Septuagint

The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek, undertaken by and for the large Jewish community of Ptolemaic Alexandria, whose members increasingly read and spoke Greek rather than Hebrew. The Pentateuch was translated first, traditionally in the mid-3rd century BC; the Prophets and Writings followed piecemeal over the following two centuries, by different hands of uneven skill, producing a text that is less a single translation than a loosely coordinated library of translations sharing a common project. The legendary account in the Letter of Aristeas, describing seventy-two translators independently producing identical Greek versions in seventy-two days, is not taken as history by modern scholars, but the name it gave the work, "the Translation of the Seventy" (Septuaginta), stuck.

The Septuagint's importance for later history vastly outran its origin as a practical accommodation to Greek-speaking Jews. It became the Bible of the earliest Christian communities, who were mostly Greek-speaking and unfamiliar with Hebrew; the great majority of quotations of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament follow the Septuagint's wording rather than the Hebrew Masoretic Text, sometimes in ways that shape Christian doctrine directly (the Greek word for "young woman" in Isaiah 7:14 is rendered by a word more naturally read as "virgin," a reading Matthew's Gospel builds on explicitly). It also preserves several books, and longer versions of others, that never entered the later Jewish canon fixed by the rabbis but remained scripture for Catholic, Orthodox, and other Christian traditions as the Old Testament Apocrypha or deuterocanon.

Beyond its religious afterlife, the Septuagint is also the single largest surviving body of Koine Greek prose from the Hellenistic period, and its frequently literal, Hebrew-inflected Greek syntax shaped the register in which the New Testament itself would later be written. It stands, in effect, at the hinge between the civilizations of Israel and Greece: a Jewish sacred text produced by, and eventually feeding directly into, the Hellenistic Greek-speaking world.