The Septuagint (from Latin septuaginta, \"seventy\"; conventionally\nabbreviated LXX) is the ancient Koine Greek translation of the\n\nHebrew scriptures\n, produced in\nAlexandria across the third and second centuries BCE. The Torah — the five\nbooks of Moses — was rendered first, by tradition in the reign of Ptolemy II\nPhiladelphus (285–246 BCE); the Prophets and the Writings followed over the\nnext century and more, in the hands of many different translators of uneven\nskill and method. It is the oldest translation of the Hebrew Bible into any\nlanguage, and for the greater part of a thousand years it was, for\nGreek-speaking Jews and then for the early Church, simply the Bible.
\nFor the textual scholar the Septuagint matters because of its age. The Greek\nwas fixed long before the Masoretes of Tiberias supplied the received Hebrew\nconsonantal text with its vowels and cantillation between roughly the sixth and\ntenth centuries CE. Where the Greek and the received Hebrew diverge, the\nSeptuagint can preserve a reading older than the Masoretic vocalization, and in\na handful of consequential passages it reflects a different Hebrew Vorlage —\nthe source text lying behind the translation — than the one the later Jewish\ntradition standardized.
\nThe name records a legend. The Letter of Aristeas, a Greek text written in\nAlexandria probably in the second century BCE and cast as an eyewitness report\nfrom an earlier generation, tells how Ptolemy II, assembling the great Library\nof Alexandria, sent to the high priest in Jerusalem for scholars to translate\nthe Jewish Law into Greek. Seventy-two elders — six from each of the twelve\ntribes — came to Egypt, were housed on the island of Pharos, and completed the\ntranslation of the Torah in seventy-two days. Later retellings rounded the\nnumber to seventy, sharpened the miracle, and extended the tale: Philo of\nAlexandria reports that the translators, working separately, produced word for\nword the identical text, as if by inspiration. The \"seventy\" of the legend gave\nthe whole collection its name and its Roman numeral, LXX, even though the legend\nstrictly concerns only the five books of the Torah.
\nThe historical kernel is modest and widely accepted: the Torah was translated\ninto Greek in third-century-BCE Alexandria, for a Jewish community whose\neveryday language had become Greek. The miracle of identical independent\nversions is a theological embellishment; the plain fact is that a large\ndiaspora community needed its scriptures in the language it actually spoke.
\nThe Septuagint is not a single book or a single translator's work but a library\nassembled over generations. The Greek Torah is a relatively close, competent\nrendering; other books range from the fairly literal to the freely\nparaphrastic, and Greek Daniel, Greek Jeremiah, and Greek Job differ from their\nHebrew counterparts substantially enough that scholars treat them as separate\neditions rather than mere translations.
\nIts contents and arrangement also differ from the later Jewish canon. The\nSeptuagint orders the books by genre rather than by the tripartite Torah–\nProphets–Writings division, and it includes works that the rabbinic canon did\nnot retain — Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), the\nbooks of Maccabees, and additions to Daniel and Esther among them. These are the\nbooks later Christian tradition calls deuterocanonical and Protestant\ntradition calls the Apocrypha. Their presence in the Greek and absence from\nthe standardized Hebrew is one of the oldest fault lines in the history of the\nbiblical canon.
\nFor Greek-speaking Jews from Alexandria to Asia Minor, the Septuagint was\nscripture. Philo built his allegorical philosophy on it; the writers of the New\nTestament quoted it far more often than they quoted the Hebrew, so that many of\nthe Old Testament citations in the Gospels and Paul follow the Greek wording\nagainst the Hebrew. When the early Church spread through the Greek-speaking\nworld, it inherited the Septuagint as its Old Testament, and the great Christian\ncodices — Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus — transmit it.
\nThat Christian adoption had a consequence for Judaism. As the Septuagint became\nthe Church's book, Jewish communities increasingly turned to newer, more\nliteral Greek revisions — those of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion in the\nsecond century CE — that hewed closer to the emerging Hebrew standard.\nOrigen's Hexapla, a monumental six-column synopsis setting the Hebrew and the\ncompeting Greek versions side by side, is itself evidence of how contested the\nGreek text had become. One translation choice runs through the whole tradition:\nwhere the Hebrew wrote the Tetragrammaton YHWH, the Greek generally read\nKyrios, \"Lord\" — the substitution that would carry into the Latin Dominus and\nthe \"LORD\" of the English Bibles.
\nThe Septuagint's standing as a text-critical witness was transformed by the\nDead Sea Scrolls. Before Qumran, a Septuagint reading that disagreed with the\nHebrew could be dismissed as a translator's liberty. But among the scrolls are\nHebrew manuscripts that agree with the Greek against the received Hebrew text —\ndemonstrating that the Septuagint translators sometimes worked from a genuinely\ndifferent Hebrew original, not from carelessness or invention. Emanuel Tov's\nstandard synthesis treats the Greek, on a case-by-case basis, as a controlled\nwindow onto Hebrew readings a thousand years older than the medieval Masoretic\nmanuscripts. The Greek does not automatically outrank the Hebrew; each variant\nis weighed on its own merits. But the Septuagint is no longer a mere daughter\nversion. It is, at points, an independent line of descent from an older stage of\nthe text.
\nThe sharpest example — and the one most consequential for the Wheel of Heaven\nreading — is Deuteronomy 32:8, a verse in the archaic Song of Moses describing\nhow the Most High (Elyon) apportioned the nations of the earth.
\nThe received Masoretic Text says the boundaries of the peoples were fixed\n\"according to the number of the sons of Israel\"\n(בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, bene Yisrael). The reading is\npuzzling on its face: the nations are divided at the dawn of history, long\nbefore Israel exists to be counted. The Septuagint reads otherwise. Its main\nmanuscripts have \"according to the number of the angels of God\"\n(ἀγγέλων θεοῦ, angelōn theou), and other Greek witnesses read \"sons of\nGod\" (υἱῶν θεοῦ, huiōn theou) — a heavenly host, not an earthly tribe.
\nFor most of the twentieth century this looked like a pious Greek expansion.\nThen a Hebrew fragment from Qumran, 4QDeut(j), was found to read\nבְּנֵי אֱלֹהִים (bene elohim, \"sons of God/of the\nElohim\"; the fragment supports the shorter bene el). The Greek was not\ninventing angels; it was translating a Hebrew original that spoke of divine\nbeings, and the Masoretic \"sons of Israel\" is the secondary, theologically\nsmoothed reading. Most text critics now judge the older text to say that the\nnations were allotted among divine beings, with the next verse — \"Yahweh's\nportion is his people, Jacob his allotted share\" (Deuteronomy 32:9) — placing\nYahweh himself among that number, receiving Israel as his assigned share.
\nThis is one of the load-bearing passages of the divine-council scholarship, and\nthe corpus reads it directly through the\n\nPlurality of Gods\n entry: the verse\npreserves, in its oldest attested form, a plural heavenly assembly presided over\nby the Most High, of which Yahweh is one member with one national portion. The\nconvergence of three independent witnesses — a Greek translation from Alexandria,\na Hebrew scroll from the Judean desert, and the internal logic of the verse\nitself — is why the reading is treated as bedrock rather than as speculation.\nThe full audit of the evidence sits in\nThe Translator's Wager.
\nDeuteronomy 32:8 is one instance of a wider pattern in how the Septuagint\nhandled the Hebrew word \n*elohim*\n.\nWhere the term names Israel's God, the Greek renders it with the singular\nTheos — the rendering the corpus reads as the first step in the long\ntranslation lineage that would collapse a plurality of named makers into \"a\nsingle incomprehensible God.\" But where the Hebrew stages a company of divine\nbeings — the benei ha-elohim, the \"sons of the Elohim\" of Genesis 6, Job, and\nthe Psalms — the Greek frequently reaches instead for angeloi, \"messengers\" or\n\"angels,\" or for huioi theou, \"sons of God.\" The Greek thus both preserves\nthe plurality (it does not erase the heavenly host) and begins to soften it,\nrecasting embodied divine sons as the incorporeal angels of later theology. The\nsame double move recurs in the Christian-tradition rendering of the Hebrew\nmalakhim, \"messengers,\" as supernatural \"angels.\"
\nThe Wheel of Heaven framework treats the Septuagint as a valuable but partial\nwitness — valuable precisely because it is early. Made before the Hebrew text\nwas standardized and vocalized, it catches the scriptures at a stage when\nreadings the later tradition would revise or smooth away were still current. At\nDeuteronomy 32:8 that early state preserved the divine council; the Masoretic\n\"sons of Israel\" shows the editorial hand at work, tidying a plural heaven into\na monotheistic one. The framework reads this as a small, dated, physical example\nof the larger process it calls the collapse of the plural Elohim into a singular\nGod.
\nThe inference must be kept honest, and the corpus keeps it so. The Septuagint is\nitself a translation, and its own choices are interpretive: rendering divine\nsons as angeloi is a theological decision no less than the Masoretic revision\nwas. The Greek does not deliver an unmediated original; it delivers an older\nmediation. What the framework claims is narrow and text-critical — that the\noldest recoverable form of certain verses is more plural than the received\nHebrew, and that the manuscript evidence for this is now independent and\nconvergent. The larger reading of that plurality as the memory of a real\ncreator civilization is developed, and labelled as framework, elsewhere in the\ncorpus.
\nThe Septuagint stands, in this sense, as the mirror image of a translation like\nthe \nDhorme Bible\n, which\nconsciously preserved Élohim and Iahvé where standard versions substituted\ntheological titles. The Septuagint is where some of that substitution began —\nTheos for the plural, Kyrios for the name — and also, at Deuteronomy 32:8,\nwhere the plurality was best preserved. Both facts are true at once, which is why\nthe Greek is read here as a witness to be weighed, not a verdict to be quoted.
\n", "extra": {"alternative_names":["LXX","the Greek Old Testament","the Alexandrian translation"],"category":"Texts & Sources","claim_type":"direct","editorial_pass":"2026-05","entry_type":"text","infobox":{"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","date":"3rd–2nd c. BCE (Torah first, c. 3rd c. BCE; the remainder by roughly the 2nd c. BCE)","distinguished_from":"The Masoretic Text (the received Hebrew); the later Jewish Greek revisions of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion; the Latin Vulgate","language":"Koine Greek","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","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"},"lang":"en","lang_prefix":"","references":[{"author":"Karen H. Jobes & Moisés Silva","date":"2015","title":"Invitation to the Septuagint","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"},{"author":"Alfred Rahlfs (ed.), rev. Robert Hanhart","date":"1935; rev. 2006","title":"Septuaginta: Editio altera (the standard critical edition)","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"},{"author":"Pseudo-Aristeas (2nd century BCE)","date":"c. 2nd c. BCE","title":"Letter of Aristeas","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_Aristeas"},{"author":"Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft","date":"2020","title":"The Septuagint (LXX) — introduction","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"}],"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"],"see_also":[{"description":"The Hebrew-language corpus the Septuagint translates.","path":"/wiki/hebrew-bible/","title":"Hebrew Bible"},{"description":"The received vocalized Hebrew text the Septuagint predates and is compared against.","path":"/wiki/masoretic-text/","title":"Masoretic Text"},{"description":"The Qumran manuscripts that sometimes confirm Septuagint readings against the Masoretic Text — including at Deuteronomy 32:8.","path":"/wiki/dead-sea-scrolls/","title":"Dead Sea Scrolls"},{"description":"The divine-council reading the Deuteronomy 32:8 variant supports.","path":"/wiki/plurality-of-gods/","title":"Plurality of Gods"},{"description":"A philologically preserving translation, the counter-model to the theologizing choices that begin with the Septuagint.","path":"/wiki/dhorme-bible-translation/","title":"Dhorme Bible translation"},{"description":"The Explainer on strict-literal reading, where the Deuteronomy 32:8 evidence is audited.","path":"/articles/the-translators-wager/","title":"The Translator's Wager"}],"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.","timeline":["multi-age"]} }, "links": { "self": "/v1/wiki/septuagint/", "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/septuagint/", "index": "/v1/wiki/", "schema": "/v1/schema/wiki-entry/", "related": [{"slug": "hebrew-bible", "title": "Hebrew Bible", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/hebrew-bible/" },{"slug": "masoretic-text", "title": "Masoretic Text", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/masoretic-text/" },{"slug": "dead-sea-scrolls", "title": "Dead Sea Scrolls", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/dead-sea-scrolls/" },{"slug": "plurality-of-gods", "title": "Plurality of Gods", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/plurality-of-gods/" },{"slug": "dhorme-bible-translation", "title": "Dhorme Bible translation", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/dhorme-bible-translation/" },{"slug": "the-translators-wager", "title": "The Translator's Wager", "kind": "Article", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/articles/the-translators-wager/" }] } }