Septuagint

The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament. It literally means “seventy”. It is the oldest translation of the Old Testament.

The Septuagint is the product of many different translators, over a period of several centuries. Some translators were working in Israel (probably in Jerusalem), and others in Egypt.

The first books to be translated into Greek were the five books of the Torah. The Greek translation of these books was completed in the third century BC. The other books were translated at a later date, most of them over the course of the second and first centuries before Christ.

The style of the translations differs. Sometimes people translated quite literally (as with the translation of Judges, 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel, and 1 Kings and 2 Kings). But in other cases (like the translation of Proverbs) the translation was quite free. This is why the Septuagint is not a unified whole.

The Septuagint is named after a legend. The original legend said the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy II (third century BC) instructed 72 Jewish scholars to translate the five books of the Torah into Greek. These 72 scholars were said to have completed the task in 72 days, each independently of each other producing exactly the same translation of the Torah. This was the miraculous — and God inspired — origin of the Greek Pentateuch.

Later, the legend was adapted: it became 70 men (hence the name Septuagint) and they no longer just translated the Pentateuch, but the entire Old Testament. In the early Christian Church, the Septuagint was understood to refer to the entire Greek Old Testament.

The oldest version of this story of the origins of the Septuagint is recorded in the Letter of Aristeas, a text from the second century BC.