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What Is the Septuagint? The Bible in Greek
The Greek Septuagint and the Old Testament
What is the Septuagint, and why does it matter for Bible study? This Search 185 Short explores the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, changing languages, and the Old Testament background of the Christian Bible.
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[0:00] This happens even in our day and age,
[0:01] right?
[0:02] My grandparents were from Mexico. My My
[0:05] dad was born here, but he spoke Spanish.
[0:07] I learned Spanish, but my kids didn't
[0:09] learn Spanish. And so, over time, the
[0:13] language starts to decline and the
[0:15] knowledge of the language starts to
[0:16] decline. And so, now you've got a whole
[0:18] bunch of these Hebrew people who don't
[0:21] know Hebrew and can't hear the word of
[0:24] God because they don't understand it.
[0:26] They don't know what it says. So, what
[0:27] ended up happening
[0:29] um around 280 BC, this is 280 years
[0:33] before Christ,
[0:34] there was a um
[0:36] a group of of Jewish scholars that got
[0:38] together to create a Greek version of
[0:43] the Old Testament Hebrew.
[0:45] Why Greek? Because that's who was in
[0:47] power at the time. And not only that,
[0:49] but Greek was a very common language. It
[0:51] was kind of the language of of commerce
[0:53] and whatnot. So, Greek was what they
[0:55] spoke and so they translated
[0:58] the Bible from Hebrew into Greek. I'll
[1:01] tell you why this is important uh here
[1:03] in just a minute, but this Septuagint
[1:06] literally mean means 70 and it's also
[1:08] abbreviated as LXX. What is LXX?
[1:13] That's a Roman numeral 70, correct? So,
[1:16] you may see it like that. So, just a
[1:18] little hint there if you you're reading
[1:19] along and you go, "Hey, I see LXX. It's
[1:21] like, I remember. That's the Greek
[1:23] version of the Old Testament
[1:25] Septuagint." Okay?
[1:27] This Greek
[1:28] Alexandrian canon, it's called
[1:30] Alexandrian because Alexander the Great
[1:33] um had 46 books in it. And this is
[1:37] important why? Because this is the the
[1:39] version that was most commonly used
[1:42] during Jesus's time.
[1:44] We'll see how that plays out here in
[1:46] just a second. But if you'll if you'll
[1:49] bear with me here, during this time,
[1:52] you had
[1:53] many many people who could not speak
[1:55] Hebrew, especially the northern people,
[1:58] uh uh the tribes of lost tribes of
[2:00] Israel, and so they were reading the
[2:02] Septuagint cuz they could read Greek.