The Septuagint has fascinated me for some time. Although it has widely been considered holy writ by the church historically, some groups—Protestants primary among them—reject it, choosing to do away with the deuterocanonical (pejoratively called apocryphal
) texts and to stick as closely as possible instead to the Masoretic text-type. Even those who might claim sympathy for the LXX are quick to make it subservient to the Masoretic, rendering null and void its own voice and authority. Saint Augustine’s attempt at compromise between the two sides led him to believe that the Spirit which inspired the writings of the prophets was the same which inspired the translators of the Septuagint. Thus, according to Augustine, there is dual-scriptural authority—that both the Hebrew and the Greek, even when they are different or at odds, are equally authoritative. In order to come to an understanding of some of the evidences which might argue for an acceptance of the Septuagint on its own grounds, I attempted to come to a grasp of the historical situation and what that might mean. What follows are my conclusions that favor the LXX.
1 - Aristeas
Perhaps the best place to begin is with the Letter of Aristeas. The purpose of the letter, as many scholars attest, was to help stimulate the acceptance of the Greek translation among Jews of the diaspora and/or pagan converts. For reasons and arguments that have escaped me thus far, the letter is not considered genuine or historically reliable. Another important thing to note is that the Septuagint of Aristeas is only the Pentateuch. Despite these things, however, the letter makes the Septuagint to be nothing less than guided by the Spirit of God and sacrosanct—so much so that a curse is placed near the end of the letter, like unto Revelation 22:18-19, which gives dire warnings against additions or changes to this Greek translation of the Torah (Letter of Aristeas 310-311). Although the curse was not regarded by later Jewish translators like Aquila, this letter makes it clear that the first Greek translation was held in esteem early on and that its translators were venerated by Jewish communities outside Palestine.
2 - Philo
And then there was the Hellenistic Jew Philo. In his Life of Moses I, Philo writes much more glamorously of the events surrounding the translation of the sacred books into Greek. He wrote that the translators were inspired by God as prophets in the office of Moses. Their translation was under divine motivation, prophetic in nature, and the holy word of God. Indeed, according to him, each translator wrote the same words as if one single, invisible voice had dictated the Septuagint to them. There is no doubt that Philo was glorifying the Septuagint and that he considered it as great if not greater than the Hebrew itself. It is quite likely he was not the only one.
3 – Palestinian and Rabbinic Judaism
But what of those within Palestine? What did they think about the texts of the Septuagint? Among the Dead Sea Scrolls and from caves nearby, not only have we discovered Hebrew and Aramaic fragments of some of the deuterocanonical/apocryphal
texts in the Septuagint (like Tobit and Sirach), proving that they were used alongside the other biblical texts, but we have also discovered both proto-Septuagintal texts—Greek texts that antedate any previously known Septuagint manuscript, but which closely follow it in word and form—and Hebrew texts which agree in meaning or form with the Septuagint against the Masoretic. In fact, the Babylonian Talmud itself quotes extensively from Sirach. Origen and Jerome both tell us of Hebrew and Aramaic versions of Judith and Maccabees used in their day. Origen defended Susanna (one of the additions
to Daniel) as being inspired scripture by pointing to its authenticity in a proto-Theodotian LXX manuscript, a version of the Greek scriptures used by many Jews and which was used exclusively by almost every church father after him. So we can see quite clearly that the various texts of the Septuagint, including the so-called apocrypha,
were quite commonly used and preserved as every other biblical text among the Jews.
4 – Justin Martyr
Indeed, the authority of the Greek translation among Jews can be seen in that when Justin Martyr accused the Jew Trypho of failing to obey his teachers who told him the translation of the seventy elders was true scripture(Dialogue 68:6-8), Trypho didn’t deny that his teachers had told him this or that Justin’s appeal to the LXX as true scripture was incorrect, something which would have greatly supported him in his debate had he believed the Hebrew was superior.
5 – 4 Ezra (?)
This Jewish psuedepigraphal work might be saying in 14:37-48 that while the regular texts of the Masoretic tradition were regarded as scripture, the seventy (the Septuagint) were of even greater authority and thus were to be given only to the wise, because in those texts was the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge.
6 - Josephus
Even Josephus, who seems to take the hard, Pharisaic line that only certain Hebrew texts (those of the Masoretic tradition) were scripture, actually makes use of the Septuagint’s so-called apocryphal additions
in the longer Greek version of Esther in Book 11, Chapter 6 of his Antiquities.
7 – Church Fathers
If I were to even begin listing the times and places that church fathers quoted authoritatively from texts of the Septuagint, both apocryphal
and not, or spoke of the texts of the LXX as being either inspired or canonical, such a list would quickly consume the bandwidth of my website. Indeed, many councils, such as the Council of Laodicea, the Third Council of Carthage, and the Council of Hippo, all presumed texts of the LXX to be inspired scripture.
8 – The New Testament
We mustn’t forget the fact that the LXX was used without issue by many of the earliest Christians including those who wrote parts of the New Testament and quoted from it or summarized the LXX’s words therein. Although I believe that the NT’s reliance upon the Septuagint is not so great as many claim, it must be acknowledged that some differences between quotes or summaries of OT verses in the NT and what those verses look like in the Masoretic is best explained by reliance upon a Greek text of the OT. And despite what is commonly assumed and even taught, many things in NT texts have a foundation in the deuterocanonical
texts of the LXX. John’s entire concept, for instance, of the Word becoming flesh and tabernacling in Israel is drawn directly from Sirach (the major difference being that whereas Sirach says the Word in flesh tabernacling in Israel is Torah, John says it is Yeshua). Therefore, any understanding and acceptance of John’s perspective is dependent upon an understanding of Sirach and an acceptance of at least some authority of viewpoint in that text.
Last year, I purchased an absolutely incredible audio book, The Bible Experience: Old Testament. And I say this as one who abhors audio bibles generally and the NIV specifically (The Bible Experience is based on the TNIV). That is not to say there aren’t problems. But I was able to listen through 1 and 2 Samuel, Genesis, and Exodus without any serious hiccups. In Leviticus, however, I couldn’t help laughing at a ridiculously anachronistic absurdity…
The book starts out cool enough. As YHWH speaks to Moses in the Tabernacle about Levitical rites and regulations, we are greeted with the sound of knives being drawn, animals slaughtered, blood splashed, fat and flesh burning… You can almost smell the aroma of sizzling meat. The commands come alive viscerally. But as we move away from sacrificial regulations, an ambience of meditative monastic chant echoes across the backdrop. It was so obviously out of place that I almost wonder if such juxtaposition was intended to convey something. And if so, what? Moses was the first monk? Latin preceded Hebrew? Catholics hide in holy places? Goat-hair curtains and animal hide have cathedral-like acoustics? The Pope is Jewish?
He who cherishes the value of culture cannot fail to be a pacifist.
Albert Einstein, 1914, Jeremy Bernstein’s Einstein
But I say to you who are listening: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you…then you will be sons of the Most High.
Luke 6:27-8, 35 NET
I do think Jesus one-ups poor Albert… After all, what is doing good instead of harm for the love of culture compared to doing good instead of harm for the love of God and human life? And as far as I know, Albert never offered up his own life to destruction rather than destroy someone else’s as an example of how we should live.
The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community. The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation. The aftermaths of violence are emptiness and bitterness. This is the thing I’m concerned about. Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the goals of justice and peace, but let’s be sure that our hands are clean in this struggle. Let us never fight with falsehood and violence and hate and malice, but always fight with love, so that when the day comes that the walls of segregation have completely crumbled in Montgomery that we will be able to live with people as their brothers and sisters….We must come to the point of seeing that our ultimate aim is to live with all men as brothers and sisters under God…
Martin Luther King Jr, Sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 1957
You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they’d experienced the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.
And we are here, we are here this evening because we are tired now. And I want to say that we are not here advocating violence. We have never done that. I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people! We believe in the Christian religion! We believe in the teachings of Jesus! The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest!
Love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian faith, but there is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.
The Almighty God himself is not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, I love you, Israel.
He’s also the God that stands up before the nations and says, Be still and know that I’m God, that if you don’t obey me I will break the backbone of your power and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships.
Martin Luther King Jr., address to the first Montgomery Improvement Association, December 5, 1955
Beware any person who claims to speak truth and carries a sword.
In my previous post New Thoughts On Abortion, I explored an authoritative, ancient Hebrew perspective about the beginning of human life by looking not only at the Hebrew Bible, but at the ordinances of the Pharisees/Rabbis preserved in the Oral Law and its commentary. In that post, we saw that breath was the foundation of human life according to an ancient and authoritative Israelite perspective. This was represented even in the very Hebrew word (nephesh) traditionally translated soul in the Hebrew Bible. We therefore were able to see that abortion was a legal and Torah-abiding activity because until a baby breathed, it was not considered human life.
Ancient Israel didn’t exist alone in history. Its concepts, ideas, values, and world-views were not sui generis. We know that Israel’s perception was in some ways very much like the Canaanites and that, in fact, trying to retain her own purity of tradition, ancestry, and religion instead of being absorbed into the Canaanite life and religion was a recurring problem. One of the ways, therefore, to come to an adequate understanding of ancient Israel is to make a comparison of it to its neighbors—particularly its closest neighbors whom Israel drank with, married amongst, cursed, and slaughtered.
In order to further solidify the proposition that human life began and ended with breath in the Israelite perspective, it would benefit us greatly to look to the Canaanites to see if they had any similar concept. If there is evidence that they thought in the same manner, then this lends a great deal of support to the proposition that Israel would have thought in such a manner. And in the matter of abortion, it would further the claim that abortion could not technically or even morally be considered the taking of human life if one respects the beliefs of the ancient Hebrew people.
To this end, I turn my attention to one of the great archaeological finds of the last century—the capital city of an ancient Canaanite kingdom called Ugarit, sitting under the long shadow of the Mountain of Baal himself. The archeology and artifacts of Ugarit have dramatically changed the way we think about the ancient world, ancient languages, and indeed about ancient Israel herself. Among all the texts found at Ugarit, there were several popular epics which were known as far away as Babylon. One of these is Aqhat. It is the story of how an ancient patriarchal hero asks Baal for a son. Baal turns to El, the supreme God, who grants the request and gives him a son: Aqhat. At a crucial point of his life, Aqhat is given a special bow which the goddess Anat desires. Anat asks for the bow, but Aqhat refuses to give it to her. Anat then gathers her forces and attacks Aqhat to kill him. In the description of Anat’s attack, we can see this same concept of life coming from breath (and conversely a lack of life meaning an absence of breath) in the ancient Canaanite perspective spelled out for us. The death of Aqhat is described thusly:
Let his life go like a breath…
From his nose like smoke…
I shall take his life.
[His] life went off like a breath…
from [his nose] like smoke.
Aqhat, Tablet 2, Column IV, lines 24, 26-27, 36-37, translation by Simon Parker
Aqhat’s life passes out of his mouth and nose as he ceases to breathe. Were breath to enter him again, he would return to life. However, unlike Baal in another Ugaritic epic, Aqhat isn’t so lucky as to have breath (i.e. life) returned to him.
As I was looking at the transliteration of the Ugaritic, I noticed something even more interesting. The word translated breath—the thing that leaves him and renders him non-living—is spelled NPSH. Add vowels to that and you have the Hebrew word “nephesh,” which occurs through the Hebrew Bible, and which as discussed previously is also the thing (meaning breath) which gives life in Hebrew literature. (Another example of breath being the thing that makes people living from the Hebrew Bible is Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. YHWH resurrects the people, putting their bones back together, sewing flesh and sinews back together, and making their bodies whole and complete. But it is not until breath comes and enters them at last that they live.)
