The Septuagint

Overview

• The Septuagint (Latin for "seventy," abbreviated LXX) is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures — begun with the Torah and extended to the other books — which became the Old Testament of the early Church. It is more a family of texts than a single fixed book.

Summary

"The Septuagint" means "the work of the seventy," after the tradition of seventy(-two) translators who first rendered The Torah into Greek at Alexandria; the remaining books were translated later.[^1] It is not one uniform canon but a tradition of texts, so that "the Septuagint" is more accurately the Alexandrian Jewish canon — the Scriptures the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria used, which the Christians there received as their own. As a rule the early Church simply took the Old Testament canon of its local Jewish community, which is why the Orthodox Old Testament is broader than the later Hebrew (Masoretic) and Protestant canon; the Reformers' removal of the deuterocanonical books is often mischaracterized, since the boundaries were still unsettled when they chose one side of a long-standing dispute.[^1]

Sources

[^1]: OrthodoxWiki, Septuagint, with notes from Fr. Stephen De Young — the Septuagint as the Greek Old Testament (Torah first, then the other books), not a single fixed canon; the Alexandrian Jewish canon received by the early Church; the broader Orthodox Old Testament over against the Masoretic/Protestant canon.