Text family

Septuagint

Also known as LXX · Greek Old Testament

The Greek Old Testament, translated in the third century BC and after. It is a family of copies, and the site holds the chief ones.

textual-traditionold-testamentgreek-bibletranslations

Summary

The Septuagint is the Old Testament in Greek. Jewish scholars made it in Egypt before Christ, and the apostles quoted from it.

Papyri, codices and later copies all carry the Greek text.
The five books of Moses came first, at Alexandria in Egypt.
The rest followed over the next two hundred years.
It holds the books Protestants group as the Apocrypha.
Your Bible cites it at Isaiah 53:11 and Psalm 22:16.

A leaf of Papyrus 967, an early Greek papyrus codex of the Septuagint — Papyrus 967, leaf P. Köln Theol. 37v: the papyrus collection of the University of Cologne, public domainKept by the papyrus collection of the University of Cologne.Papyrus 967 is the oldest substantial Greek copy of Ezekiel and Daniel, written about a century before the great codices, so it shows the Septuagint as a book people read rather than as a name in a footnote.

Sources (6)

Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Fortress, 2012) · accessed 2026-09-11The counts of the Qumran biblical scrolls by text type.
Karen H. Jobes and Moises Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2015) · accessed 2026-09-11The handbook on the Greek translation and its differences from the Hebrew.
Letter of Aristeas (Charles 1913 English translation, public domain) · accessed 2026-04-17Primary source for the traditional origin account.
ISBE (1915): Septuagint · accessed 2026-04-17Public domain.
Jewish Encyclopedia (1906): Bible Translations, The Septuagint · accessed 2026-04-17Public domain.
Wikipedia: Septuagint · accessed 2026-04-17CC BY-SA. Kept last, for the facts of the row it first supplied.

What it is

The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Its name comes from the old account of seventy or seventy-two translators, and it is often written LXX for that reason.

The Letter of Aristeas tells that story. It is a Jewish work of the second or first century BC, written under a name its author did not own. It says the five books of Moses were turned into Greek at Alexandria under Ptolemy II. The other books followed over the next two hundred years. The preface to Ben Sira, written about 132 BC, already speaks of the Law, the Prophets and the rest of the books in Greek.

Most Greek-speaking Jews read it in the Second Temple period. The early Christian Bibles in Greek carry it as their Old Testament.

The Greek text is a family. It survives in the great codices Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus. It survives also in earlier papyri such as Papyrus 967, and in the Greek scrolls from the Judaean desert, among them the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll.

What agrees, what differs, and what does not change

What agrees

Agreement is measured where the evidence is whole. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran was copied about 125 BC. It runs through all sixty-six chapters, and it matches the medieval Hebrew Bible through the great bulk of the book. Most of the places it differs are spellings rather than a different sense (Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed., 2012). A thousand years of copying lie between the two, and the text held.

What differs

Where the Greek and the Hebrew part, the difference can be large. The Greek Jeremiah is shorter by about an eighth, counted as Hebrew words with no Greek equivalent. It also sets the oracles against the nations elsewhere (Tov, 2012). The Greek Daniel holds stories the Hebrew and Aramaic Daniel lacks. The Greek reads differently at Deuteronomy 32:8 and at 32:43. A Hebrew scroll from Qumran agrees with the Greek at both (Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd ed., 2015). Tov also sorted the Qumran Bible scrolls by the Hebrew text each one follows. That classification counts text types, and it measures nothing about how closely two texts agree. Fifty-six of them are close to the Hebrew behind your Old Testament. Seven are close to the Hebrew the Septuagint was made from (David and Lange, Qumran and the Bible, 2010).

What does not change

No Christian teaching rests on these differences. Genesis 1 and the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 say the same thing in Hebrew and in Greek, and so does the Shepherd of Psalm 23. Those three sit outside every passage argued over on this page.

The line of descent

The stops are in the order the copies were made, from the Hebrew the translators worked from to the footnote in a modern Bible.

The Hebrew parentbefore c. 250 BC, the copies the translators worked from, now lost
The Old Greekc. 250 to 100 BC, the first translation, made at Alexandria and after
Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotionsecond century AD, Jewish revisions of the Greek toward the Hebrew
Origen's Hexaplathird century AD, six columns compared; a leaf of it survives in the Cairo Geniza
Codex Vaticanusc. AD 300, the fullest Greek Old Testament
Codex Sinaiticusc. AD 330, a whole Greek Bible in one book
Codex Alexandrinusc. AD 400, a fifth-century copy of the same tradition
The footnote in your Bibletoday, where a modern edition marks the Greek reading

The family at a glance

Date: The Pentateuch at Alexandria under Ptolemy II, about 285 to 247 BC, on the account of the Letter of Aristeas, which is a tradition rather than a record; the remaining books by the second century BC, from the prologue to Ben Sira of about 132 BC.
Language: Greek (Koine)
Translated from: Hebrew copies made before the medieval Hebrew manuscripts. In Samuel and in Jeremiah, scrolls from Qumran carry a Hebrew text close to the one the Greek translators used, which is the direct evidence for those two books (Tov, 2012).
Made at: Produced initially in Alexandria, Egypt
Contains: Torah / Pentateuch · Prophets · Writings · Apocrypha / Deuterocanon (in most manuscripts)
Chief witnesses: Codex Vaticanus Codex Sinaiticus Codex Alexandrinus The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll

Why it matters

The Septuagint matters for three reasons. It is the Old Testament of the first Christians, and the version the New Testament quotes most often. It was translated from Hebrew copies that no longer survive, so where it differs from the medieval Hebrew Bible it is indirect evidence for what its own Hebrew read. That evidence is strongest book by book: in Samuel and in Jeremiah, scrolls found at Qumran carry a Hebrew text close to the one the Greek translators used (Tov, 2012). It holds the books Catholic and Orthodox Christians receive as Scripture and Protestants group as the Apocrypha, and the order of the books in most English Bibles follows it.

Where this witness is read

The words used here: uncial, minuscule, Koine, Masoretic Text, Septuagint, papyrus, codex

uncial: a book hand of Greek capital letters, used for the oldest whole Bibles.
minuscule: the smaller joined hand that replaced capitals from about the ninth century.
Koine: the everyday Greek spoken across the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries around Christ.
Masoretic Text: the Hebrew Bible copied and pointed by Jewish scribes, the text the KJV and the ASV translate.
Septuagint: the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made by Jewish scholars before Christ.
papyrus: paper made from reed, the cheap writing material of Egypt.
codex: a book with leaves and a spine, the form that replaced the scroll.

The King James and American Standard Old Testaments translate the Masoretic Text, the Hebrew Bible Jewish scribes copied and kept. Their New Testaments come from Greek manuscripts and are a separate question. Where the Septuagint reads differently, the margin of your Bible points here. Each card below sets the Greek beside the Hebrew the King James renders. The Translators to the Reader, the 1611 preface, asked: "doth not a margin do well to admonish the Reader to seek further, and not to conclude or dogmatize upon this or that peremptorily?"

Where the manuscripts differ, all 15 places →Every handwritten copy, shelved and in date order →