The Septuagint: what it is and why it matters
By Gregory Lanier and William Ross
I’m a nerd. That’s not true, I’m not smart enough to be a nerd, but I really like when I can reach up and understand a bit of nerd stuff. Nowhere is this more true for me than in matters of the Bible and Theology. There is something wonderful to me about the notion that my saving faith can be summed up in a sentence my five-year-old can understand: “Jesus is God, he died for my sins and rose again so we can be together forever” yet supporting a simple statement like that is mountains of detail that make the truth that much richer. I love noodling around that mountain, such as I can, to add as much depth to my understanding of the Gospel as I can. This year I got myself a book just because it had an essay “P66, P75, and the Myth of the Alexandrian recension”, total nerd stuff, I devoured it, and loved it. I’m thankful God wired me this way, hopefully it can bless someone out there reading this.
This book, “The Septuagint”, was sort of a final flourish of a year spent reading about the text of Scripture. I wanted to know as much as I could about the manuscripts, translation methods, all of it. I’m kind of sad to be moving on to other studies now. I’ve read 8 books in the last year on the topic, in addition to thousands of pages of content online, from journal articles to blog posts, covering the topic of the text of the Scriptures from higher academic angles all the way down to the lay-level. The net effect of all this was a greater appreciation for the perfection and inspiration of the Word of God. I’ll definitely be back to this topic; I really only just scratched the surface.
One aspect of the study bears some theological and doctrinal weight is the fact that Christianity is one of the only religions that is multi-lingual even in its founding documents. In that is a subtle, but deliberate I think, nod by our Creator that this gospel message is for all people across all human history. Jesus said as much a couple times.
Where this gets interesting, and where this book comes in, is the fact that Christian doctrine is built on the truth of the Old Testament. Open your New Testament to any page and you will probably see Old Testament quotations. But wait, Old Testament is Hebrew, New Testament is Greek, what in particular is being quoted in all those hundreds of places in the New Testament? To oversimplify a pretty nuanced topic: the answer in most cases is the “Septuagint”: the name used for the Greek translation of the Old Testament. The Holy Spirit used a translation to communicate God’s message to God’s followers, that’s interesting.
But it gets more interesting. Look a little deeper into the history of things and you’ll see that there really isn’t a “The Septuagint”, it’s more of a catch-all term for several different Greek translations of the Old Testament and even several later recensions. Put simply, there were different “versions” not unlike how we today have NIV, NASB etc., and several of them seem to be quoted in the New Testament. That’s interesting.
This book then is a brief discussion into these matters and others like them. 7 simple chapters broken into 2 sections. Most chapters break down into 3 key points that the authors then elaborate on. The first section discusses “what it is” (namely dispelling the notion that there is a “the Septuagint”), while the last 3 chapters discuss the “why it matters”. The really thought-provoking stuff is in the “why it matters” section, but you really have to understand the background laid down in the “what it is” section to get it. Don’t be intimidated, this book was written for laypeople, you don’t have to know Greek or Hebrew to get everything this book has to offer. In fact, I only noticed Greek letters in one footnote, the rest of the time they spell it out phonetically.
And if all of that is still too much, there’s a 5-page appendix at the back summarizing the 10 key takeaways of the book. It’s worth having this book on your shelf even if all you ever read is that.
I did have some hesitations about this book. First, it’s hot off the press, like first published December 2021. New stuff isn’t always good stuff, but these guys aren’t trying to present new stuff, they are distilling hundreds of years of study and their own careers as seminary professors on this topic down to bite-sized pieces that people who don’t subscribe to theological academic journals can benefit from.
Second, these authors are seminary professors. Reformed Seminary professors. Their theology does sneak in a bit in the last couple chapters, but not in a repugnant or divisive way. It seems their intended audience is anyone who takes the Bible as the Word of God. There are more than a few pages dedicated to looking at the apocrypha and what we should do with that and why the Greek Orthodox Church takes their Old Testament text from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew, so even those in more orthodox circles could benefit from this book.
The last chapter defines the idea of the authority of the Scriptures. The authors distinguish between “Normative” authority and “Derivative” authority. They use the word “Scripture” for the former and “Word of God” for the latter, and in the latter category they place the Scripture in translation (i.e., the Septuagint, English Bibles etc.). A fair distinction, and one worth thinking on to be sure, but I’m left wondering if it’s not a distinction without a (practical) difference.
If matters of the text of Scripture or the Scripture in translation or text criticism are things that interest you, then you will like this book. If you’re reading in your Old Testament and find footnotes that read “LXX reads…” and that leaves you wondering, this book will help you, if you ever tracked down an Old Testament reference in the New and found that the words weren’t the exact same, this book will help bring some clarity to these supposed “difficulties”.
If you read this book and liked it you’ll probably want this book, and this one. If not, my birthday is coming up so…