The Septuagint (LXX)
The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in Alexandria — the Old Testament of the early church and of Orthodoxy.
Tradition attributes the translation to seventy-two elders working in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BC. Whatever the legend's worth, the result is certain: the Hebrew scriptures existed in Greek, the language of the eastern Mediterranean, centuries before Christ.
The Septuagint's choices shaped everything after it. Its renderings passed into the New Testament's quotations, into the Vulgate, and into the theological vocabulary of the church. The Orthodox churches still receive it as their Old Testament.
References
- Brenton's Septuagint at CCEL Free / open access
Other Translation Traditions
- The Targums — The Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible that accompanied synagogue reading and preserve ancient interpretation.
- The Peshitta — The Syriac standard Bible, the first complete Bible translation of the Christian era, still read across the Syriac churches.
- The Vulgate — Jerome's Latin Bible, the text of Western theology for a millennium and the Catholic Church's declared rule of faith at Trent.
- Vetus Latina (Old Latin) — The Old Latin versions that preceded the Vulgate: the first Latin Bibles, and early witnesses to the Greek text.
- The Ancient Church Translations: Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic — The early versions of the daughter churches, which preserved texts lost elsewhere and made the Bible a literature in five more tongues.
- Arabic Bible Translations — A thousand years of Arabic versions, differing by community and confession, down to the Van Dyck Bible of 1865.
- Modern Missionary and Vernacular Translation — The worldwide vernacular translation movement and the translation theory it produced, with its contested history.