When God Spoke Greek

The Septuagint (often abbreviated LXX, "the Seventy") is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, made for the large Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria beginning in the third century BCE. The legend preserved in the Letter of Aristeas holds that seventy-two Jewish elders produced the translation of the Torah in seventy-two days at the request of King Ptolemy for his library, hence the name, and later books were added over the following centuries. Its historical importance is enormous and runs in two directions.

For Judaism it made scripture available to Jews who no longer read Hebrew and shaped Hellenistic Jewish thought. For Christianity it became, in effect, the Old Testament of the early church: the New Testament writers quote scripture overwhelmingly in its Greek form, and the Eastern Orthodox churches still regard it as authoritative. Because it sometimes differs from the later standardised Hebrew (Masoretic) text and includes books (the deuterocanon/Apocrypha) not in the Jewish canon, it lies at the root of lasting differences between Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Bibles.