The Septuagint and New Testament Quotations

The New Testament quotes the Old Testament formally about 300 times. Where the Greek and the Hebrew diverge, the majority of those quotations follow the Greek. This is not an obscure statistic; it changes how particular arguments read.

Hebrews 10:5 quotes Psalm 40:6 as "a body hast thou prepared me." The Masoretic Hebrew reads "ears hast thou dug for me." The entire argument of Hebrews 10:5–10 — the offered body of Christ replacing animal sacrifice — runs on the Greek reading.

Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 with parthenos, "virgin," the Septuagint's rendering of the Hebrew almah. Jewish translators chose that Greek word roughly two centuries before Christ. Whatever one concludes about almah, the messianic reading of Isaiah 7:14 as involving a virgin is pre-Christian and Jewish, not a Christian retrofit.

At the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15:16–18, James settles the Gentile question by quoting Amos 9:11–12 in its Greek form — "that the residue of men might seek after the Lord" — where the Hebrew reads "that they may possess the remnant of Edom." The charter of the Gentile mission is argued from the Septuagint.

Hebrews 1:6 quotes Deuteronomy 32:43, "and let all the angels of God worship him" — a line absent from the Masoretic Text but present in the Septuagint, and present in Hebrew at Qumran in 4QDeutq. The New Testament author was quoting something that existed in Hebrew.

That is the pattern the scrolls established. Before 1947 these divergences were widely explained as loose translation or Alexandrian theological drift. Then 4QSamᵃ appeared, agreeing with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text in 124 places in the non-kaige sections alone.

Then 4QJerᵇ and 4QJerᵈ turned up preserving, in Hebrew, the shorter and differently ordered edition of Jeremiah previously known only in Greek — the Septuagint's Jeremiah runs about an eighth shorter than the Masoretic.

Emanuel Tov's conclusion stands: the Septuagint frequently translates a genuine, and sometimes older, Hebrew Vorlage.

Two consequences follow for Scripture's reliability. First, the apostles did not misquote their Bible; they used a legitimate textual stream that Jewish scholarship had produced and Jewish communities used. Second — and this is the stronger point — Israel and the church preserved several textual streams side by side rather than eliminating the differences.

Copies that disagreed were kept, not burned. That is what conservative transmission looks like, and it is the opposite of what a fabricated tradition would leave behind.

The Jewish reception is its own datum. Greek-speaking synagogues used the Septuagint for three centuries; once the church made it the standard Christian Old Testament, Jewish scholars produced fresh Greek versions — Aquila's rigidly literal rendering around AD 130, then Symmachus and Theodotion — precisely to get back to the Hebrew. The competition is visible in the record, which is why the divergences can be measured at all.

The scholarly apparatus is public and unfinished. The Göttingen Septuaginta, the critical edition begun in 1931, is still in progress volume by volume; Rahlfs–Hanhart is the standard portable text; A New English Translation of the Septuagint (2007) put it into English for readers without Greek. Origen's Hexapla — six parallel columns of Hebrew and Greek versions compiled around AD 240 — survives only in fragments, and remains the great lost instrument of the field.