THE SEPTUAGINT
a triglot in English, the original Greek, and Latin

Genesis Exodus Leviticus

The Project

This is the commencement of a project to complete a triglot version of the Septuagint comprising both English and Latin translations of the original Greek text, the version of the Old Testament used by Christ, His Apostles, and the Early Church.

The English translation aims to improve, both in readability and textual fidelity, on previous ones made by Charles Thomson, Sir Lancelot Brenton, Gary Zeolla, and Nicholas King, as well as those contained in the NETS, Lexham, and Orthodox editions. Interestingly, all those translations were made by men outside the Catholic Church (including Nicholas King, an adherent of the pseudo-Catholic Vatican II sect).

The Greek text is taken from the Rahlfs-Hanhart edition, a critical edition based on the three major LXX codices (Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, and Sinaiticus). It appears to vary but little from the as yet incomplete Gӧttingen edition, considered by many as the gold standard in Septuagintal studies.

The Latin translation is an amended version of that made by the 19^th century French priest Jean-Nicolas Jager, who in turn made use of the early incompletely-preserved Latin translations of the Septuagint collectively termed the Vetus Latina. The amendments seek not only to correct translation errors but also to bring the text into line with the superior readings of the Rahlfs-Hanhart edition.

Septuagintal Priority?

There are many reasons for believing that the Septuagint (LXX) should form the basis of our Old Testament (OT) studies and not play second fiddle to the Hebrew, merely being consulted where the latter is felt to be obscure or incomplete. This was the approach favoured by St Augustine in his debates with St Jerome. For this reason we might term the two different approaches Augustinian and Hieronymian. Some reasons for LXX priority are as follows:

- the LXX codices are many hundreds of years older than that of the mediaeval Masoretic Text (MT)

- unlike the MT, the LXX comprises all the books of the Bible

- the LXX is not merely a translation, it is an inspired translation, as witnessed by numerous messianic allusions either absent from or obscured in the MT

- Hellenistic Greek was the lingua franca of all educated men in the time in which Christ chose to come on earth

- the New Testament (NT) writings grew out of the soil of the LXX, both in its thought and its language, and thus the great majority of its quotations are taken from the LXX, not the MT

- the Dead Sea discoveries prove that much of the LXX is based on alternative Hebrew texts no longer extant, the content of which Christ and His Apostles virtually canonized through their preferential use of the LXX

- the Hebrew scriptures were not maintained by the Church, but entirely by the Jews, and were partially corrupted in the centuries after Christ, messianic allusions and promises to include non-Israelites in the community of salvation being systematically excised or at least obscured by antichristic scribes, at least according to writers like St Justin Martyr and Origen

- the Early Church relied exclusively on the LXX for her understanding of the Old Testament, and it was only by the 9th century that St Jerome's Vulgate translation of the 4th century Hebrew text completely displaced the Church's earlier translations of the LXX

Or Septuagintal Complementarity?

Protestants rely almost exclusively on the MT for their understanding of the OT, whereas the 'Orthodox' go to the opposite extreme and rely almost exclusively on the LXX. But would it not be better to read them both in tandem, in other words, to read the LXX as synchronously as possible with the MT? The reasons for this are as follows:

- much of the material in the LXX has an interlinear and super-literalist quality about it, suggesting that its translator saw it more of an aid to understanding the Hebrew than an independent text to be read in isolation

- the Hebrew often contains a richness of detail and an authoritativeness that is missing in the LXX, as even St Augustine (who was very much an advocate of Septuagintal priority) admitted

- the majority of the MT verses appear to be very close if not identical to the text that the LXX translators were clearly working from

- Greek lacks several of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet, so the transliteration of proper names is necessarily problematic

- the LXX translators clearly made a number of translation errors

- the Greek frequently lacks the vocabulary to mirror the Hebrew terms precisely, so these can only be fully appreciated by consulting the underlying Hebrew text itself

- it should be reasonably apparent where messianic references have been obscured in the Masoretic Text, for in these cases the Hebrew will present a poor match to the text quoted by the New Testament authors,

- hence one could arguably limit one's distrust of the Hebrew text (as St Jerome himself appeared to do) to the following such cases:

o suspected de-messianization

o extensive alteration of proper names

o obscurities interpreted less satisfyingly than in the LXX

Useful references

Other English translations which are freely available include those of Thomson, Brenton, The Apostolic Bible (interlinear), and NETS. Of these, Brenton's version is the one most commonly used, so much so that there is even a Restored Names Version of it! The NETS translation, despites its scholarly veneer, has alas opted for a barbarous literalism, one that is punitively unsympathetic to Hellenistic idiom, making much of it largely unreadable. Other translations are also available for a fee: those of Nicholas King, Gary Zeolla, the Lexham English Septuagint, and the Orthodox Study Bible.

Sabatier's collation of the remnants of the Vetus Latina and Jager's Latin translation can be found on www.Archive.org.

The Greek Documents website is a useful resource for instant Greek vocabulary lookups, although the LSJ Lexicon is superior, and Muraoka's Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint is invaluable.

The Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) should also be regularly be consulted by students of the Septuagint. Intriguingly it often reveals that Septuagint itself is more faithful to the Hebrew than any of the English translations made from it. The Literal Standard Version, a recent revision of Young's Literal Translation, aims to be the most literal of all English translations made from the MT, although being a Protestant translation it is of course an incomplete Bible. The Syriac Peshitta is also worth consulting, as is the Samaritan Pentateuch, which tends to be closer to the LXX than the MT.