Notes on the Septuagint

Notes on the Septuagint by R. Grant Jones, Ph.D. July 2000 Revised and Converted to Adobe Acrobat Format February 2006 The author can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]. Copyright 2000, 2006, R. Grant Jones. Table of Contents 1.0 Preface …………………………………………………………………………….………..1 2.0 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………..2 3.0 The Septuagint in Early Christian Writings …………………………… …….4 4.0 The Septuagint in the New Testament 4.1 General Observations ………………………………………… …………..12 4.2 Agreement with the Septuagint 4.2.1 Methodology …………………………………………………………15 4.2.2 Assessment of Agreement in Meaning ……………………..17 4.2.3 Presentation of New Testament Divergences ……..…….27 from the Septuagint 4.2.4 Assessment of the Agreement in Wording ………………..30 Between the New Testament and the Septuagint 4.3 Further Evidence of the Influence of the Septuagint …….……..32 4.4 Conclusions …………………………………………………………………….34 Appendix A - Agreement in Meaning Between the New Testament …………..37 Quotations and the Hebrew Old Testament Appendix B - Table of Quotations in New Testament Order …………………….42 Appendix C- Detailed Comparisons ………………………………………………………50 Appendix D – Dead Sea Scroll/Septuagint Alignments …………………………..151 Against the Masoretic Text Appendix E – The Books of the Septuagint …………………………………….……..168 Appendix F – A Collection of References to the “Septuagint Plus” ……………172 in the New Testament References ………………………………………………………………………………………….188 Notes on the Septuagint 1.0 Preface This project was begun to satisfy my curiosity about the New Testament authors’ reliance on the Septuagint and to provide a framework to address the question of the appropriate source text for Old Testament translations into English. For those who are new to the Septuagint, I have provided an “Introduction,” discussing the history of that translation. “The Septuagint in the Early Church” addresses how the Church in the West departed from reliance on the Septuagint under the influence of Jerome, though earlier writers had generally read the Septuagint and defended its use. I investigated the New Testament authors’ dependence on the Septuagint largely by comparing New Testament quotations of the Old with both the Septuagint and an English translation of the Masoretic (Hebrew) text. “The Septuagint in the New Testament” summarizes the methodology I employed in assessing those comparisons and the results I discovered. A large number of quotations agree in sense with the Septuagint, but disagree with the Masoretic text - I compiled a list of these verses, and a list of the occasions (far smaller in number) where the New Testament author used a Masoretic reading rather than one from the Septuagint. Appendix B, “The Table of Quotations in New Testament Order,” includes a set of symbols to indicate the extent of agreement (in terms both of meaning and of word choice) between quotations and sources. Each quotation is shown in Appendix C, “Detailed Comparisons,” which displays the Greek of the New Testament, the Greek of the Septuagint, and English translations of the New Testament, the Septuagint, and the Masoretic text. Appendix C lists the quotations in New Testament order for ease of use with Appendix B. In Appendix D, the reader will find a sample of readings from the Dead Sea Scrolls which support the Septuagint against the Masoretic text. Appendix E consists of a table showing the books of the Septuagint as they appear in Rahlfs and in the three great uncial manuscripts. Appendix F is a collection of possible New Testament references to the books of the Septuagint outside the Hebrew canon (the “Septuagint Plus”).1 Please note: I am not an expert in either Greek or Hebrew. A physicist by education, I have no formal training in religion, theology or scripture studies. I urge readers to treat the results presented here with caution. Should anyone find errors - particularly in my categorization of the quotations as either in or out of agreement with the Masoretic text - I will gladly accept informed correction. The reader who (perhaps with wisdom) doubts the validity of my characterizations of the degree of agreement in meaning between quotations and source texts may wish to rely on the judgment of the Greek New Testament (4th edition), which is also presented in the “Table of Quotations in New Testament Order.” 1 These Notes originally appeared in over three hundred separate HTML files located at http://www.geocities.com/r_grant_jones/Rick/Septuagint/spindex.htm . Two appendices from the HTML version were not included here: a collection of discrepancies in the book of Genesis between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text, and table that illustrates an approach for the use of patristic scriptural interpretations in the translation of the Septuagint. The first was excluded because its key message, that the Septuagint and the Masoretic texts vary frequently and in ways that are sometimes significant, is made by Appendix D. The second is incomplete. 1 Notes on the Septuagint 2.0 Introduction The Septuagint is the most ancient translation of the Old Testament into Greek. The translators were likely Jews of the dispersion, living in Alexandria, Egypt. The beginning of the Jewish presence in Egypt is difficult to date precisely. There may have been a Jewish colony there as early as the tenth century BC, when Shishak (Shashanq) invaded Palestine and took treasures from the temple and the king’s palace (2 Chronicles 12.1-8). But certainly a number of Jews lived in Egypt after the murder of Gedaliah (~586 BC), when “the captains of the forces set out and went to Egypt; for they were afraid of the Chaldeans” (2 Kings 25-26). Jeremiah, Baruch, and the princesses also went into Egypt at that time, though Jeremiah prophecied that they would all “perish by the sword and by famine, until not one is left” (Jeremiah 43.6, 44.27). One expects, on the basis of that prophecy, that this was not the beginning of a permanent settlement. A lasting Jewish presence in Egypt can, however, be definitely dated from the the time of the founding of the city of Alexandria in 332 BC, when Alexander the Great granted them citizenship. In time, the Jews in Alexandria lost familiarity with Hebrew, and spoke Greek instead. It was natural, then, that they would require a translation of the scriptures into Greek for public worship in the synagogues and for private study. An account of the translation of the Septuagint is told in The Letter of Aristeas, which claims that Demetrius Phalereus, who ran the royal library in Alexandria, urged the king (Philadelphus (285-247 BC)) to obtain a copy of the Jewish law for the library. Philadelphus sent a deputation to the high priest Eleazar in Jerusalem, and the result was that seventy-two elders arrived in Egypt with a copy of the Hebrew law written on rolls of skins in golden letters. They were given accommodations on the island of Pharos, and completed their translation in seventy-two days. The same basic account is given in Aristobulus, Philo, and Josephus. Even if the account given in the Letter of Aristeas is inaccurate, it seems clear that the Hebrew Old Testament was available in Greek in Alexandria before the birth of Christ. As Christianity began to spread, the Septuagint was used with persuasive effect by Christian apologists - so well, in fact, that in time the Jews of the dispersion replaced it with newer works. For instance, a proselyte to Judaism named Aquila completed a extremely literal translation of the Old Testament into Greek about the year 128. Other translations were made by Theodotion of Ephesus and a certain Symmachus, called an Ebionite, also in the second century. The most ancient manuscripts of the complete (or nearly complete) Septuagint are known as Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus. Vaticanus and Sinaiticus have been dated to the mid-fourth century, and Alexandrinus to the fifth. Based on an earlier Hebrew original, the Septuagint departs from the Masoretic text2 frequently. “The book of Jeremiah is noteworthy,” for instance, “in that the present Hebrew text differs substantially from the Greek version (the Septuagint) in both content and order. Thus the Septuagint omits several passages (e.g., 33.14-26) and combines the 2 The Masoretic text is the source from which modern translations into English are made. While the oldest complete manuscripts of the Septuagint date from the fourth century, the oldest complete Hebrew Old Testament, the Leningrad Codex, was copied in ~ 1008 A.D. Modern English translations of the Old Testament rely primarily on the Leningrad Codex as published in the Hebraica Stuttgartensia. For examples of Septuagint departures from the Masoretic text supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Appendix D. 2 Notes on the Septuagint oracles against foreign nations into a single section following 25.14, though in a different order. In addition, there are many smaller differences from verse to verse. Remarkably, among the portions of the text of Jeremiah in Hebrew that are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls are not only those that reflect the standard Hebrew text but also those that reflect the text tradition represented by the Septuagint. It is likely, then, that these two text traditions represent the contrasting editorial work on the book of Jeremiah that took place in Egypt (the Septuagint tradition) and in Palestine or Babylon (the traditional Hebrew text).” [Introduction to the book of Jeremiah, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, page 960.] Around the end of the first century, the Hebrew text was standardized to a form nearly identical with the modern Masoretic text. Variant readings, such as those represented in the Septuagint, were no longer transmitted in the Hebrew language. Another contrast between the Septuagint and the modern Hebrew Old Testament involves the canon of scripture. The Septuagint includes several books and sections of books absent from the modern Hebrew text: 1 Esdras; Tobit; Judith; 1-3 Maccabees; the Wisdom of Solomon; the Wisdom of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus); Baruch; the Epistle of Jeremiah; The Song of the Three Children; Daniel and Susanna; Daniel, Bel and the Dragon; Additions to the Book of Esther; Psalm 151; and the Prayer of Manasseh.

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