+++
title = "Septuagint"
slug = "septuagint"
description = "The Septuagint (LXX) is the ancient Koine Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, made in Alexandria — a textual witness older than the Masoretic vowels."
template = "wiki-page.html"
toc = true

[extra]
same_as = ["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q29334", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint", "https://www.britannica.com/topic/Septuagint", "https://viaf.org/viaf/295128581"]
category = "Texts & Sources"
entry_type = "text"
claim_type = "direct"
editorial_pass = "2026-05"
summary = "The Septuagint (LXX) is the Koine Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, begun with the Torah in third-century-BCE Alexandria and largely complete by roughly the second century BCE. It was the Bible of Hellenistic Judaism and the early Church, and because it predates the Masoretic vocalization by about a thousand years it carries independent text-critical weight — sometimes reflecting an older Hebrew *Vorlage* than the received Hebrew text. Its most consequential variant for the Wheel of Heaven reading is Deuteronomy 32:8, where the Greek reads 'angels of God' / 'sons of God' against the Masoretic 'sons of Israel' — a divine-council reading the Qumran scroll 4QDeut(j) independently supports."
alternative_names = ["LXX", "the Greek Old Testament", "the Alexandrian translation"]
timeline = ["multi-age"]
see_also = [
    { title = "Hebrew Bible", path = "/wiki/hebrew-bible/", description = "The Hebrew-language corpus the Septuagint translates." },
    { title = "Masoretic Text", path = "/wiki/masoretic-text/", description = "The received vocalized Hebrew text the Septuagint predates and is compared against." },
    { title = "Dead Sea Scrolls", path = "/wiki/dead-sea-scrolls/", description = "The Qumran manuscripts that sometimes confirm Septuagint readings against the Masoretic Text — including at Deuteronomy 32:8." },
    { title = "Plurality of Gods", path = "/wiki/plurality-of-gods/", description = "The divine-council reading the Deuteronomy 32:8 variant supports." },
    { title = "Dhorme Bible translation", path = "/wiki/dhorme-bible-translation/", description = "A philologically preserving translation, the counter-model to the theologizing choices that begin with the Septuagint." },
    { title = "The Translator's Wager", path = "/articles/the-translators-wager/", description = "The Explainer on strict-literal reading, where the Deuteronomy 32:8 evidence is audited." },
]
references = [
    { title = "Invitation to the Septuagint", author = "Karen H. Jobes & Moisés Silva", date = "2015", url = "https://bakeracademic.com/p/Invitation-to-the-Septuagint-Karen-H-Jobes/40602" },
    { id = "tov-textual-criticism", locator = "the Septuagint as a witness to a pre-Masoretic Hebrew *Vorlage*; the evaluation of LXX variants, including Deuteronomy 32:8" },
    { title = "Septuaginta: Editio altera (the standard critical edition)", author = "Alfred Rahlfs (ed.), rev. Robert Hanhart", date = "1935; rev. 2006", url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Rahlfs%27_edition_of_the_Septuagint" },
    { id = "deuteronomy-32-8-and-the-sons-of-god-bibliotheca-sacra-158-the-4qdeutj-evidence-", locator = "the 4QDeut(j) evidence and the case that the Masoretic 'sons of Israel' is a secondary reading" },
    { title = "Letter of Aristeas", author = "Pseudo-Aristeas (2nd century BCE)", date = "c. 2nd c. BCE", url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_Aristeas" },
    { title = "The Septuagint (LXX) — introduction", author = "Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft", date = "2020", url = "https://www.die-bibel.de/en/en/the-septuagint-lxx" },
    { id = "the-book-which-tells-the-truth", locator = "the plural Elohim collapsed by later hands into a singular 'God'; the Septuagint's *Theos* as the first step of that translation lineage" },
]

[extra.infobox]
language = "Koine Greek"
date = "3rd–2nd c. BCE (Torah first, c. 3rd c. BCE; the remainder by roughly the 2nd c. BCE)"
origin = "Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt"
source_text = "The Hebrew (and, for some books, no longer extant) scriptures, in a form often earlier than the received Masoretic Text"
contents = "The Torah, Prophets, and Writings, plus books not in the later Jewish canon (the 'deuterocanon' / Apocrypha); book order and some contents differ from the Hebrew canon"
textual_significance = "The earliest large-scale translation of the Hebrew scriptures; a text-critical witness predating the Masoretic vocalization by roughly a millennium, sometimes preserving an older Hebrew reading"
distinguished_from = "The Masoretic Text (the received Hebrew); the later Jewish Greek revisions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion; the Latin Vulgate"
+++

The **Septuagint** (from Latin *septuaginta*, "seventy"; conventionally
abbreviated **LXX**) is the ancient Koine Greek translation of the
{% wiki(slug="hebrew-bible") %}Hebrew scriptures{% end %}, 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**"
(<span class="hebrew">בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל</span>, *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
<span class="hebrew">בְּנֵי אֱלֹהִים</span> (*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
{% wiki(slug="plurality-of-gods") %}Plurality of Gods{% end %} 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*](/articles/the-translators-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 {% wiki(slug="plurality-of-gods") %}*elohim*{% end %}.
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 {% wiki(slug="dhorme-bible-translation") %}Dhorme Bible{% end %}, 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.