The Septuagint and the Greek Scriptures
When the Scriptures Crossed Into Another Language
“Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.”
— Luke 24:45 (CSB)
By the time Jesus was born, the Scriptures of Israel had already crossed an important bridge. They had been translated into Greek.
That may not sound especially remarkable to us because we are used to seeing the Bible in many languages, but in the ancient world it was a very important development. Jewish people were living far beyond Judea, and many of them spoke Greek in everyday life. Some could no longer read Hebrew easily enough to understand Scripture well, so a Greek translation became necessary.
That Greek translation tradition became known as the Septuagint, often shortened to LXX.
The Septuagint would eventually become one of the most important links between the Jewish Scriptures Jesus knew and the growing Christian church.
Why Was a Greek Translation Needed?
Centuries before Jesus, Jewish communities had spread into many parts of the Mediterranean world. One of the most important Jewish centers was Alexandria in Egypt, where Greek was widely spoken.
For many Jewish families living outside Judea, Greek became the language used at home, in business, and in public life. As generations passed, some Jewish people became more comfortable speaking Greek than reading Hebrew.
That created a very practical problem. If Scripture remained only in Hebrew, many ordinary Jewish people would have difficulty understanding it.
So the Scriptures began to be translated into Greek.
This was not a rejection of Hebrew or of Jewish faith. It was a way of helping people hear Scripture in a language they understood. In that sense, the purpose was not very different from the purpose of modern Bible translations today.
What Does “Septuagint” Mean?
The name Septuagint comes from an ancient tradition about the translation of the Torah, the first five books of Moses.
According to that tradition, a group of Jewish scholars translated the Law into Greek in Alexandria. The number of translators came to be remembered as around seventy or seventy-two, which is why the Roman numeral LXX, meaning seventy, became connected with the translation.
The story became more detailed as it was retold, so we should not assume that every part of the later tradition is certain history.
What we can say with confidence is that the Torah was translated into Greek several centuries before Jesus, and other Jewish writings were translated into Greek over time.
That last part is important.
The Septuagint was not one complete Bible translated all at once by one group of people.
It developed gradually.
The Septuagint Was a Translation Tradition
When we hear the name Septuagint, it is easy to imagine one ancient Greek Bible with a fixed table of contents and one consistent translation style from beginning to end.
The history is more complicated.
Different books were translated at different times, and different translators did not always work the same way. Some stayed very close to the Hebrew wording, while others expressed the meaning more freely.
Over time, Greek biblical manuscripts also did not always contain exactly the same group of books.
So it is better to think of the Septuagint as a broad Greek scriptural tradition rather than one single ancient edition that looked exactly like a modern Bible.
That will become especially important when we later talk about canon.
Jesus Lived in a Multilingual World
Jesus did not grow up in a world where everyone around Him spoke only one language.
Aramaic was almost certainly the everyday language He used most often. The Gospels even preserve some of His Aramaic words and phrases. Jesus also knew the Jewish Scriptures deeply, which makes knowledge of Hebrew very likely, especially in religious settings.
Greek was also widely spoken in the region, particularly in trade and in communities connected to the wider Roman world. We cannot say with certainty how fluent Jesus was in Greek, but it is quite possible that He knew and used at least some Greek.
So when we picture Jesus and the earliest Christians, we should picture a world where people sometimes moved between languages.
That helps us understand why Greek Scripture mattered so much.
The Scriptures could be read in Hebrew, heard in Aramaic-speaking settings, and also known in Greek translation. The ancient world was not as linguistically simple as we sometimes imagine.
The New Testament Often Sounds Like the Septuagint
Many Old Testament quotations in the New Testament sound closer to the Greek Septuagint than to the Hebrew form later preserved in the Masoretic tradition. That makes sense because the New Testament was written in Greek and many early Christian communities were Greek-speaking. Not every quotation follows the Septuagint word for word—some are closer to Hebrew, while others are expressed more freely—but the Greek Scriptures clearly influenced the language of the New Testament.
This also explains something that can puzzle modern readers. We may read a quotation from Isaiah or Psalms in the New Testament, turn back to the Old Testament, and discover that the wording is not exactly the same. Often our English Old Testament has been translated mainly from the Hebrew Masoretic tradition, while the New Testament writer was using a Greek form of the passage. Once we understand that Scripture was already moving between languages, the difference becomes much less mysterious.
Did the Septuagint Contain More Books?
This is where the Septuagint becomes especially important for our later discussion of canon.
Some ancient Greek biblical manuscripts contain books that are not found in the Jewish Tanakh or in Protestant Old Testaments. These writings were later treated differently by Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Ethiopian Christian traditions.
But we need to be careful here.
It would be too simple to say, “The Septuagint had all these extra books, and somebody later removed them.”
The ancient Greek manuscript tradition was not that uniform. Different manuscripts contain somewhat different collections.
So the Septuagint shows us that a broader group of Jewish religious writings circulated in Greek-speaking communities, but it does not give us one perfectly fixed Old Testament table of contents for everyone.
That distinction may seem small, but it keeps us from making a larger claim than the evidence supports.
The Septuagint Became Very Important to Early Christians
As Christianity spread beyond Judea, more and more believers spoke Greek. Many Gentile Christians did not know Hebrew at all.
For them, the Greek Scriptures were the Scriptures they could actually read.
Early Christian teachers quoted them. Christian writers used their language. Churches copied them and read them together.
That made the Septuagint a very important bridge between the Jewish Scriptures and the growing Christian church.
Without translation, Scripture would have stayed beyond the reach of many people.
God’s Word was moving into the languages people actually spoke.
Translation Preserves Meaning, but It Also Requires Judgment
The Septuagint also teaches us something that will matter later in this series.
Every translation tries to preserve meaning, but every translation also requires judgment.
Sometimes a Hebrew word has more than one possible meaning. Sometimes Greek has no exact equivalent. Sometimes the translator has to choose between staying very close to the original wording and making the sentence understandable in another language.
That does not make translation bad or unreliable.
It simply reminds us that translation is human work.
Sometimes a choice may help clarify a passage. Sometimes it may narrow the meaning. Sometimes later readers may hear more in a translated word than the original writer intended.
That is why comparison can be helpful.
Was the Septuagint the Bible Jesus Used?
People sometimes ask this as though there must be one simple answer.
There probably is not.
We know Greek Scripture was already in use before Jesus was born. We know the New Testament writers often use wording close to the Septuagint. We know Greek was widely spoken in the world around Jesus.
But we cannot say that Jesus carried around one complete Greek Bible matching a later Christian Septuagint collection.
The evidence does not allow us to be that specific.
It is better to say that Jesus lived in a world where Scripture existed in more than one language and more than one textual form. Hebrew and Aramaic were important in Jewish life, while Greek Scripture was also widely known.
That picture is a little more complicated than imagining one Bible on one shelf, but it is also more realistic.
What the Septuagint Helps Us Understand
The Septuagint shows us that translation was already part of the life of Scripture before Christianity began. Jewish people wanted the Scriptures to remain understandable even as languages changed, and the Greek translation helped make that possible.
It also helps us understand why New Testament writers sometimes quote the Old Testament in wording that differs from our English Old Testament, and it helps explain some of the later differences between Jewish and Christian collections of Scripture.
Most of all, it reminds us that Scripture was never meant to remain locked inside one language.
People needed to understand it.
“We hear them declaring the magnificent acts of God in our own tongues.”
— Acts 2:1
Acts is describing Pentecost rather than Bible translation, but the principle is beautiful: God's message was being heard in languages ordinary people understood
That was true in Alexandria. It was true in the early church. And it is still true now.
In the next chapter, we will turn from the Scriptures Jesus knew to the writings that began appearing after His ministry—the Gospels, Acts, letters, and other writings that would eventually become the New Testament.
