What is the Septuagint?

The Septuagint gets its unusual name from a Latin word meaning ‘seventy,’ and it’s abbreviated LXX using the Roman numeral for that number. The name comes from an old tradition, recorded in a document called the Letter of Aristeas, claiming that seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars, working independently in Alexandria, Egypt, produced identical translations of the Hebrew Torah into Greek—a story meant to underline the translation’s trustworthiness, whatever the precise historical details behind it.

Whatever the exact process, the translation itself was real and enormously influential. Work began on the first five books of Moses around 250 B.C. under the patronage of the Greek-ruled Egyptian government, and translation of the rest of the Old Testament followed gradually over the next century or two, likely by different translators of varying skill.

By the third century B.C., a large Jewish community had settled in Alexandria, then one of the greatest cities in the ancient world. Many of these Jews, and their children after them, grew up speaking Greek as their primary language after generations away from Israel. Hebrew, the language of their Scriptures, was becoming unfamiliar to ordinary people even as it remained central to their identity and worship.

The Septuagint solved a real, pressing problem: it let Greek-speaking Jews read Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets in a language they actually understood, without needing formal training in Hebrew. It preserved their access to God’s word across a major cultural and linguistic shift, much the way modern Bible translation work continues to do for language groups around the world today.

By the time of the New Testament, the Septuagint had spread far beyond Alexandria and become the standard Old Testament for Greek-speaking Jews and, soon after, for the early church. Because the New Testament itself was written in Greek, its authors frequently quoted the Old Testament directly from the Septuagint rather than translating fresh from Hebrew each time.

This shows up in memorable ways. When Jesus stood up in the Nazareth synagogue and read from Isaiah about the Spirit of the Lord anointing him to proclaim good news to the poor, the wording he read closely follows the Septuagint’s Greek phrasing (Luke 4:18-19; Isaiah 61:1-2). The writer of Hebrews likewise quotes Psalm 40 in a form that matches the Septuagint more closely than the Hebrew Masoretic Text (Hebrews 10:5-7). In God’s providence, a Greek translation made for practical, everyday reasons became a key vehicle for the gospel’s spread across the Roman world.

The Septuagint contains all the books of the Hebrew Old Testament, though sometimes in a different order or with variant readings, as well as several additional Jewish writings composed during the intertestamental period—books like Tobit, Judith, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. These extra writings are often grouped together as the Apocrypha.

Protestant Bibles do not include these books as Scripture, following the Hebrew canon that Jesus and the apostles themselves recognized, which never included them as authoritative. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles, by contrast, include some or all of these books, reflecting their reliance on the wider Septuagint collection that was common in the early church. This is one reason Catholic and Protestant Old Testaments differ slightly in length even though both draw ultimately on the same ancient sources.

For modern Bible scholars, the Septuagint is an invaluable tool. It offers an independent ancient witness to the Old Testament text, sometimes preserving readings that predate later Hebrew manuscripts, and it shows scholars how ancient Jewish translators themselves understood difficult Hebrew words and phrases. Comparing it with the Masoretic Text and the Dead Sea Scrolls helps textual scholars reconstruct the Old Testament with remarkable confidence.

For ordinary believers, the Septuagint’s story is a reminder that God has always cared about his word reaching people in the language they actually understand, and that he works through ordinary historical circumstances—a scattered people, a dominant new language, a practical translation project—to accomplish his larger purposes (Psalm 19:7). The same God who prepared a Greek Old Testament centuries before Christ’s birth continues to prepare hearts, languages, and translators today so that the gospel can go out to every nation.

Consider the timing involved. The Septuagint was essentially complete a full two centuries before Jesus was born, long before anyone could have known how central a Greek-speaking mission field would become for the early church. Yet by the time the apostles began traveling the Roman world proclaiming the risen Christ, a Greek Old Testament already sat waiting in synagogues from Rome to Antioch, ready to serve as common ground for explaining how Jesus fulfilled Israel’s Scriptures. That kind of quiet, long-range preparation is exactly what you would expect from a sovereign God orchestrating history toward the coming of his Son, and it is a small but genuine encouragement that he is just as capable of preparing the ground for the gospel’s advance in your own generation.