The Septuagint as the Church’s Old Testament

The Septuagint — the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made in Alexandria from the third century BC — is the Old Testament of the Orthodox Church. It was the Bible of the Greek-speaking Jewish world, of the Apostles, and of the Fathers; the New Testament quotes it far more often than the Hebrew; and it remains the authoritative Old Testament text of Orthodox worship and theology. This file sets out why the LXX holds priority in Orthodox use over the Masoretic Hebrew.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the Septuagint Is

The Septuagint (Latin septuaginta, “seventy,” abbreviated LXX) is the collective name for the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, together with several books composed or preserved in Greek. It was produced in Alexandria over roughly the third to first centuries BC, beginning with the Torah and extending to the Prophets and Writings. By the time of Christ it was the Bible of the vast Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora, from Egypt to Asia Minor, and it became the Bible of the apostolic mission as the Gospel moved into that Greek-speaking world (Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, Baker, 2000, chs. 1–2, on the origins and spread; Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Version of the Bible, Brill, 2000).

The name comes from a legend recorded in the Letter of Aristeas (2nd c. BC): that seventy (or seventy-two) Jewish elders, summoned to Alexandria under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, translated the Law into Greek. Later tradition embellished this — the seventy working separately and producing identical translations, taken as a sign of divine inspiration. Orthodoxy has often cherished the legend as a witness to the LXX’s providential character, while modern scholarship treats the Letter of Aristeas as a later apologetic account of what was in fact a gradual, multi-translator, multi-generation enterprise (Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2000, on the Letter of Aristeas and its historical value; Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Oxford, 2014). [Apocryphal: the account in the *Letter of Aristeas* of seventy-two translators completing the Torah in seventy-two days, and the later legend of their independently identical renderings, is a literary and apologetic tradition, not a documented historical event. It is valued in Orthodoxy as a witness to the LXX's honored status, not asserted as fact.]

The Bible of the Apostles

The single most powerful argument for the LXX’s priority in the Church is that the Apostles used it. The New Testament writers, composing in Greek for a Greek-speaking world, quote the Old Testament overwhelmingly in its Septuagint form. The standard scholarly count is that of the roughly three hundred explicit Old Testament citations in the New Testament, the great majority follow the LXX, including in places where the LXX differs from the Hebrew (Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2000, ch. 8, on New Testament use of the LXX; R. T. McLay, The Use of the Septuagint in New Testament Research, Eerdmans, 2003). Several load-bearing texts of the Christian faith depend on the specifically Septuagintal reading. The most famous is Isaiah 7:14, where the LXX renders the Hebrew ʿalmāh (“young woman”) by parthenos (“virgin”) — the reading Matthew cites for the virginal conception of Christ (Matthew 1:23; see Text, Numbering, and the Masoretic Question). For the Orthodox, this is not a convenient accident but a mark of providence: the Scriptures the Apostles preached from, and in whose very words they proclaimed Christ, were the Greek Scriptures of the Church.

The Bible of the Fathers

The Fathers, likewise, used the Septuagint as their Old Testament, and built their theology and exegesis upon it. The entire patristic tradition of Old Testament interpretation — Origen’s commentaries, Chrysostom’s homilies on Genesis and the Psalms, Basil’s Hexaemeron, Cyril’s Old Testament works — is exegesis of the LXX. St. Augustine in the West went so far as to argue for the inspired authority of the Septuagint translators themselves, holding that where the LXX differs from the Hebrew, the Spirit was speaking a further word through the seventy (Augustine, The City of God 18.43). Not every Father went so far — and the great exception is instructive. St. Jerome, translating the Latin Vulgate, came to prefer the Hebraica veritas, the “Hebrew truth,” and translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew, provoking a sharp exchange with Augustine over the risk of unsettling the churches’ familiar (Septuagintal) Scriptures (the Jerome–Augustine correspondence, e.g., Augustine, Letter 71 and Jerome’s reply, Letter 75/112). The debate is ancient, and the East decided differently from Jerome: it kept the Greek. [Disputed: whether the Septuagint translation is itself inspired. St. Augustine (*City of God* 18.43) argued that the LXX translators were inspired, so that its distinctive readings carry divine authority; St. Jerome preferred the *Hebraica veritas* and translated from the Hebrew. Orthodoxy has generally leaned toward a high, providential view of the LXX as the Church's Old Testament, without a single binding dogmatic definition of "inspiration of the translation." The two patristic instincts are both attested; the compendium reports the range.]

The Priority of the LXX in Orthodox Use

For Orthodoxy the Septuagint is not merely one witness to the Old Testament text among others; it is the Old Testament of the Church, with a real priority over the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) that the medieval rabbis standardized. This priority has several grounds, drawn together in the repository’s topical article and in the standard authorities (see Holy Scripture in Orthodox Theology; Breck, Scripture in Tradition, SVS Press, 2001, Part I; Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2014):

Apostolic usage — the New Testament preaches from the LXX, and its christological texts often depend on LXX readings.
Patristic authority — the Fathers universally used the LXX; the whole edifice of patristic Old Testament exegesis is built on it.
Liturgical use — the LXX, and the translations derived from it (above all the Church Slavonic Old Testament, rendered from the Greek), remain the text read and chanted in Orthodox worship. The Old Testament the faithful actually hear — the paremias at Vespers, the Psalter of the Hours, the prophecies of the great feasts — is the Septuagint.
Theological coherence — in a number of places the LXX preserves readings more consonant with the Church’s christological faith, and Orthodoxy does not simply assume the Hebrew MT is always the more “original” text.

That last point rests on a real advance in modern scholarship, which has changed the terms of the old debate.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Rehabilitation of the LXX

For centuries the LXX was widely regarded, in the West, as a loose or inferior translation of the “original” Hebrew preserved in the Masoretic Text. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (from 1947) altered this picture decisively. Among the biblical manuscripts from Qumran (dating from roughly the third century BC to the first century AD) are Hebrew texts that agree with the Septuagint against the later Masoretic Text — showing that in many places the LXX was not a free paraphrase but a faithful translation of a different Hebrew text form current in the Second Temple period. The Hebrew textual tradition, in other words, was itself plural before the rabbis standardized one form; the MT is the survivor of that standardization, not simply “the original” (Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed., Fortress, 2012, on the pluriformity of the Second Temple text and the Qumran witnesses; Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2000). This is why the Orthodox refusal to treat the MT as automatically superior is not special pleading but aligns with the current scholarly recognition that the LXX often preserves ancient and valuable readings. The next file treats the concrete differences and the both-sides question of textual priority in full (see Text, Numbering, and the Masoretic Question).

The Septuagint as a Christian Bible

Finally, the LXX matters to Orthodoxy not only as an old and good text but as a Christian Old Testament — the form of the Hebrew Scriptures in and through which the Church has always read the promise of Christ. Because it was the Bible of the Apostles and Fathers, its very phrasing is woven into the New Testament, the Creeds, the hymns, and the prayers. To read the LXX is to read the Old Testament as the Church received and transmitted it, already oriented toward its fulfillment in Christ. This is why, for the Orthodox, the choice of the Septuagint is not a narrowly text-critical preference but a matter of standing within the continuity of the Church’s own reading of her Scriptures (Breck, Scripture in Tradition, 2001; Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2014; see The Patristic Mind).

References

Jobes, Karen H., and Moisés Silva. Invitation to the Septuagint. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000. (Origins, the Letter of Aristeas, New Testament use of the LXX.)
Fernández Marcos, Natalio. The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Version of the Bible. Trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012. (The pluriformity of the Second Temple Hebrew text; the Qumran witnesses agreeing with the LXX.)
Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The LXX as the Orthodox Old Testament; the Letter of Aristeas.)
Breck, John. Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (Part I, the LXX and the MT.)
Augustine of Hippo. The City of God 18.43 — the inspiration of the LXX translators; Augustine, Letters 71 and 82; Jerome, Letter 112 — the Jerome–Augustine exchange over the Hebraica veritas.
Scripture: Isaiah 7:14 / Matthew 1:23 (parthenos).