When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible

Timothy Michael Law is a scholar of biblical studies, and this Oxford University Press book is his history of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and its adoption as the Old Testament of the early Christian church. Its strength is tracing a genuinely underappreciated story, that the earliest Christians overwhelmingly read their scripture in this Greek version rather than the Hebrew, with real consequences for how doctrine developed, told accessibly without sacrificing the underlying textual scholarship. Its limit is that it is a history aimed at a general educated readership rather than a technical textual-critical study, so a claim needing detailed manuscript-level argument about a specific Septuagint variant needs a more specialized source.