Septuagint

The Septuagint (from Latin septuaginta, "seventy"; conventionally abbreviated LXX) is the ancient Koine Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures , produced in Alexandria across the third and second centuries BCE. The Torah — the five books of Moses — was rendered first, by tradition in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BCE); the Prophets and the Writings followed over the next century and more, in the hands of many different translators of uneven skill and method. It is the oldest translation of the Hebrew Bible into any language, and for the greater part of a thousand years it was, for Greek-speaking Jews and then for the early Church, simply the Bible.

For the textual scholar the Septuagint matters because of its age. The Greek was fixed long before the Masoretes of Tiberias supplied the received Hebrew consonantal text with its vowels and cantillation between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries CE. Where the Greek and the received Hebrew diverge, the Septuagint can preserve a reading older than the Masoretic vocalization, and in a handful of consequential passages it reflects a different Hebrew Vorlage — the source text lying behind the translation — than the one the later Jewish tradition standardized.

The name and the legend

The name records a legend. The Letter of Aristeas, a Greek text written in Alexandria probably in the second century BCE and cast as an eyewitness report from an earlier generation, tells how Ptolemy II, assembling the great Library of Alexandria, sent to the high priest in Jerusalem for scholars to translate the Jewish Law into Greek. Seventy-two elders — six from each of the twelve tribes — came to Egypt, were housed on the island of Pharos, and completed the translation of the Torah in seventy-two days. Later retellings rounded the number to seventy, sharpened the miracle, and extended the tale: Philo of Alexandria reports that the translators, working separately, produced word for word the identical text, as if by inspiration. The "seventy" of the legend gave the whole collection its name and its Roman numeral, LXX, even though the legend strictly concerns only the five books of the Torah.

The historical kernel is modest and widely accepted: the Torah was translated into Greek in third-century-BCE Alexandria, for a Jewish community whose everyday language had become Greek. The miracle of identical independent versions is a theological embellishment; the plain fact is that a large diaspora community needed its scriptures in the language it actually spoke.

What the Septuagint contains

The Septuagint is not a single book or a single translator's work but a library assembled over generations. The Greek Torah is a relatively close, competent rendering; other books range from the fairly literal to the freely paraphrastic, and Greek Daniel, Greek Jeremiah, and Greek Job differ from their Hebrew counterparts substantially enough that scholars treat them as separate editions rather than mere translations.

Its contents and arrangement also differ from the later Jewish canon. The Septuagint orders the books by genre rather than by the tripartite Torah– Prophets–Writings division, and it includes works that the rabbinic canon did not retain — Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), the books of Maccabees, and additions to Daniel and Esther among them. These are the books later Christian tradition calls deuterocanonical and Protestant tradition calls the Apocrypha. Their presence in the Greek and absence from the standardized Hebrew is one of the oldest fault lines in the history of the biblical canon.

The Bible of Hellenistic Judaism and the early Church

For Greek-speaking Jews from Alexandria to Asia Minor, the Septuagint was scripture. Philo built his allegorical philosophy on it; the writers of the New Testament quoted it far more often than they quoted the Hebrew, so that many of the Old Testament citations in the Gospels and Paul follow the Greek wording against the Hebrew. When the early Church spread through the Greek-speaking world, it inherited the Septuagint as its Old Testament, and the great Christian codices — Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus — transmit it.

That Christian adoption had a consequence for Judaism. As the Septuagint became the Church's book, Jewish communities increasingly turned to newer, more literal Greek revisions — those of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion in the second century CE — that hewed closer to the emerging Hebrew standard. Origen's Hexapla, a monumental six-column synopsis setting the Hebrew and the competing Greek versions side by side, is itself evidence of how contested the Greek text had become. One translation choice runs through the whole tradition: where the Hebrew wrote the Tetragrammaton YHWH, the Greek generally read Kyrios, "Lord" — the substitution that would carry into the Latin Dominus and the "LORD" of the English Bibles.

A witness older than the Masoretic vowels

The Septuagint's standing as a text-critical witness was transformed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Before Qumran, a Septuagint reading that disagreed with the Hebrew could be dismissed as a translator's liberty. But among the scrolls are Hebrew manuscripts that agree with the Greek against the received Hebrew text — demonstrating that the Septuagint translators sometimes worked from a genuinely different Hebrew original, not from carelessness or invention. Emanuel Tov's standard synthesis treats the Greek, on a case-by-case basis, as a controlled window onto Hebrew readings a thousand years older than the medieval Masoretic manuscripts. The Greek does not automatically outrank the Hebrew; each variant is weighed on its own merits. But the Septuagint is no longer a mere daughter version. It is, at points, an independent line of descent from an older stage of the text.

Deuteronomy 32:8 and the sons of God

The sharpest example — and the one most consequential for the Wheel of Heaven reading — is Deuteronomy 32:8, a verse in the archaic Song of Moses describing how the Most High (Elyon) apportioned the nations of the earth.

The received Masoretic Text says the boundaries of the peoples were fixed "according to the number of the sons of Israel" (בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, bene Yisrael). The reading is puzzling on its face: the nations are divided at the dawn of history, long before Israel exists to be counted. The Septuagint reads otherwise. Its main manuscripts have "according to the number of the angels of God" (ἀγγέλων θεοῦ, angelōn theou), and other Greek witnesses read "sons of God" (υἱῶν θεοῦ, huiōn theou) — a heavenly host, not an earthly tribe.

For most of the twentieth century this looked like a pious Greek expansion. Then a Hebrew fragment from Qumran, 4QDeut(j), was found to read בְּנֵי אֱלֹהִים (bene elohim, "sons of God/of the Elohim"; the fragment supports the shorter bene el). The Greek was not inventing angels; it was translating a Hebrew original that spoke of divine beings, and the Masoretic "sons of Israel" is the secondary, theologically smoothed reading. Most text critics now judge the older text to say that the nations were allotted among divine beings, with the next verse — "Yahweh's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted share" (Deuteronomy 32:9) — placing Yahweh himself among that number, receiving Israel as his assigned share.

This is one of the load-bearing passages of the divine-council scholarship, and the corpus reads it directly through the Plurality of Gods entry: the verse preserves, in its oldest attested form, a plural heavenly assembly presided over by the Most High, of which Yahweh is one member with one national portion. The convergence of three independent witnesses — a Greek translation from Alexandria, a Hebrew scroll from the Judean desert, and the internal logic of the verse itself — is why the reading is treated as bedrock rather than as speculation. The full audit of the evidence sits in The Translator's Wager.

What the Greek did with elohim

Deuteronomy 32:8 is one instance of a wider pattern in how the Septuagint handled the Hebrew word elohim . Where the term names Israel's God, the Greek renders it with the singular Theos — the rendering the corpus reads as the first step in the long translation lineage that would collapse a plurality of named makers into "a single incomprehensible God." But where the Hebrew stages a company of divine beings — the benei ha-elohim, the "sons of the Elohim" of Genesis 6, Job, and the Psalms — the Greek frequently reaches instead for angeloi, "messengers" or "angels," or for huioi theou, "sons of God." The Greek thus both preserves the plurality (it does not erase the heavenly host) and begins to soften it, recasting embodied divine sons as the incorporeal angels of later theology. The same double move recurs in the Christian-tradition rendering of the Hebrew malakhim, "messengers," as supernatural "angels."

In the Wheel of Heaven framework

The Wheel of Heaven framework treats the Septuagint as a valuable but partial witness — valuable precisely because it is early. Made before the Hebrew text was standardized and vocalized, it catches the scriptures at a stage when readings the later tradition would revise or smooth away were still current. At Deuteronomy 32:8 that early state preserved the divine council; the Masoretic "sons of Israel" shows the editorial hand at work, tidying a plural heaven into a monotheistic one. The framework reads this as a small, dated, physical example of the larger process it calls the collapse of the plural Elohim into a singular God.

The inference must be kept honest, and the corpus keeps it so. The Septuagint is itself a translation, and its own choices are interpretive: rendering divine sons as angeloi is a theological decision no less than the Masoretic revision was. The Greek does not deliver an unmediated original; it delivers an older mediation. What the framework claims is narrow and text-critical — that the oldest recoverable form of certain verses is more plural than the received Hebrew, and that the manuscript evidence for this is now independent and convergent. The larger reading of that plurality as the memory of a real creator civilization is developed, and labelled as framework, elsewhere in the corpus.

The Septuagint stands, in this sense, as the mirror image of a translation like the Dhorme Bible , which consciously preserved Élohim and Iahvé where standard versions substituted theological titles. The Septuagint is where some of that substitution began — Theos for the plural, Kyrios for the name — and also, at Deuteronomy 32:8, where the plurality was best preserved. Both facts are true at once, which is why the Greek is read here as a witness to be weighed, not a verdict to be quoted.

Septuagint. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/septuagint/

"Septuagint." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/septuagint/.

"Septuagint." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/septuagint/.

@misc{woh-septuagint,
  author       = {{Wheel of Heaven}},
  title        = {Septuagint},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/septuagint/}},
  note         = {CC0-1.0 public domain}
}