What is the difference between the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint?

When scholars talk about how we know what the Old Testament originally said, two names come up constantly: the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. Both are ancient, both are treasured, and both played a role in shaping the Old Testament you hold in your hands today. Understanding the difference between them helps explain why footnotes in your Bible sometimes mention alternate readings.

Neither is a competing ‘Bible.’ Both are witnesses—copies and translations—that scholars compare in order to reconstruct, as accurately as possible, what the Hebrew prophets and writers originally set down under the inspiration of God (2 Peter 1:21).

The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew version of the Old Testament, named for the Masoretes, groups of Jewish scribes working primarily between the sixth and tenth centuries A.D. Hebrew, as originally written, used only consonants, which left room for ambiguity in pronunciation and meaning over the centuries. The Masoretes developed a system of vowel points and accent marks, added meticulously above and below the consonantal text, to preserve the traditional pronunciation and cantillation they had received.

Their devotion to accuracy was extraordinary. Masoretic scribes counted letters, words, and even the middle letter of entire books to catch copying errors, and they recorded these counts in the margins. The oldest complete Masoretic manuscript, the Leningrad Codex, dates to around A.D. 1008, and it remains the base text for most modern Hebrew Old Testaments and English translations.

The Septuagint, often abbreviated LXX, is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament produced in Alexandria, Egypt, beginning around 250 B.C. According to tradition, seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars translated the Torah first, with the rest of the Old Testament following over the next century or so. The name Septuagint, meaning ‘seventy,’ honors that tradition.

This translation mattered enormously. By the first century, Greek was the common language across much of the Mediterranean world, and many Jews living outside Israel could no longer read Hebrew fluently. The Septuagint let them read their own Scriptures in the language they actually spoke, and it later became the Old Testament of choice for many early Christians, since the New Testament itself was written in Greek.

The two texts agree on the vast majority of content, but real differences exist. Some are minor wording variations natural to any translation. Others are more noticeable: the Septuagint’s version of Jeremiah is roughly one-eighth shorter than the Masoretic Text’s, with material arranged in a different order, which most scholars believe reflects two genuinely different Hebrew editions that circulated in ancient Israel rather than a translation error. The Septuagint also includes several additional books—often called the Apocrypha—which Catholic and Orthodox Bibles retain but Protestant Bibles, following the Hebrew canon, do not.

Discoveries among the Dead Sea Scrolls have shed real light here, since some Hebrew manuscripts found at Qumran actually agree with the Septuagint’s readings against the later Masoretic Text, confirming that the Septuagint sometimes preserves a genuinely ancient Hebrew tradition rather than simply a loose paraphrase.

Far from undermining confidence in Scripture, the existence of these two witnesses actually strengthens it. Having multiple independent lines of transmission lets scholars cross-check readings, and the overwhelming agreement between them, across more than a thousand years and two different languages, testifies to how carefully the Old Testament text was preserved. Where genuine differences exist, they rarely touch any major doctrine; the character of God, the promise of the Messiah, and the call to trust and obey him come through clearly in both.

New Testament writers themselves quoted the Septuagint frequently, since it was the Bible their Greek-speaking audiences knew best (Luke 4:18-19; Hebrews 10:5-7). That should reassure you rather than confuse you: the God who inspired the original Hebrew Scriptures also providentially guided their translation and preservation, ensuring that his word, as Isaiah promised, would stand forever regardless of the language it was read in (Isaiah 40:8).

It is also worth remembering that Jesus himself, though he taught primarily in Aramaic and Hebrew, ministered in a world where the Septuagint shaped how Scripture was read, discussed, and quoted across the wider Mediterranean. When you notice a New Testament quotation of the Old Testament that reads slightly differently than your Old Testament passage, the explanation is very often as simple as this: the New Testament author is quoting the Septuagint’s Greek wording rather than translating fresh from the Hebrew. Far from a problem, that pattern is a small but telling piece of evidence for how carefully and consistently the church has always handled the text of Scripture, translation and all.