Why does the Septuagint have so many differences from the Hebrew text of the Old Testament?

Over the past few years I have compared many Old Testament passages in the Masoretic Hebrew text and the Septuagint as I have prepared to lead the weekly lectionary study at my local Episcopal church. Sometimes there are no striking differences, but often there are quite significant ones. Why do these differences exist? I alluded to the reasons briefly in an earlier post. I will now give more details.

1. The original Hebrew text had consonants but no vowels. In modern times we are accustomed to thinking of the vowels of the Masoretic Hebrew text as definitive. In many cases, though, different vowels are possible and make just as much sense. Sometimes the vowels that presumably underlie the Septuagint’s translation actually make the text easier to understand.

2. Manuscripts were handwritten. Letters could be confused with one another, depending on the scribe’s style of handwriting. ר (r) and ד (d), ו (w) and י (y), ב (b) and כ (k) are among the pairs of easily confused consonants. At least one of the Dead Sea scrolls has the peculiarity that the tail on י (y) is regularly drawn longer than the tail on ו (w)!

3. There were no spaces between words. There could be differing decisions about where one word ended and the next began.

4. Readers might accidentally or deliberately transpose letters. Accidental transposition is common enough in any language. Deliberate transposition can happen when the reader cannot make sense of the string of letters as it stands. By rearranging two or more letters, and perhaps even changing one or two, the translator was able to understand an otherwise obscure bit of text, and he translated it into Greek according to this understanding.

5. Some Hebrew words were rare or obscure. Since scholarly lexica had not yet been invented, translators sometimes had to use their best judgment based on the context. As suggested in the previous point, deliberate rearrangement of letters was another way to deal with this problem.

6. The translators were in a historical time and cultural environment very different from that of the original writers and revisers of the Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures. Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria, Egypt in 200 B.C.E. had a different geographic orientation from that of Hebrew-speaking Jews in Palestine before the exile, or Aramaic-speaking Jews in Babylon or Persia during the exile.

We will see examples of many of these phenomena while examining specific passages in the future.

A brief word about the Masoretic text of the Hebrew scriptures is in order. The name of the Masoretes comes from the Hebrew word masorah ‘tradition’. The Masoretes were a group of Jewish scribes active in Israel and Babylon in the 7th-11th centuries C.E. They lived long after Hebrew had ceased to be a living language. They inherited traditions (thus their name) of pronunciation and interpretation from their forbears. They devised elaborate sets of symbols to indicate vowel sounds, intonation or melody, pauses and other breaks in the text. They also came up with a large set of marginal notes with corrections to the consonantal text, statistics, and so forth. (A short introduction to these can be found in A Simplified Guide to BHS, 4th ed., by William R. Scott; Richland Hills, TX: BIBAL Press, 1987. A more comprehensive introduction is The Masorah of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: Introduction and Annotated Glossary, by Page H. Kelley, Daniel S. Mynatt and Timothy G. Crawford; Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998.)

The first complete Masoretic manuscript of the Hebrew Scriptures was completed in 930 C.E. by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher. This is more than a thousand years after the Septuagint was translated, about 200 B.C.E. The Masoretic text is the basis of all published editions of the Hebrew scriptures. Thus it underlies all modern translations of those scriptures. Consequently, when we in modern times see the differences between the Old Testament as we know it at the Septuagint, our first inclination may be to consider the Septuagint to contain errors. The wiser course is to consider each version of this text to have its own value.

If you want to dig deeper, you will need to study the field of Old Testament textual criticism, where you will also learn about the Latin Vulgate and the Syriac Peshitta, which also predate the Masoretic text by centuries. A textbook of this is Old Testament Textual Criticism: A Practical Introduction, 2nd ed., by Ellis R. Brotzman and Eric J. Tully; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016.

© 2017 Paul S. Stevenson, Ph.D.