Septuagint

The Septuagint (LXX — so called from the traditional account of 70 or 72 translators) is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Letter of Aristeas (a Jewish pseudepigraphic work of the 2nd–1st century BCE) accounts for the initial translation of the Pentateuch at Alexandria under Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the 3rd century BCE; the remaining books were translated over the following centuries. The LXX was the Bible of most Greek-speaking Jews in the Second Temple period and the Bible most often quoted by New Testament authors; early Christian Bibles in Greek (including Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus) used the Septuagint as their Old Testament. It is a TEXTUAL TRADITION rather than a single physical manuscript — surviving witnesses are distributed across many manuscripts, including the major uncials Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus, along with earlier partial papyri and the Qumran Greek fragments. This node represents the tradition as a whole; the most important physical witnesses have their own node entries (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are already seeded; Alexandrinus may be added later).