Question on relationship of Septuagint to Hebrew canons and contents

[Amy]

After reading more of the introductory pages in my Orthodox Study Bible, I am wondering why most of our English translations of the O. T. are based on the Hebrew texts rather than the Septuagint?

What are the important differences in the Hebrew texts of the rabbis and the Greek translation in the Septuagint? It is my understanding that about 1/3 of the N.T. quotes of the O.T. come from the Septuagint ( LXX ), how should this affect our study and understanding of the O.T Scriptures?

Many thanks for your thoughts and insights.

[Michael Stickles]

I am wondering why most of our English translations of the O. T. are based on the Hebrew texts rather than the Septuagint?

I think that this statement from the introduction to the Revised Standard Version is probably the most common reason:


The aim of the translator must be to render into intelligible language, as faithfully as possible, what he regards on solid critical grounds as the original text or the closest possible approximation to it. In some cases the original has not come down to us, but it is still incumbent on the translator to try to get as near as possible to it by a study of the most ancient versions.

Since the Greek is a translation from the Hebrew, the Hebrew would be considered closer to the original text than the Greek, and so the Hebrew would be preferred under this standard of translation.


What are the important differences in the Hebrew texts of the rabbis and the Greek translation in the Septuagint? It is my understanding that about 1/3 of the N.T. quotes of the O.T. come from the Septuagint ( LXX ), how should this affect our study and understanding of the O.T Scriptures?

I think it's the other way around - I think the NT quotes are about 2/3 from the LXX and 1/3 from the Hebrew OT - but I've never counted them to make sure :-).

As for differences, I'm not sure offhand if anyone has made a complete catalog, but here is something I found at The Septuagint Online's introduction page (http://www.kalvesmaki.com/LXX/):



In many cases, it seems the LXX is based on a version of the Hebrew different from the standard, Masoretic text (MT) of the 9th c. CE. There are a number of books where the differences between the LXX and MT are very striking. For instance:

- LXX Jeremiah is shorter than MT Jeremiah by roughly one-eighth, and the order of its chapters is quite different.
- LXX Job is about one-sixth smaller than MT Job, and includes an ending not extant in the Hebrew.
- Almost half of the verses in LXX Esther are not found in MT Esther.
- LXX Exodus and MT Exodus differ in many places according to order of verses, and inclusion / exclusion of words and material


One other thought here: Egyptologist David Rohl wrote a book called A Test of Time (published in the U.S.A. as Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest). The book covers much of the research for his Ph.D. thesis, which involved reworking the standard chronology for the Egyptian dynasties to remove various inconsistencies with the archaeological evidence. One effect of this was that under his New Chronology, the history of Israel in the OT lines up properly with Egyptian history. One thing he found was that the Septuagint had a better agreement with his findings than the Hebrew Masoretic Text. Here's just one example, from a page which reviewed Rohl's book (http://www.lamblion.com/articles/other/religious/RI-19.php):



Rohl makes two adjustments in the traditional biblical chronology. The first is one that Evangelicals will have to wrestle with. He shortens the sojourn in Egypt from 430 years to 215 years, which results in the date of the Exodus shifting from 1250 BC to 1447 BC.

The length of the Hebrew sojourn in Egypt has traditionally been set at 430 years because of Exodus 12:40 which reads as follows: "Now the time that the sons of Israel lived in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years."

From this passage, the length of the Egyptian sojourn seems to be indisputable. But, Rohl points out that our modern translations of this passage are based on the Masoretic text which dates from the 4th Century AD. Rohl shows that there are three more ancient versions of this text and that all three state that the 430 years was from the time the Hebrews entered the land of Canaan, not Egypt.

The three older sources are The Septuagint (the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in about 280 BC), the writings of Josephus (who quotes the verse in his First Century AD writings, stating that he is quoting from Temple documents), and The Samaritan Version of the Torah (which dates from the 2nd Century AD). The Septuagint version reads as follows: "And the sojourning of the children of Israel, that is which they sojourned in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, was four hundred and thirty years."

Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (Chapter XV:2) puts it this way: "They [the Israelites] left Egypt in the month of Xanthiens, on the fifteenth day of the lunar month; four hundred and thirty years after our forefather Abraham came into Canaan, but two hundred and fifteen years only after Jacob removed into Egypt."

It appears that in the compilation of the Masoretic text, the phrase "and in the land of Canaan" was dropped either because of a scribal error or because of an exercise in interpretation.

Just one of the many fascinating things I ran across in Rohl's book. For the purpose of this thread, while not proof, it's definitely strong evidence that the LXX may more accurately reflect the original OT than the Masoretic Text.

In Christ,
Mike

[Marjorie Parsons]

After reading more of the introductory pages in my Orthodox Study Bible, I am wondering why most of our English translations of the O. T. are based on the Hebrew texts rather than the Septuagint?

What are the important differences in the Hebrew texts of the rabbis and the Greek translation in the Septuagint? It is my understanding that about 1/3 of the N.T. quotes of the O.T. come from the Septuagint ( LXX ), how should this affect our study and understanding of the O.T Scriptures?

Many thanks for your thoughts and insights.

Hi,

The use of quotations from the OT by NT authors will certainly affect a Christian understanding of the OT, but I don't think the understanding of the OT is affected by which text the NT author quotes from. Knowing the text used by a NT author can, however help in the understanding of that author, for example by yielding some information about his immediate cultural background. Generally this will be of interest only to those who make a scholarly study of the NT.

I know of no index of text sources for NT authors, but there might be one. Otherwise, if you are worried about a particular OT citation, the best thing is to consult a commentary on that book. Any thorough commentary will have that information.

I don't know if this was helpful. Best wishes

marjorie

[Chris S.]

I'm resurrecting this thread because I have some questions based on the evidence presented by Mike:

If what The Septuagint Online's introduction page says is accurate, namely that certain portions of the OT are shorter than what is found in the Masoretic Text, do Orthodox Christians not consider canonical those portions which are, in most cases, now incorporated within most Bible translations (English specifically)?

Do Orthodox Christians, then, differ not only on certain historical events within the Bible, but also on the length of historical epochs, etc.? For instance, if what Egyptologist Rohl says about the correspondence between Exodus 12:40 and actual Israelite history is true, then this seems to create a disparity between Bibles, and modes of thought based upon those Bibles, with a reliance upon the MT (often assigning the phrase "in Canaan and Egypt," as found in the Septuagint, to a footnote).

As a result of modern textual criticism, which attempts to reconstruct the full "original" text based upon surviving manuscripts, it is my basic presumption that the MT is used as the fundamental resource for the reconstruction of the OT with other ancient sources, such as the Septuagint, used to fill in the gaps, so to speak. If my presumption is correct, then are Orthodox Christian translators also using this method? If not, then why?

[James Haddad]

TO respond to the earlier question. The MT texts have a large influence in modern Biblical translation into English because Martin Luther. At the time of the reformation, he decided that the Church should be using the same OT as the Jews used. And, this meant using the canon that the rabbis had established at the council of Jamnia in 90 C.E. And also prefered the using of Hebrew texts for translations. I dont know of any ancient Church that didnt use the Septuagint for its early OTs, or translation. This includes Jeromes translation of the Latin Vulgate.

[Fr Raphael Vereshack]

We all need to keep in mind that the LXX text is not defined as being everything the Hebrew was not. The LXX is not defined in an oppositional sense to the Hebrew.

After all from the tradition concerning the composition of the LXX in Alexandria before the time of Christ we are told that it was a translation of the Hebrew Scripture of that time. In no sense does this tradition suggest that the LXX was an attempt to supplant the Hebrew or make it disappear as a holy text. I say this only because some of our interpretations of what the LXX is come close to this latter understanding.

What is clear is that the Church at many points has referred to the Hebrew text and has emended its own Greek LXX versions in accordance with this. Unless we believe that Jewish life before Christ and then early life within the Church took place in hermetically sealed chambers then it is also likely that considerable influence of Hebrew & Greek on each other were occurring by the time of early Christianity. Thus Origen was following a precedent already set in his compilation of Scriptural versions and not doing something radically new (which seems to match up more with his deep respect for Scripture).

This also I think shows that the LXX is as much or more a representational notion as it is an actual version. Whether, when we consider all of the very old manuscript traditions and then translations into other languages such as Slavonic, the LXX is an actual version of Scripture is a real question. It could be that what the Church has actually used as its Scripture over time has varied in time & place and that it has continually referred to more than one version.

Which means that if the new version of the Orthodox OT relies also on the NKJV (if, because I really do not know myself the truth of this statement) this does not in itself deny it a place within the Church. This shouldn't automatically cause us disappointment since we have to first know whether the NKJV represents a good, possible reading.

Having a good version at hand does not necessarily mean it being radically different from what we already have had. Who knows- maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised about the versions of Scripture we've been using all these years in English!

In Christ- Fr Raphael