition with all the questions of canonicity and variance answered at the time of Jesus. That's just not historically the case.
00:27:46
Speaker
Yeah. I will say the discovery of these multiple text forms at Qumran that were all written in a couple centuries before Jesus... yeah Doesn't necessarily prevent us from continuing to try to seek the most original version of the text. Right.
00:27:59
Speaker
If anything, it gives us more evidence to do so. Absolutely. But it makes it more difficult. You know, it demands that we question some of the assumptions that we may have had 90 years ago before we discovered all these ancient Hebrew texts. Yeah, before the Qumran Dead Sea Scroll texts were discovered, we were maybe a little bit blissfully ignorant of some of the complexities here. Yeah.
00:28:19
Speaker
Yeah, have the Dead Sea Scrolls open up our eyes to the complexities and don't always tie up all these questions with a nice, neat bow. So we don't have full versions from the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Hebrew Bible that line up with the Masoretic text or a Hebrew text that lines up with the Septuagint.
00:28:35
Speaker
We have kind of bits and pieces that match each one. This has led some scholars to propose that the Septuagint readings may actually be evidence of an older Hebrew version than in the Masoretic text.
00:28:47
Speaker
So those that hold this position would argue that where the Masoretic text and the Septuagint differ, other text forms like the one that the Septuagint represent may actually be evidence of the older, more original text. Right. Isn't this just obviously the case?
00:29:01
Speaker
Well, could be, but there's other possibilities too. Okay. So we know that the Septuagint and the Masoretic text forms differ in some circumstances. And we know that some of these differences were present in different Hebrew forms in Qumran.
00:29:14
Speaker
But there are lots of Septuagint differences that we haven't found in Hebrew. So it leaves the open question, are these changes that were made by the translators? Or is it evidence of another version of a Hebrew text? okay Even if we do say that it's evidence for another version of the Hebrew text, that still leaves open the question of which Hebrew text form do we think is closer to the original? Right, yeah.
00:29:33
Speaker
The message that many Christians have heard regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls is that the scrolls found there, like the Great Isaiah Scroll, match the Masoretic text that we have from a thousand years later. and this proves that we can trust our Bibles.
00:29:44
Speaker
Yeah, there's this Christian apologist, Wes Huff, who was recently on Joe Rogan and said something like this. Exactly. He said that the Masoretic texts match the Dead Sea Scrolls text of the Great Isaiah Scroll.
00:29:57
Speaker
I think his words were word for word or 100%. Okay. okay But yeah, this is used by Christian apologists oftentimes to be like, therefore, trust the Bible. It was all preserved really well, which as a general point might be a thing, but it's not a word for word type of thing. Yeah. I think generally what they're trying to communicate there is true, but it's potentially a misleading half-truth. Yeah.
00:30:19
Speaker
The Dead Sea Scrolls show us that the Masoretic text did in fact preserve a much older version of the Hebrew text, but the Dead Sea Scrolls also proves that there were other forms of the Hebrew text being used.
00:30:30
Speaker
Right. And the Masoretes were only preserving one form. Exactly. So for biblical translators, it's great that they can know that the Masoretic text is a carefully preserved text form, but the existence of other old forms in Hebrew means that the textual critics are actually less likely to go with Masoretic texts when there are variant readings now.
00:30:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's kind of interesting. Like, we have extra evidence that we can trust the Masoretic text, but we now know that we should maybe use it less. Yeah, because we know it's just one of several text forms.
00:31:01
Speaker
Some of the others may may not have been older forms. Yeah. We'll leave that up to the text critics to figure out. Yeah. This definitely shouldn't decrease our trust in the Bible. No.
00:31:12
Speaker
If we want more original versions of the text, textual critics now have more information and historical context available to help them get there.
Practical Examples and Translation Choices
00:31:20
Speaker
Right. Yep. So it's probably worth a reminder here that we're talking about differences that only seriously affect a relatively small portion of the Old Testament. Fair enough. yeah But I think the question that Christians, especially translators, need to face is, are we concerned with getting better or are we simply preoccupied with proving that what we have been using is correct?
00:31:40
Speaker
Do we want the truth or do we want comfort? Exactly. Sometimes we can't have both. I think usually you can't have both. You can't handle the truth. I think looking at a couple of these specific differences might be helpful.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, let's do that. Psalm 145 is acrostic.
00:32:03
Speaker
One line starts with each of the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. However, it's missing the section for one Hebrew letter, the letter Nun. Okay. Now, the Septuagint has the extra lines where the Masoretic text appears to be missing them.
00:32:18
Speaker
And this is interesting. One of the Hebrew scrolls from the Dead Sea Scrolls includes this line for the letter Nun, just like the Septuagint had. ah So, some English translators are now including those extra lines as verse 13.
00:32:32
Speaker
So, they think that the best evidence is that this text was original, but was lost by the Masoretic text tradition. Right. This would seem to be a kind of more obvious omission by the Masoretic text. And somewhere along the line, they lost that.
00:32:45
Speaker
The Dead Sea Scrolls helped provide some older text traditions that include it. and you're like, oh, this makes sense. There's the line for the noon. Yep. Yeah, and especially with being an acrostic, having that line in Hebrew is especially helpful.
00:32:58
Speaker
It's kind of obvious that that was probably lost in the later MT. Yeah. Now, another example, this one from the David and Goliath story. In 1 Samuel 16, when Saul was tormented by an evil spirit, one of his servants told the king about David, Jesse's son, who plays the liar.
00:33:13
Speaker
Saul became fond of David and made him one of his armor bearers. Then in chapter 17, David decides he's going to face Goliath. So he goes and talks to Saul, who offers him his personal armor. But it's too big for David, so he goes and kills Goliath with just a sling and a stone. Yep.
00:33:28
Speaker
After the battle, there's an odd bit of narrative that rewinds back to the beginning of the battle and describes Saul watching David go out to meet Goliath, asking, whose son is this young man?
00:33:39
Speaker
Like he's never met David before. Oh, interesting. Now, this odd bit at the end of the story is not present in the Septuagint, which begs the question, was this part of the original or was it added to the Hebrew after the Greek translation was made?
00:33:53
Speaker
None of the English translations I've looked at remove this section, but several of them will add footnotes mentioning that it's not present in the Septuagint. Yeah, that's interesting. But why does any of this matter? Beyond the text criticism question. Yeah, exactly.
00:34:08
Speaker
Which me and you and anyone who's listening to this isn't up to anyway. Like, it doesn't really matter what we think about any of this, does it? Yeah. If you are a professional text critic of the Old Testament listening to our podcast, ah please email us. But if you should be listening to something else. Maybe you listen to a different podcast. This is for the common folk.
00:34:27
Speaker
Yeah, the Septuagint has a lot of benefits beyond just the text criticism questions. One of those benefits is its use in Old Testament interpretation. Translation is always going to include some level of interpretation. Yep.
00:34:39
Speaker
So for passages that are difficult to translate or understand, the Septuagint can provide another perspective for us. One from a Hebrew speaker who was living in the ancient world. Somebody who was much more contextually close to the original text than we are today.
00:34:53
Speaker
Genesis 6 describes Nephilim. The Hebrew of this passage could be taken several different ways. The only reason Nephilim is used in English is because some translators have decided to transliterate rather than having to pick one of these translation options. That's a classic translation move. Yep. If you don't know what a word means, just transliterate it. Yep, exactly.
00:35:14
Speaker
Now, the Septuagint translates Nephilim with gigantes, giants. Yeah, gigantic. So whether or not you agree with the Septuagint translators here, this at least gives you a window. You know that there was a probably third or second century BC translator who looked at this text in Hebrew, their native language probably, and said, oh yeah, Nephilim means gigantes. Yeah, the best Greek word for that would be giant.
00:35:36
Speaker
Yes. So if you're an English speaker living today trying to translate this difficult Hebrew text, that's a good piece of evidence to consider when you're translating Genesis 6. Right. Though Nephilim may not be a common word in modern Hebrew, we can pretty well determine what it meant to a 3rd century BC Hebrew speaker. Mm-hmm.
00:35:56
Speaker
And that person would say, yeah, it means giant. Yep. Another interesting aspect of any translation is trying to deal with names, especially when names have a lot of meaning. So when you translate names from Hebrew, the meaning of those names will usually get lost.
00:36:11
Speaker
Yeah. So Adam in Hebrew means human. Eve means life. Usually our English translations will just keep these as names, meaning we keep Adam and Eve, but we lose human and life.
00:36:23
Speaker
So Genesis 3.20 in the NIV, Adam named his wife Eve because she would become the mother of all the living. Now the Septuagint translators here... They decided to keep Adam as a name, but here they felt that the meaning of Eve's name was more important than the name itself.
00:36:40
Speaker
So they actually translate Eve here to life in Greek. Interesting. Wow. So this verse in the Septuagint says, and Adam called the name of his wife life because she is the mother of all the living.
00:36:53
Speaker
And by the way, this is just true in the Hebrew Bible, especially these earlier texts, Genesis 1 through 11, all the names mean something. i mean i mean, even throughout the Hebrew Bible, all the prophets' names mean something.
00:37:05
Speaker
And a lot of them are very translatable. Like, we know what they mean. And you could just translate them as the meaning of that name, or you could transliterate and just have the sound of their name. Yeah. Another example would be like Abel.
00:37:18
Speaker
Should we translate Abel from the Hebrew Hevel? Or should we translate the meaning of Hevel, which is the same as you'd recognize from Ecclesiastes? Hevel of Hevel. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Or translated another way, gone with the wind, gone with the wind. All things are going with the wind. In other words, passing away.
00:37:37
Speaker
That which is passing away. What happens to Mr. Hevel in that text? He passes away very quickly. If not a teacher of the ancient Hebrew language, it's certainly a feature of the biblical Hebrew text that the names mean something, oftentimes within the narrative itself and for purposes within that very narrative.
00:37:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really interesting now when you're looking at a Greek translation where they're using both the transliteration and translation because you can see where did they decide that the meaning of a name was so important that it was actually worth translating rather than just transliterating a name The Septuagint is also really useful for finding connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
00:38:20
Speaker
This familiarity influences the language they use. In the Septuagint, covenant gets translated with the Greek word theatheki. The common meaning of this word had actually shifted by the time the New Testament was written to mean something more like last will.
00:38:33
Speaker
The New Testament authors still use theatheki the way it was used in the Old Testament. The Septuagint provides context that helps us understand the language of the New Testament. I'm struck by how much reading parts of the Septuagint feels familiar.
00:38:47
Speaker
It very much feels like you're in the same world as the New Testament authors. Rather than when you read an English translation that translates one from Hebrew, one from Greek, there's some disconnect. There's new language that comes in, language that changes, kind of a different vibe.
00:39:00
Speaker
Some of that goes away and the two feel a little more similar when you're reading in the Septuagint and then in the Greek New Testament. That's interesting. Yeah. so that does affect our theology when it's affecting our conceptions of things like the etheke, like covenant. Well, that that's a prominent and important theme that affects a lot of our New Testament theology that we develop.
Tools for Septuagint Study and Modern Relevance
00:39:20
Speaker
And if we felt like we had more continuity between the language that's being used in the Old Testament and the language that's being used in the New Testament, both translating a word as covenant, like that would be helpful to like have that continuity.
00:39:35
Speaker
And what you're saying is actually reading the LXX, the Septuagint, and then reading the New Testament sometimes provides us a little bit more of that continuity with some of these theologically loaded words.
00:39:46
Speaker
Yeah, we did Words Matter podcasts on gospel and on church. Words that are used in the Septuagint and then also used in the New Testament, but you lose that continuity in most of our English translations.
00:39:58
Speaker
Right. The classic example with gospel is you will not find a passage in your English Old Testament that says gospel, but in the Alex X, it's all over. Evangelion is all over in the New Testament and it's all over in the Old Testament. Mm-hmm.
00:40:12
Speaker
The fact that we don't have the same word gospel in English found in the New Testament and Old Testament is a direct result of us translating our English Bibles from a Greek New Testament and a Hebrew Old Testament text tradition.
00:40:27
Speaker
There are plenty of easy ways to begin accessing and using the Septuagint and seeing these benefits that it can have for studying your Bible. One of the easiest ways is just to read an English translation of the Subtuagent.
00:40:39
Speaker
The N-E-T-S is the New English Translation of the Subtuagent, and it's available for free online. You can also use Subtuagent search tools very easily. We put together a short video showing how you can do Subtuagent word searches in Blue Letter Bible.
00:40:52
Speaker
That's a free and very easily accessible tool, but I will say that it only gives you partial access to the Subtuagent. It only gives you access to the books that are in the Protestant canon. Okay, so you don't get a lot of these other texts that are in other Christian canons.
00:41:06
Speaker
Yeah, you don't get access to the Apocrypha. Okay. If you want access to that larger body of text, you'll want to use something like Logos software. Now here you'll need to purchase a digital Septuagint, but the word search tools available are way more powerful, and you'll get access to all those additional books, which can provide some really interesting illumination on New Testament passages.
00:41:27
Speaker
There are just websites that have the Septuagint in English. They might not be very user-friendly, but you can find the Apocrypha in English on various websites, too, if you just Google it. Yeah.
00:41:37
Speaker
If you're ever going through the New Testament and looking at quotations of the Old Testament that don't quite match, go look them up in an English translation of the Septuagint and see what's different from your Hebrew text.
00:41:49
Speaker
Don't be afraid to go do a word search and see where a key word or phrase that you're looking at in the New Testament might show up in the Old Testament through the Septuagint in places that your English Bible might not make clear.
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So, for example, if I'm reading my English New Testament on my Bible software, let's say, and I get to a section that talks about the propitiation or something like that, and I click on that word, propitiation, I'll see in Greek it's hilasterion or something like that.
00:42:18
Speaker
Well, I could word search for Helasterion in the Alex X, right? And then I could see every time that the Septuagint translates that word in the Old Testament.
00:42:28
Speaker
That's a Bible study right there. That'd give me a wealth of knowledge for what Paul is meaning when he says that in Greek. It's exactly the way Paul would have done his word studies, although maybe without the clicking or the hyperlinks. He would have just probably had a Greek Old Testament text next to him, perhaps.
00:42:45
Speaker
Or large sections of it memorized. Yeah. Or a Hebrew version that aligned well with the Alex text. A version that we no longer have. I hope you preserved it in a jar so we can discover it somewhere.
00:42:57
Speaker
to To just kind of wrap this conversation, I think we brought up a lot of different things regarding both the Qumran text, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the LXX, the Septuagint. And we discussed kind of some of the impact that both the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint could have potentially on the meaning of our English Bibles, our English Old Testament.
00:43:16
Speaker
Largely because our English Old Testaments are translated from the Masoretic texts, which is preserving potentially a different text tradition And the version of the Masoretic text that we're using for our English Bible is of course an 11th century AD text.
00:43:29
Speaker
And assuming you're using an English translation that's been made in the last 40, 50 years, there's already some of that evidence there. If you look closely at the text notes, especially as you're going through something like 1 Samuel, you'll see a lot of text notes saying, ah, well, this is based on a Dead Sea Scrolls reading, or here we use a Subtuagent reading.
00:43:47
Speaker
You'll start to see that our Bible translators are already starting to use some of this new evidence that we have from the Dead Sea Scrolls to influence what they think is the best text to translate Okay, so good text criticism is going on. They are taking into account Septuagint readings, partly because the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hebrew texts from the third-ish century BC, are confirming that a lot of the Alex X readings are probably more original.
00:44:13
Speaker
They confirm that the Septuagint is sometimes translated from a Hebrew text form that is as old. It's tricky because you could like you could almost put this in a table and have like five different categories, right? You could have sections where we have old versions in Hebrew that match the Masoretic text and old versions that match the Septuagint.
00:44:31
Speaker
You could have versions from the Dead Sea Scrolls where we have a set of texts that matches the Masoretic text, but not the Subtuagent. And then you could find sections where we have that match the Subtuagent form, but not the Masoretic text form.
00:44:42
Speaker
mean, you could almost classify them to all these different categories. I think the bottom line for Christians is that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has called into question some of the older assumptions that existed about the originality of the Masoretic text form.
00:44:56
Speaker
That may be uncomfortable, but it's a good thing for text criticism because it means that if we really are interested in finding the most original or oldest form of these texts, we have more evidence available now. Yeah, that makes sense.
00:45:09
Speaker
It also raises kind of the practical question, why are the apostles quoting a text that's different than my Old Testament text in English? And it's just a simple answer most of the time. Oh, they're using a slightly different text tradition.
00:45:21
Speaker
yeah Either the Septuagint or or one of the different Hebrew text traditions of the time that weren't preserved in what's now the Masoretic text. So the Masoretic text may well be as ancient as any of the other text traditions, but it is just one of the other text traditions.
Conclusion and Reflection on Text Traditions
00:45:37
Speaker
yeah And I think that probably just needs to be acknowledged too. We don't really have a slam dunk. This is the oldest text tradition form. These are the copies of the original autographs.
00:45:48
Speaker
This shorter version of Jeremiah or the longer version of Jeremiah or the Psalm that has the noon in there. Like, we don't have all those questions answered. That's probably good to acknowledge that.
00:45:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good thing to reflect on it. The Bible we have is based on texts that are largely consistent and everybody agrees on. But around the borders and little bits and pieces in between, there are serious questions about whether or not the text that we're using would have been an original. And I kind of put that in air quotes text.
00:46:17
Speaker
And we know that early Christians and Second Temple Jewish traditions were more comfortable with multiple forms of the text than we would be today. a lot of Christians, evangelicals today will take kind of a very firm stance on their Biblicism.
00:46:33
Speaker
And that stance doesn't seem to be the stance that a lot of early Christians or even Second Temple Jews held towards scripture. They were more kind of open handed with being willing to work with multiple text forms or to be able to work in a translation and not worry too much about whether or not that translation matched perfectly with an original form of the text.
00:46:53
Speaker
Honestly, a lot of this is just a product of the technologies of the time too. I mean, the ancient Hebrews had separate scrolls. There was no such thing as a canon collected into a codex, into a book.
00:47:07
Speaker
That was conceptually not a thing. And so, like, just the fact that each one of your texts that would then later be included in what's called a canon, those are all separate scrolls. It would be stuck on the wall somewhere or put in different places.
00:47:22
Speaker
Hand me the Jonah scroll. Hand me the... Just the fact that that's how people's interaction with the Bible as such was, that affects the way you view canonicity, verbal plenary inspiration, and things like that.
00:47:36
Speaker
They weren't arguing over which one you need to send off to the printers because you're going to go get a thousand copies of it printed, right? If you're a small community in a synagogue or in an early church, it's like you had whatever scrolls or early codices you had, and you relied upon those texts heavily to guide your tradition.
00:47:54
Speaker
They were very much texts that you used, and it seems like they were less concerned with sitting around and debating about the specifics of the text itself. Right. I think that's interesting. i think it's ah I think it's a blessing that we have so much data to to help us guide towards a very ancient reading of these texts.
00:48:12
Speaker
I mean, we can be fairly confident that our versions of the Pentateuch are preserving something as old as the original writings of the Pentateuch without major, major differences. I think it's a blessing that we have different text traditions that were preserved by, for example, the Jews at Qumran that are instantiated in the Al-Aqsaq Septuagint.
00:48:33
Speaker
I had a professor once, it's interesting, he described the phenomenon of preserving different text traditions. He described it as sister texts, sister canons. Jesus's Old Testament was a collection of writings that could be categorized as Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim.
00:48:50
Speaker
But like the fringes of those canon, maybe besides Torah, the fringes of those are fuzzy. And the specifics, what version of each of those books is also fuzzy?
00:49:02
Speaker
Because Jesus had sister text traditions preserved for him. And he doesn't weigh in on what one's the right one, whether or not the Alex X most faithfully reflects the right text tradition, or whether or not something more akin to what we now have as the Masoretic text reflects the right one.
00:49:22
Speaker
Doesn't even weigh in on it at all. Jesus seemed to be fairly happy with his canon when he refers to it as the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim. And so, like, we should be happy with that too and we should be thankful for all the data that we have.
00:49:35
Speaker
But we're probably going a little bit off the road here when we get too caught up in the verbal plenary inspiration of a very specific text form. And we probably do need a degree of humility to just receive these text forms as being providentially passed down by God through His people.
00:49:54
Speaker
And we'll just receive them as such. And we Protestants and Orthodox and Catholics will debate about the fringes of the canon and the different text forms that we use to translate into English.
00:50:05
Speaker
And that's all like healthy debate. But we probably don't need to choke hold each other over it. Yeah. Yeah. Keep our eyes on the the essential fact that the texts we have are still useful and that they're useful guides for our lives.
00:50:19
Speaker
profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness. Praise God for that. Absolutely. um So finally, to all of those people who have been just hoarding us persistently to finally do Septuagint podcast, there you go. You can leave us alone now.
00:50:58
Speaker
A sincere thanks to everyone who's listened to the RepairDime podcast. And thanks especially to those who've reached out and expressed how much the podcast has blessed them. We've got plenty more we want to do, plenty of other topics we want to cover.
00:51:11
Speaker
So until next time, thanks again for listening to the RepairDime podcast.
00:51:44
Speaker
Amen.