Septuagint (LXX)

Here’s a dictionary definition:

a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), including the Apocrypha, made for Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt in the 3rd and 2nd centuries bc and adopted by the early Christian Churches.

Origin: mid 16th century (originally denoting the translators themselves): from Latin septuaginta ‘seventy’, because of the tradition that it was produced, under divine inspiration, by seventy-two translators working independently.

“Septuagint,” New Oxford American Dictionary, retrieved Oct. 6, 2022

It’s the first known translation of the Hebrew Bible (the TaNaKh¹Hebrew acronym for Torah, Neviim (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings) and other Hebrew writings of the roughly four centuries between the writings of Malachi and the Gospels.

The earliest manuscripts for the Masoretic Text of the TaNaKh were compiled in the sixth century AD.²Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Masoretic text“. Encyclopedia Britannica, Sept. 20, 2013. Accessed Oct. 6, 2022. This was a key basis for Bible translations of the TaNaKh before the discovery in 1948 of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Hebrew collection of manuscripts for TaNaKh books and sectarian writings dating from the third and second centuries BC.³Davies, Philip R.. “Dead Sea Scrolls“. Encyclopedia Britannica, July 26, 2021. Accessed Oct. 6, 2022.

Many TaNaKh quotations in the Apostolic Writings (aka New Testament) more closely follow the Septuagint translation than the Masoretic Text. And there are a number of examples where the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls agree on a TaNaKh passage, but the Masoretic Text differs.⁴Noah Wiener, “The ‘Original’ Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Biblical Archaeology Society, June 22, 2022. Accessed Oct. 6, 2022. So Bible translations for centuries have used the Septuagint to help guide renderings of the TaNaKh, and those produced after 1948 have used what passages survived from the Dead Sea Scrolls as a second witness.