LXX vs Masoretic

The Septuagint. Two to three hundred years before Yahushua was born, Jewish scholars in Egypt translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, the common language of that world. The translation is called the Septuagint, meaning “seventy,” after the old account of the translators who made it. It is often written LXX. Jews across the Roman world read it in their synagogues. When the apostles quote the Old Testament, their words match the Septuagint far more often than they match the Hebrew text used today.

The Masoretic Text. The Masoretic text is the Hebrew Bible used by Jews today, and the one most English Old Testaments are translated from. It was put in its final form by Jewish scribes called the Masoretes between about 600 and 1000 AD. The oldest complete copy is the Leningrad Codex, written in 1008 AD, about a thousand years after the cross.

What Happened in Between. Once believers began proving Yahushua from the Greek Bible, Jewish teachers turned against it. In the second century, three new Greek translations appeared, made by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, to replace the one their own fathers had made. The Hebrew copies that were handed down from then on were the ones the rabbis chose to keep.

In 1947 a shepherd found clay jars in a cave near the Dead Sea. Inside were Scripture scrolls copied between about 250 BC and the first century AD, roughly a thousand years older than any complete Masoretic copy.

The scrolls show that in Messiah’s day there was more than one form of the Hebrew text. Some scrolls match the later Jewish Bible. Others match the Hebrew the Greek translators worked from. At key verses about Messiah, the scrolls side with the Septuagint. A scroll has “pierced” in Psalm 22:16. Another keeps the line in Deuteronomy 32:43 that Hebrews 1:6 quotes and the Masoretic text dropped, calling on the heavenly host to worship Him.

The Greek translators were not making things up. They were translating a real Hebrew text, one the rabbis later set aside.

The King James translators took their Old Testament from the Masoretic Hebrew. The New Testament was already written, and it quotes the older text. So the same Bible says two different things in place after place:

• Hebrews 10:5 says “a body hast thou prepared me.” Psalm 40:6 says “mine ears hast thou opened.”
• Hebrews 11:21 says Jacob worshipped “leaning upon the top of his staff.” Genesis 47:31 says he “bowed himself upon the bed’s head.”
• Acts 7:14 says threescore and fifteen souls went down to Egypt. Genesis 46:27 says threescore and ten.

Readers have been told these are small slips. They are two different Old Testaments bound into one cover. In a few places the translators would not follow the Masoretic text at all. Psalm 22:16 is one of them.

The Septuagint is not a new Bible to replace the Hebrew. It is a witness. It shows what the Hebrew said before it was changed.

It is still a Greek translation, and Greek came with baggage. The translators put the Greek word Kyrios, “Lord,” where the Name Yahuah stood. They used Greek words such as Hades and psychē that already carried pagan meaning, and those words later carried Greek philosophy into the church. The page Words Your Bible Borrowed traces that damage word by word.

So the rule on these pages is simple. The Hebrew is the source. The Greek is a witness to what the Hebrew said before the rabbis changed it. Where the Septuagint preserves Messiah, it is called to testify. Where it carries a Greek idea, it is not followed.