The Bible You Don’t Know: The Story of the
Septuagint, Stephen Beale, Catholic Church
Catholic Church
The Bible You Don’t Know: The Story of the Septuagint
Stephen Beale
It was some six decades after the death of Alexander the
Great and more than two centuries before the birth of Christ.
One of the world’s greatest libraries—ever—was seeking
new titles. It already had more than two hundred thousand of them, but there
was one glaring omission: the Torah of the Hebrews. And the king of Alexandria
So begins the epic story of the Septuagint, the translation
of the Hebrew Scriptures into ancient Greek, as told in the ancient letter of
Aristeas, supposedly a royal court official, to his brother.
Today, translating ancient texts sounds like a thing that
would excite balding and bespeckled scholars burrowed deep bowels of libraries.
In other words: not the stuff of legend. But, as recounted by Aristeas, the
story of how the Torah was translated into ancient Greek becomes just that.
The task of finding translators took on all the trappings
of an international diplomatic mission. An official letter was dispatched to
the Jewish high priest requesting translators, and an embassy was appointed to
meet them in Jerusalem Egypt —taken from Israel
by the previous king of Egypt
When the obvious contradiction between his reverence for
Jewish the law and the continuing captivity of Jewish slaves was pointed out to
him, the king promptly freed them, according to Aristeas (who conveniently
takes credit for proposing the emancipation).
Meanwhile, several gifts were prepared for the diplomats
to take to the Jewish high priest. These included a solid gold table embossed
with precious stones and embellished with a crystal and amber center—“which
produced an incomparable impression on the beholders,” according to Aristeas.
Seventy two elders—six from each of the twelve tribes—were to
be selected for the work of translation. Hence the name Septuagint, which is
taken from (ironically enough) the Latin word for seventy. (The Septuagint is
often referred to as the LXX, the Roman numerals for 70.)
The embassy returned with the 72 translators. Upon their
arrival they were greeted more like royal dignitaries rather than Scripture
scholars, as told by Aristeas. The king
received them immediately, rather than wait the traditional five to thirty
days. In meeting them he told them their arrival would become a national
holiday. Naturally, a seven-day marathon of feasting ensued, in which each of
the elders was asked a question by the king in order to ascertain their wisdom
and knowledge, so Aristeas’ story goes.
Then the elders were taken to the island of Pharos Alexandria
There he assembled them in a house, which had been built upon
the sea-shore, of great beauty and in a secluded situation, and invited them to
carry out the work of translation, since everything that they needed for the
purpose was placed at their disposal. So they set to work comparing their
several results and making them agree, and whatever they agreed upon was
suitably copied out under the direction of Demetrius [the royal librarian]. And
the session lasted until the ninth hour; after this they were set free to
minister to their physical needs. Everything they wanted was furnished for them
on a lavish scale.
Aristeas’ version has the 72 translators acting as a
committee. But the Talmud, a Jewish rabbinical guide to the Torah (itself a
valued tool of biblical interpretation today), suggests there was a mystical
dimension to the process of translation. According
to the Talmud version, the 72 elders were assigned to separate rooms without
being told what they were supposed to be doing. Then the king himself went into
each room, telling the elder present to copy out the Torah by memory in Greek.
So they did. And when the translations were compared, they were identical.
The story of Aristeas doesn’t have much credibility in
the scholarly world. (Not to mention the Talmud’s mystical account.) And
perhaps understandably so: his account is riddled with elements of the
fabulous. It’s now even doubted that Aristeas was the real author. But there
does seem to be a consensus that there is a kernel of truth to all this—and
that is that sometime around 282 BC the Torah was actually translated in
ancient Greek in Alexandria ,
Egypt
And there’s no doubt that the Septuagint when fully
completed (the rest of the books took longer than the 72 days recorded by
Aristeas, modern scholars say), it was a monumental achievement of literature
and linguistics. As two scholars have put it, “Because
the Septuagint was the first translation made of the Hebrew Bible (or of any
literary work of comparable size) into another language, it marks a milestone
in human culture. Any knowledge of the ancient world would be incomplete
without understanding the significance of the Septuagint and the history that
brought it into existence” (Karen Jobes and Moisés Silva in Invitation to the
Septuagint, 19).
The Septuagint was also deeply influential in the early
Church. Rendered in Greek, the Old Testament resonated with the Greco-Roman
Christian culture in a way that the Hebrew might not have.
Take Exodus 3:14 where
God, speaking out of the burning bush, tells Moses, “I am Who I am.” In the Greek this becomes egō eimi ho ōn—I am He Who is. In
the Greek, ōn
is related to ontos, a word we could translate as being. Suddenly this verse
takes on a whole new set of connotations than the original Hebrew and we begin
to see the seed of the later patristic (as well as medieval) conception of God as being itself.
Another intriguing case is the end of Isaiah 7:9. A more
literal translation of the Hebrew might be something like what the New American
Bible has: Unless your faith is firm, you shall
not be firm! But the Septuagint tweaks this
in a way that has big ramifications for its meaning. In English the Septuagint
version would read: Unless you believe, you
will not understand.
This verse has immediate and profound implications for the
understanding of the relationship between faith and reason.
The reverence that Church Fathers like Augustine had for
the Septuagint is hard to overstate.
Writing in his classic work, On Christian Doctrine,
Augustine points to the harmony among the 72 translators evidence of the
special authority of the Septuagint. In the City of God, he goes so far as to
even suggest the Septuagint itself is inspired: “For
the same Spirit who was in the prophets when they spoke these things was also
in the seventy men when they translated them, so that assuredly they could also
say something else, just as if the prophet himself had said both, because it
would be the same Spirit who said both.”
Agree or not with Augustine, there’s no question the
Septuagint does—and should have—a special authority for us today.
For one thing, it’s the
oldest version of the Old Testament we have—predating
the earliest version of the Hebrew text we have (known as the Masoretic text).
The Septuagint is also the
version that the New Testament writers used most often when quoting from the
Old Testament.
According to one scholarly count (cited here), the
Septuagint is cited 340 times and the Hebrew text just 33.
It’s something to keep in mind when we remember that the Septuagint is the source for so-called apocryphal books
that are included in the version of Old Testament that we Catholics use.
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