"Masoretic Text versus Septuagint: A Translator’s Perspective" by Adam Boyd
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The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
All right, good morning everyone, and this is Strength to Strength. Welcome everyone here today, and hope you're all doing well. So today we have Adam Boyd with us. He is visiting in the United States just now for the past several months, and he will be returning to his home in Papua New Guinea in a few weeks. So we're happy to have him with us, and he's going to be sharing here. Before that, just one announcement. I think it was two weeks ago we had announced that Strength to Strength is starting a bookstore, and we have, and that's worked out well. Since that time, we've sold well over a thousand books. So if you want a catalog of that, you can see that online at strengthtostrength.org.
If you don't have internet access and you would like to have a PDF catalog, you can request that by email, and we'll email that to you. We also have more titles becoming available shortly. You can suggest titles online, or you can email us at contact@strengthtostrength.org.
This week, until the end of today, we are offering 10% off any new orders, so you could take advantage of that. And with that, I think we'll jump into the topic. So today we have with us Adam Boyd, and he's going to be sharing on the Masoretic text versus the Septuagint. And this is, as you may be aware or you will learn, regarding the source of the Old Testament text. And so we're going to be giving the time to him. We're going to have a Q&A at the end, and you can save your questions for then. So I think what we'll do is have a word of prayer here to begin, and then we'll turn the time over to Adam.
You can introduce yourself and launch him. So let's open with prayer here.
Father, we thank you for your goodness. Thank you for allowing us to come together in this way. And as we look at your written word this morning, we pray that you would help us to learn and may these things become practical in ways that can benefit us in our everyday lives.
As we love you with our heart, soul, and mind, and maybe this morning thinking more about the mind, may that not become an end in itself, but may it become a means to a closer walk with you. And we pray that you would bless Adam now as he shares and bless our audience today. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
All right, Adam, the time is yours. You can introduce yourself and go ahead. All right, thank you so much, Glenn. It's so nice to be with you all this morning. Usually in the past when I've shared, I've been sharing from Papua New Guinea, so I've been sharing on my Friday night. But now I'm in the same time zone with you all, so it's nice to be with you on the same day at the same time.
A little bit about myself, I serve as a Bible translator with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Papua New Guinea, working with a language called Enga, which has about 400,000 speakers. It's the largest vernacular language in Papua New Guinea, which is a country that has about 800 different languages.
Just this year, we finished our translation of the New Testament. It's now available on YouVersion in audio and print format, and I'm sorry, in audio and text. And the printed New Testament, we're doing two different editions. One is an Enga-only New Testament, and the other is an Enga-English New Testament. And we received the signature copies of those in Papua New Guinea this week. And next week, we'll receive those signature copy, not being that they have signatures, but those are the folded pages that aren't yet bound for us to check. So that's very exciting.
I've been on Strength to Strength a few times before and always enjoy the opportunity to share with you all. This topic today is going to be the Masoretic text versus the Septuagint as far as the Old Testament goes.
In recent years, there's been a lot of attention given to the Septuagint, largely I think through the writings and talks that David Verso has given. I know Chuck Pike also has talked a lot about the Septuagint, probably others as well. And the Septuagint has gained a lot of momentum, especially among conservative Anabaptist circles. And I know that many people now prefer to read the Old Testament in an English translation of the Septuagint.
I myself got quite interested in the Septuagint after reading and hearing David Verso talk about it and doing some investigation. And in fact, I even looked at Breton's edition of the Septuagint. And if you've ever gotten an edition of Breton's Septuagint on any digital version of that, you'll find that there are a lot of errors in it. And so what I did with Breton's Septuagint is I compared two different transcriptions using computer technology and eliminated, I believe, all of the typographical errors. And so I put out an edition on Amazon and eBible.org that has all of the errors from the Breton's Septuagint, all the typographical errors, I believe, removed.
There may be one or two, but I don't think so. I think I was able to get rid of them. I also did a minor update to Breton's Septuagint in which I updated the spelling of all the names. If you've ever read Breton's Septuagint and you read the names and they're spelled according to the Greek spelling, I find it to be a bit annoying myself.
So I did an edition where I updated the names to the standard spelling, and I also updated the British spelling of words to American spelling. You can find that on eBible.org as well. And then I began working on a revision of Breton's translation of the Septuagint. I tried to modernize it a bit, make it more accessible. And I did that. I started in Genesis and I made it partway through Jeremiah, and then I abandoned the project because I found that translating from the Septuagint into English had a lot of problems, and it was difficult to find clear translation.
And so that's just a bit of a background of who I am, the type of work I've done. The other thing I've done, as many of you may be aware of, is I produced a translation of the New Testament in English called the Byzantine Text Version, which follows the Byzantine majority text.
That's available in an edition called the Text Critical English New Testament, which compares 11 editions of the Greek New Testament and all of the translatable variants between those editions. And when variants have been fully collated, meaning somebody has looked through every existing manuscript, I have shown the manuscript percentages of how many manuscripts support the various readings. And so that's just a little bit about my background. And I share that just to let you know I've spent a lot of time thinking about this subject. I've spent a lot of time in Bible translation, and so hopefully I have something helpful to share this morning.
So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen so we can follow along with this presentation. And if you're listening in, I'll be sure to read what's on the screen. As I know, you'll not be if you're just listening in and you're not actually on the Zoom call and watching, I'll be sure to read what's on the screen so that you can keep track on what I'm talking about.
So the topic of this talk is Masoretic text or Septuagint. And let me just say that this is an adaptation of a talk that I gave at All Nations Bible Translation a month or two ago, which was directed towards translators. And so I've modified it a bit, realizing that the audience here is not all translators. And so I've gotten rid of some of the more technical information.
But just know that this was originally given, talking to translators and giving advice to translators on what source text we should use when we translate the Old Testament. Do we use a Masoretic text? Do we use a Septuagint? What do we do? And so that's the basis for this talk. And so you might hear a little bit of that sort of language about how do we translate in this presentation as well. But like I said, I've eliminated most of the technical, the highly technical information.
Let's start with a brief overview so that we're all on the same page. This will not be new information for most of you, but I just want to cover this to make sure we're all on the same page.
First of all, the Masoretic text, which I will abbreviate with MT. The Masoretic text is the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. It was copied and edited by the Masoretes, which is where it gets its name, Jewish scribes from the 7th to 10th centuries AD.
And the earliest complete manuscript that we have of the Masoretic text is the Leningrad Codex, which was copied in the 11th century. The Septuagint, on the other hand, which will be abbreviated with LXX, is the Koine Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. This translation is believed to have been completed in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.
And there are about 2,400 existing manuscripts of the Septuagint. Many of those are fragmentary. There will be far fewer that have a complete copy of the Septuagint, but about 2,400 manuscripts compared to the New Testament, Greek New Testament, which has over 5,000 manuscripts, just to give you some context there.
And the earliest complete manuscript that we have of the Septuagint is Codex Sinaiticus from the 4th century AD.
The Septuagint was the Old Testament of the early church. When the early church was reading the Old Testament, they were almost invariably reading it in the Septuagint version, at least early on before other translations were made. And as many of you probably know, many of the New Testament quotations of the Old Testament are from the Septuagint.
So what's the problem here? Why are we even having this discussion? What's the debate between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint? Well, here's the problem. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew. And all things being equal, a translation of the original source is always far superior than a translation of a translation. Right? That's just common sense. If you want to have a good translation of something, all other things being equal, you want to translate from the original rather than a translation of the original.
Because things are inevitably lost in translation. Translation is not a perfect science. There's always compromises. And so if you can look at the original source and translate from the original, that's always better than doing a translation of a translation, all things being equal.
However, the Masoretic text shows signs of textual corruption. There are places where it's clear that the text that came down to the Masoretes that they were copying and preserving was corrupt. We even see that in their own notes. The Masoretes have many notes within the text where they say, "These are the consonants," because originally Hebrew was written with just consonants, not vowels. "These are the consonants that were preserved for us." But then they'll have a note in the margin that says, "But we think that's wrong, and we think you should read this instead." And so the Masoretes themselves were aware of the textual corruption in the Masoretic text. And there are many examples that we can find.
Here's just one very famous and important example, Psalm 22:16. Most of your English Bibles will read something like this, "For dogs have surrounded me, a company of evildoers have enclosed me. They have pierced my hands and my feet."
Now, those three words, "they have pierced," those are from the Septuagint. The Masoretic text here reads, "Like the lion." So instead of saying, "They have pierced my hands and my feet," the Masoretic text reads, "Like the lion, my hands and my feet."
Well, it's hard to make sense out of that, out of what the Masoretic text is saying there. And if you look at the Hebrew that's presumed to be underlying the Septuagint and the Hebrew of the Masoretic text, you can see that they are only different in one letter, and it's the final letter of the word. Remember, Hebrew is read right to left. So even though this letter in red that you see highlighted in red is on the left, it's the last letter. And you can see that the difference is between a vav and a yod, and they look very similar in shape. It would be very easy for somebody copying Hebrew to mistake one of those letters for the other, especially if you're copying from an older manuscript or one that has experienced some decay or is damaged in some way.
And so it seems pretty clear here that the Masoretic text is corrupt because the Masoretic text translation makes very little sense in English. And that's why nearly every English Bible here goes with the Septuagint. And so this is just one example where it seems fairly clear that the Masoretic text is indeed corrupt.
Another example would be Genesis 10:4, which reads in English, "The sons of Javan, Elisha, Tarshish, the Ketim, and the Rhodanim." That last word, Rhodanim, is from the Septuagint. The Masoretic text reads Dodanim. Well, Rhodanim would refer to the inhabitants of Rhodes, but it's not at all clear who Dodanim would refer to.
Now, if you look at the Masoretic text in 1 Chronicles 1:7, there you'll see that the Masoretic text reads Rhodanim, not Dodanim. And if you look at the Hebrew presumed to be underlying the Septuagint and the Hebrew of the Masoretic text, you see that they differ only in the first letter, and that first letter is very similar in shape. So again, it would be very easy for a scribe to inadvertently corrupt or write the wrong letter there, which indeed seems to be the case with the Masoretic text, especially since the Masoretic text seems to get this name correct in 1 Chronicles 1:7. It seems to be a clear corruption here.
So the Masoretic text shows signs of textual corruption. Another problem that some people cite is that the earliest Septuagint manuscript, which dates to the 4th century, is much older than the earliest Masoretic text manuscript, which dates from the 11th century.
Now, I don't think this is much of a problem, and here's why. If you look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, you'll see that 35% of the Dead Sea Scrolls that contain biblical texts are remarkably similar to the Masoretic text. 5% resemble the Septuagint, 5% resemble the Samaritan Pentateuch, and 55% are not aligned with any of those textual traditions. And so we see that even though the Masoretic text, the earliest complete copy of the Masoretic text dates to the 11th century, the text in that manuscript dates back all the way to the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so the Masoretic text is just as old as the Septuagint. And so it's really not a good argument to say that the earliest Septuagint manuscript is 4th century and the earliest Masoretic text manuscript is 11th century, and therefore we should prefer the Septuagint.
It's really not a good argument because we see that the Masoretic text is much older than the 11th century and dates back all the way to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is around the time of Jesus, give or take a couple hundred years.
And then the other problem that we have, and this is a big one, is that Jesus and New Testament authors frequently quote from the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic text. And while many of the New Testament quotations are influenced by the Septuagint, there are often minor variations from the Septuagint, which suggests that the authors are either quoting from memory or from other Greek translations or from their own translation. However, there are also quotations that are clearly from the Masoretic text, Matthew 2:15 being a key example.
In Matthew 2:15, Matthew quotes from Hosea 11:1, and he quotes from the Masoretic text, which reads, "Out of Egypt, I called my son." Well, there, the Septuagint reads, "Out of Egypt, I called his children." If Matthew were to quote from the Septuagint there, it really wouldn't work at all in the context of what he is saying in Matthew chapter 2. And so this is a clear quotation from the Masoretic text. So it's not fair to say that the New Testament authors always quote from the Septuagint. Rather, they accept a certain amount of fluidity when they quote from the Old Testament. Sometimes they quote from the Masoretic text, sometimes they quote directly from the Septuagint, and sometimes they quote either from memory and they're not quoting directly, or they quote from another translation or their own translation.
And so again, they accept a certain level of fluidity as they quote from the Old Testament. Now, the other point that we can make is that because as we look at this fact that Jesus and the New Testament authors frequently quote from the Septuagint, the fact of the matter is that most of the New Testament books were written for Gentile audiences, and the Gentiles were completely unfamiliar with the Masoretic text. And so it would make sense that the New Testament authors would quote from the Septuagint because that's what the early church who they are writing to were the most familiar with. And so that's an important point to keep in mind.
So what about the early church? I know David Berceau talks about this a lot, that the Septuagint was the Bible of the early church, and therefore we should give serious consideration to continuing to use the Septuagint now. Well, the fact of the matter is, as I already mentioned, the early church could not read Hebrew.
It's not like they had a choice between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text. The Septuagint was the only translation available for the early church to use, maybe with the exception of Origen, who it seems learned some Hebrew. But for nearly every Christian in the early church, reading the Hebrew text was not an option. The Septuagint was the only way for them to access the Old Testament.
So the conclusion I draw from that is that the Septuagint was a very useful translation. We might even say a divinely inspired translation that the early church used. It blessed them. Through the Septuagint, the church grew and gained converts. And so the Septuagint is wonderful in that sense. It's a great translation. However, we should not conclude from that that the Septuagint should supplant the Hebrew.
Let's compare it to the situation with the King James Version. I think we can all agree that the King James Version was a divinely inspired translation that God used to bless the English-speaking world that's been highly influential in the English-speaking world. However, not many of us would argue that the English of the King James Version should supplant the original Greek as the primary source text for translating the New Testament into other languages.
It can be a very helpful tool in translation, but it should not be the primary text that we translate from. We should translate from the Greek text because, as I said earlier, a translation of the original source will always be superior to a translation of a translation.
And there are problems with the Septuagint. And I don't often hear people that promote the Septuagint. I don't often hear them talking about these problems. One problem is that there are clear errors. A great example is Genesis chapter 5, verses 25 to 26, which reads in the Masoretic text, "When Methuselah had lived 187 years, he became the father of Lamech. After becoming the father of Lamech, Methuselah lived 782 years and had other sons and daughters." Okay, that's the Masoretic text. In the Septuagint, instead of saying, "When Methuselah had lived 187 years," it says, "When Methuselah had lived 167 years." And then after becoming the father of Lamech, it says that Methuselah lived 802 years. Now, on the surface, that may not seem like a big deal, but as you dig into it and you do the math, you find out that this chronology of the Septuagint would have Methuselah dying two years after the flood, which would contradict 2 Peter chapter 2, verse 5, where Peter says that Noah was one of eight people who survived the flood, and he is not counting Methuselah among those eight people.
And so there's a clear problem here in the Septuagint in which the math just doesn't line up with history and what we find in other parts of Scripture.
So there's problems, there's errors in the Septuagint. There's problems where the Septuagint simply transliterates the Hebrew. Transliteration is different than translation. Transliteration is where you take the Hebrew letters and rewrite them with Greek letters, where you don't actually translate. You're just changing the script. One example is Genesis 22:13.
It says, "Then Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, there was a ram caught by its horns and a plant of Sabbath." That's what the Septuagint reads. Now, let me ask you, what in the world is Sabbath?
Have any of you ever seen a plant of Sabbath? Could any of you explain to me what that is? No. Without question here, a translator would be forced to refer to the Masoretic text to come up with a sensible translation because none of us have ever seen a plant of Sabbath or know what a plant of Sabbath is, because Sabbath is the Hebrew word for thicket. So here, for some reason, the Septuagint simply took the Hebrew word Sabbath, and rather than translating it into Greek, they just wrote the Hebrew letters with Greek letters.
So there's problems where the Septuagint simply transliterates the Hebrew. There's also problems where the Septuagint interprets figurative language. For example, in Psalm 3:3, the Masoretic text reads, "But you, O Lord, are a shield around me." There, the Septuagint reads, "But you, O Lord, are my helper." And it seems here that the Septuagint translators have taken this figurative language that says, "But you, O Lord, are a shield around me," and replaced it with a more straightforward translation. The Lord being a shield around us helps us. And it seems the Septuagint has taken that interpretation and made it part of their translation.
But we really begin to miss out when we get away from this figurative language because the Bible is full of figurative language, and it adds color and depth that we miss out on when we just do a straightforward interpretation. And so I think that's another problem we see in the Septuagint.
We also see some nonsensical translations in the Septuagint. A great example of this is the superscription in Psalm 5. There, the Masoretic text reads, "To the chief musician for the flutes, a psalm of David." But in the Septuagint, it says, "For the end, concerning her who inherits, a psalm of David."
Well, this psalm has nothing to do with a woman inheriting anything, and it's quite unclear what "for the end" means. And so although this sentence works grammatically, it is basically, in my mind, nonsensical. And you will come across that time to time in the Septuagint, things that you read and you're like, "You know what? This makes no sense."
And finally, another problem with the Septuagint is that there are limited exegetical resources for the Septuagint. This is more of an issue when you're trying to translate from the Septuagint into another language. When you have limited exegetical resources and you have trouble understanding what the Greek of the Septuagint is saying, there's not many places where you can turn for help. But with the Masoretic text, there are many, many resources to turn to. And I think this is an important point that shouldn't be underestimated, especially if you're doing any preaching, and you're preaching from the Septuagint, and you come across something that's confusing, you're going to have a hard time finding any help with that. But if you're preaching from the Masoretic text, you'll have loads of resources to help you if you get stuck.
I also want to do a brief overview here of translations of the Septuagint, just so you're aware of what's out there. The first one that was done in English was by Charles Thompson in 1808. Again, first translation in English, it uses King James English, and it does not include the Apocrypha. And for each of these translations of the Septuagint, I'm going to give you a brief sample by quoting Genesis 1:1. So in Charles Thompson's translation, Genesis 1:1 reads like this: "In the beginning, God made the heaven and the earth, and the earth was invisible and unfurnished, and there was darkness over this abyss, and a breath of God was brought on above the water."
The next translation of the Septuagint was by Sir Lancelot Brenton, which came out in 1854. This also uses King James English, and it's really a beautiful translation. Brenton had a great ability to produce a beautiful translation, beautiful English style. However, if you dig into Brenton's translation, you'll find that he's highly inconsistent in his translation. He doesn't translate the same Greek words with the same English words in places where they should be translated the same way. So it's a beautiful translation, but highly, highly inconsistent.
And it's probably the one that most of you are familiar with. If you're going to read the Septuagint, a lot of people will read Brenton's edition. It's kind of like the King James Version for English Septuagint translations. It's really well known.
And Brenton translates Genesis 1:1 as, "In the beginning, God made the heaven and the earth, but the earth was unsightly and unfurnished, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the water." After Brenton, there weren't a whole lot of English translations of the Septuagint for many years until we get to the Netz translation in 2007. That's the new English translation of the Septuagint.
Now, this is a highly wooden academic edition. It's an adaptation of the new revised standard version. And if you ever try to read it, you'll quickly grow tired of it, I imagine, because it is not beautiful at all. It's highly wooden, and it sort of grates on you.
This translation in Genesis 1:1 reads as follows: "In the beginning, God made the sky and the earth, yet the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss, and a divine wind was being carried along over the water."
That doesn't sound so bad, but again, you read other parts of this translation, and it'll really grate on you because it is incredibly wooden.
Then we have the Orthodox Study Bible produced in 2008, which I imagine many of you have read or looked at at one point or another. This is an adaptation of the new King James Version. And what's surprising about this translation of the Septuagint is it actually follows the Masoretic text in many places. It's not a pure translation of the Septuagint. Often it goes with the Masoretic text, even when the translation of the Septuagint is perfectly acceptable. So I don't quite understand that. I don't know if that was intentional or if those were just errors that were made by the people that produced the Orthodox Study Bible.
But it will follow the Masoretic text in many places. Here, the Genesis 1:1 reads as follows: "In the beginning, God made heaven and earth. The earth was invisible and unfinished, and darkness was over the deep. The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water."
And finally, we have the Lexham English Septuagint, which was originally done in 2012, and an update was produced in 2019. This is a modern translation, but it is quite literal. I find it to be uninspiring. And I actually ordered a hard copy of this, and within 15 minutes of reading it, I found an error in Psalms. And so it didn't give me a lot of confidence in it.
But it's a good resource that you can turn to if you want to. In Genesis 1:1, the Lexham English Septuagint reads, "In the beginning, God made the heaven and the earth, but the land was unseen and unprepared, and darkness was upon the deep, and the Spirit of God rushed upon the water."
Now, all of these translations I would classify as literal translations, and some are highly, highly literal. And that's because it's difficult to do a dynamic translation of the Septuagint because there's many places where the language of the Septuagint simply is not clear. And a literal approach allows it simply retains that lack of clarity.
There's also an added level of difficulty because you're trying to figure out not just what the Greek says, but what the Greek might be attempting to translate from the Hebrew. And that's why it's difficult to do a translation of a translation.
So what are we to do?
Let me go back. What are we to do? The Masoretic text is corrupt. The Septuagint has problems. Neither one is sufficient as a standalone source text for the Old Testament for translation of the Old Testament. Nearly all English translations of the Old Testament rely to some extent upon the Septuagint. But at the same time, the Greek Orthodox Study Bible that David Berceau recommends as a good English translation of the Septuagint, it relies in many places upon the Masoretic text rather than the Greek of the Septuagint. So what are we to do?
Well, I'd like to suggest what I call the best of both worlds approach.
And here, I suggest that we take the best from the Masoretic text and the best from the Septuagint to produce a translation that is clear, natural, understandable, and flows well. I do not suggest that we try to recreate the original autograph of the Hebrew text. I don't think that's possible.
It's something we simply can't do. Rather, I believe our goal should be to allow for a certain level of fluidity and interchange between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, just as we see the New Testament authors doing. They didn't stick with simply the Masoretic text or simply the Septuagint, but they were comfortable with a certain level of fluidity, and they referred to both of those when they quoted from in the New Testament.
And I think that will allow us to produce the best possible translation. So we use the Masoretic text as the base text because it's always better to do a translation of an original text than a translation of a translation, all things being equal.
But then we use the Septuagint to adjust the Masoretic text at certain times. And when would we do that? We'd use the Septuagint to adjust the Masoretic text when the Masoretic text is corrupt, as in some of the examples I already gave, when the Masoretic text is confusing or unnatural, when the Masoretic text does not flow well, and when the Masoretic text does not align with New Testament quotations and allusions.
To me, I find it highly disturbing and confusing when we have a quotation of the Old Testament and the New Testament, and then we go look it up in the Old Testament and it doesn't match. I think that's especially confusing for newer believers as well.
And so I would prefer to allow the Septuagint to correct the Masoretic text so that our Old Testaments are in alignment with our New Testaments.
And also, another time we can make adjustments is when the Masoretic text has long omissions. And often, more than one of these factors will apply for any given variant of the Old Testament. I believe that most English translations rely too heavily upon the Masoretic text when the Septuagint provides a better alternative. Now, again, our goal is not to try to piece together the original Hebrew text. Our goal is to have a translation that is clear, natural, and unified.
And again, the New Testament authors accepted a certain degree of fluidity to the text, and they used the texts that were most helpful to their audiences. And I think we should do likewise. Unfortunately, a translation such as the one I'm talking about doesn't exist, not in English. I've done a little work trying to do that. I translated Genesis through the first 42 chapters. I've translated the first 17 Psalms.
But it's a big, big job, and that's as far as I've gotten.
Now, to conclude this talk, I have one section, and I use the word conclude in a way that a pastor would use it, a preacher would use it. It means there's still a lot to come. But to conclude it, I want to give a lot of examples of the difference between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text. And all of these examples are going to come from Genesis and Psalms because those are the texts that I've worked in depth with to this point as I've done some translation into English.
And I hope, as we explore these examples, that you will see that there are times when the Septuagint is clearly superior, and there are times when the Masoretic text is clearly superior. So let's just dive into those. First is Genesis 1:9.
There, the Masoretic text reads, "Let the waters under the sky be gathered into one place, and let dry land appear, and it was so." The Septuagint reads the same way, except after, "And it was so," it adds, "The waters under the sky were gathered into their places, and dry land appeared."
This, to me, appears to be a long omission in the Masoretic text, and I find that the Septuagint matches better the overall flow and pattern of Genesis 1. In Genesis 1, after saying, "And it was so," there's often a summary statement of what happened, and we find that here in the Septuagint, but it's missing in the Masoretic text. So in Genesis 1:9, I prefer the Septuagint reading.
In Genesis 1:27, the Masoretic text reads, "So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them." In the Septuagint, that part that says, "In his own image," is missing. So it just reads, "So God created man. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them."
Well, here, the Masoretic text seems to fit better with Hebrew parallelism. Hebrew parallelism is something used in Hebrew poetry where two lines of poetry are very similar. It basically says the same thing but makes a slight adjustment. And we find that in the Masoretic text. "So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him." That sounds like perfect Hebrew parallelism, but that's missing in the Septuagint. And so here, I would prefer the Masoretic text because it retains that aspect of Hebrew parallelism.
Genesis 2:2. "On the sixth day," this is the Septuagint, "On the sixth day, God finished the work he had done, and on the seventh day, he rested from all the work he had done."
The Masoretic text, and also the Orthodox Study Bible, reads as follows, "On the seventh day, God finished the work he had done, and on the seventh day, he rested from all the work he had done." Well, me personally, I find the Masoretic text here to be confusing because I'm not sure if God worked on the seventh day or not. It makes it sound like God finished his work on the seventh day. So did that mean that God did some work on the seventh day and then finished? Or what? It's not clear to me.
I suppose you could translate the Masoretic text to say, "By the seventh day, God had finished the work he had done," but that doesn't flow very well. It's not very sweet-sounding in English. The Septuagint is very clear. God worked for the first six days. He finished his work on the sixth day, and on the seventh day, he rested. And so here, I prefer the Septuagint, especially if we're translating into minority languages around the world. The Septuagint is much clearer. The Masoretic text is going to cause problems. It's not going to be clear.
All right, Genesis 2:23. The Masoretic text reads, "She will be called woman because she was taken out of man." The Septuagint reads, "She will be called woman because she was taken out of her husband." Well, I like the Masoretic text here because a translation in English of the Masoretic text shows that there is a linguistic connection between the Hebrew words "ish," man, and "isha," woman. But in the Septuagint, that connection is concealed, and the Septuagint just doesn't sound very good. "She will be called woman because she was taken out of man." That sounds great. "She will be called woman because she was taken out of her husband" doesn't sound as nice.
And so I prefer the Masoretic text here, especially since it shows that linguistic connection between the Hebrew words for man and woman, that they're connected.
All right, Genesis 4:8. Here, the Septuagint reads, "Then Cain said to his brother Abel, 'Let us go out to the field.' And while they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother and killed him." But the Masoretic text and the Orthodox Study Bible read, "Then Cain spoke to his brother Abel. And while they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother and killed him." Well, the Masoretic text here doesn't flow well at all, and it seems like something is missing. Cain spoke to his brother Abel, and then all of a sudden, they're out in the field.
But in the Septuagint, it's very clear. Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let's go out to the field." And while they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother and killed him. It flows really well, makes perfect sense. The Masoretic text sounds like something is missing. And here, I can't for the life of me figure out why the Orthodox Study Bible went with the Masoretic text instead of the Septuagint. The Septuagint is so clear here. And if you're doing a translation of the Septuagint, I can't imagine why you wouldn't follow it here and why you would go with the Masoretic text instead.
Genesis 4:26.
The Masoretic text says, "To Seth, a son, to Seth also, a son was born, and he named him Enosh. At that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord." The Septuagint says, "To Seth also, a son was born, and he named him Enosh. He hoped to call upon the name of the Lord."
Well, to me, the Masoretic text here flows very well and makes sense. The Septuagint leaves the reader wondering, why did he only hope to call upon the name of the Lord? Why didn't he actually just call upon the name of the Lord?
And the Orthodox Study Bible recognizes the problem here. And instead of following the Septuagint, it uses a dynamic translation to hide the difficulty. So the Orthodox Study Bible here says, "He hoped in the Lord God and called upon his name." Well, that makes more sense, but it's really not what the Septuagint is saying. And so here, the Masoretic text seems to be a superior text to translate from.
Genesis 10:24. The Septuagint reads, "Our foxhood was the father of Canaan. Canaan was the father of Shelah, and Shelah was the father of Eber." And forgive me if I mispronounce names. I'm not good with Hebrew names. The Masoretic text leaves out Canaan and just reads, "Our foxhood was the father of Shelah, and Shelah was the father of Eber."
Well, the Septuagint here matches the genealogy of Jesus that we find in Luke 3:36, but the Masoretic text seems to have an omission, which would be very easy to do in a genealogical list like the one we find in Genesis 10. You're copying this long list of names where there's a lot of similar vocabulary. It'd be easy for your eye to accidentally skip a name. And so I find the Septuagint here to be far superior to the Masoretic text, especially since it lines up with the genealogy in Luke 3.
All right, Genesis 11:8. This is talking about the Tower of Babel. So the Lord, this is the Septuagint reading. "So the Lord scattered them from there across the face of all the earth, and they stopped building the city and the tower." Well, in the Masoretic text, it doesn't have "and the tower" at the end.
But as I read the story of the Tower of Babel, the whole point of the story is the tower. It's not the city. And so I like that the Septuagint has this focus on the tower. It fits better with the context. And for me, especially as I'm thinking about translating into minority languages around the world, the Septuagint will be much more clear to them. The Masoretic text could be confusing. So I give a slight edge here to the Septuagint. Now, the Masoretic text is also acceptable. So this is not a big difference here.
Genesis 15:6. "And Abram believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness." That's the Septuagint. The Masoretic text reads, "And Abram believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness." Very similar, very similar. But the Septuagint is what we find quoted in the New Testament. And so I prefer the Septuagint here to maintain the unity between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
All right. We have just maybe four or five more examples. Genesis 21:16-17. "So she, Hagar," I'm sorry, this is the Septuagint reading. "So she, Hagar, sat apart from him, Ishmael, and the child lifted up his voice and wept. Then God heard the boy crying." Now, the Masoretic text reads, "So she, Hagar, sat apart from him, Ishmael, and she lifted up her voice and wept. Then God heard the boy crying."
Again, this is a confusing text in the Masoretic text. And surprisingly, again, the Orthodox Study Bible follows the Masoretic text here. I can't for the life of me figure out why they do. In the Septuagint, it's very clear. "The child lifted up his voice and wept. Then God heard the boy crying."
But the Masoretic text, it's very confusing. It says, "Hagar lifted up her voice and wept, and then God heard the boy crying." There seems to be a mismatch there. And so to me, the Septuagint is far superior here, makes a lot more sense, and flows much better.
And again, I can't for the life of me figure out why the Orthodox Study Bible goes with the Masoretic text here, unless it's simply an oversight on their part. Genesis 24:62. The Septuagint reads, "Now Isaac had come through the wilderness to bear Lehiroi and was dwelling in the region of the Negev."
The Masoretic text, now, one thing about English translations is that they can cover up problems in the Masoretic text, and that happens from time to time. Because here, the Masoretic text is clearly corrupt. A literal rendering of the Masoretic text reads like this. "Now Isaac had come from coming to bear Lehiroi and was dwelling in the region of the Negev."
Well, that doesn't make any sense. You can try to finagle that to make sense, but if you're just straightforward looking at that, it makes no sense. "Isaac had come from coming to bear Lehiroi" doesn't make sense. And if you read the literature on this verse, you'll see the commentator struggling trying to figure out what that means. But the Septuagint makes perfect sense. And so in my mind, why not just go with the Septuagint since it makes perfect sense in this case?
However, Genesis 26:32 shows a clear error in the Septuagint. The Masoretic text and the Orthodox Study Bible here, I think the Orthodox Study Bible did a good job by going with the Masoretic text. Here, the Masoretic text reads, "That same day, Isaac's servants came and told him about a well they had dug, saying to him, 'We have found water.'" But in the Septuagint, it reads, "That same day, Isaac's servants came and told him about a well they had dug, saying, 'We have not found water.'" Hey, Abraham, guess what? Or, hey, Isaac, guess what? Good news. We have not found water.
Clearly, it doesn't make any sense. And that's because there's a Hebrew word here, lo, that you see in red. And that word can either mean to him or it can mean not. It can mean to him or not. Clearly, in this case, it means saying to him, "We have found water." It does not mean saying, "We have not found water." And so this is, in my mind, this is a clear error in the Septuagint, and we should follow the Masoretic text here.
All right, a couple of examples from the Psalms, and then we'll wrap it up, and we'll have time for questions. Psalm 2:12. Here, the Septuagint reads, "Except correction, lest he be angry, and you perish from the way of righteousness when his anger is quickly kindled." The Masoretic text reads, "Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish from the way of righteousness when his anger is quickly kindled." And again, English translations do a good job of covering up a really big problem in the Masoretic text here. It appears that the Masoretic text here is corrupt because in order to get the translation "Kiss the Son," you have to read an Aramaic word instead of a Hebrew word.
And so you have to imagine that David wrote this entire Psalm in Hebrew, except for this one word, which he chose to write in Aramaic. That seems like a stretch to me. And as you probably the first time you read this, I mean, this is so familiar that you probably have forgotten how awkward it sounded the first time. But the first time you read Psalm 2 and you see "Kiss the Son," it strikes you as, "Wow, that's sort of strange. What in the world is that talking about?"
However, the Septuagint makes perfect sense. "Except correction, otherwise God will be angry, and you'll perish from the way of righteousness when his anger is quickly kindled. We have to accept correction from the Lord. Otherwise, we are in danger of perishing." "Kiss the Son" is hard to make sense out of, and it only works if you assume an Aramaic word in the midst of a Hebrew Psalm.
And then this is a very important example. I believe David Brousseau highlights this example, and rightly so. Psalm 8:2. The Septuagint reads, "Out of the mouths of babies and nursing infants, you have prepared praise." The Masoretic text reads, "Out of the mouths of babies and nursing infants, you have established strength."
And here, the LXX in my mind is to be preferred because it matches the quotation in Matthew 21:16.
All right. Oh, sorry. I forgot. I do have one more section here that I know many of you will be asking about. What about the apocrypha? What about the apocrypha?
Well, the word apocryphal was originally used in Christianity for books that should be read privately, not publicly in church. That's what apocrypha meant. It meant read this privately, not publicly. Now, there are allusions to apocryphal books in the New Testament, important allusions to apocryphal books, but we don't see I don't think there are any quotations, direct quotations of apocryphal books in the New Testament. So the New Testament authors clearly read the apocryphal books and were aware of them, and it informed their spirituality. It informed their Christianity. And so they allude to these books, but they don't actually quote them.
And I find I've read the apocrypha. I find them to be very interesting and inspiring books. They're some of the most interesting and inspiring books that you could read as it relates to Christianity and faith. However, there are disagreements. I'm not going to get into the question of whether we consider the apocrypha canon or not, but there are disagreements among various church traditions about whether to include the apocrypha in the canon. And if they are included, which books to include? There's not a complete agreement on that.
So this is my summary statement of the apocrypha. This is how I can think about the apocrypha. The apocryphal books are secondary to the New Testament and the Old Testament, but useful for instruction. They should not be the primary focus of teaching and preaching, but they can and should be used to support, explain, and illuminate the primary texts of the New Testament and the Old Testament.
So the apocrypha are not books that we should be afraid of. We should not shy away from them. They're great inspirational reading. They're very interesting books to read. And they will help us to understand the New Testament better because there are allusions to the apocrypha in the New Testament. But they are the Catholic Church calls the apocrypha deutero-canonical, deutero meaning secondary. And I think that's a good way to look at it, that these books are somehow secondary to the New Testament and the Old Testament. So we shouldn't put them at a level equal to the New Testament and Old Testament, but we shouldn't ignore them either.
I would encourage people to read them. I would encourage, if you teach or preach, to be aware of what the apocrypha say, to refer to the apocrypha from time to time to illuminate texts of the New Testament. But I wouldn't put them at the same level as the New Testament and Old Testament. And whether you want to call them canonical or not, I'll leave that up to you. It doesn't really matter to me to make an official proclamation whether they're canonical or not. I'm just going to read them and be blessed by them, use them to help explain the New Testament and understand the New Testament. And I'll leave the question of whether they're canonical or not to others.
It's just not an important question for me to answer because it's not going to change how I use the books. So that's just a brief snippet on the apocrypha. Here are some translations of the apocrypha. If you want to read the apocrypha in English, there's the King James Version. There's the New Revised Standard Version. And you might be surprised to hear this, but the English Standard Version actually has a translation of the apocrypha if you can find it. It's very hard to get your hands on because they don't circulate it widely. But if you get on Amazon, you might be able to find it. There's the Good News Translation if you want a more dynamic translation of the apocrypha.
There's Edgar J. Goodspeed's translation of 1938. I've read that. That's a pretty good one. And then any Catholic Bibles will have a translation of the apocrypha and any English translation to the Septuagint. So if you're interested in reading the apocrypha, that's where you can find it.
All right. That concludes my presentation on the Masoretic text versus Septuagint. And I will now open it up to questions, and I'm going to stop sharing the screen here.
All right. Fascinating. And thank you, Adam, for sharing. So yes, we want to open it up for a time of questions. So if anyone has a question, we'd welcome you to turn on your video and ask the question.
So maybe I'll just start off with one. So Adam, you've done something that not a lot of people do, and that is to present a case for a combination of both the Masoretic and the Septuagint. Most people, I find, are in one camp or the other, and they fight each other a lot.
So my question is, is there any translation out there that does with your presenting? Any translation out there that discriminates the text and goes both ways in the same way that you were doing this morning? Well, I can answer that in a couple of ways. One answer would be nearly every English translation does that to a certain extent. Nearly every English translation will pull from the Septuagint when the Masoretic text is corrupt or unclear.
And so yes, that exists. However, my suggestion is that we should be doing that even more. And there are no translations that are doing it to the extent that I suggest, other than the draft that I've worked on. In fact, if you want to read what I've worked on, if you want to look even more closely at this on the Strength to Strength website for this particular event, you'll find a link to a PDF that has the translation I've done of Genesis 1:42 and Psalms 1 to 17. And you can find many more examples of where the Septuagint and Masoretic texts differ. I don't include every single variant because that would be completely overwhelming for the translator and for the reader.
But what you'll find are the key variants, the more important ones. And so you can look into that. I'd love to finish that work, but that's a huge task. I honestly don't know if I'll ever get to that unless somebody were to become my patron and say, "Hey, we'll provide for your needs for five years while you work on that." But other than that, I don't know that that will happen.
If it does, it would be probably a good 20 years before it happened.
Yeah, very well. Thank you for that. So maybe just another question for an English speaker who doesn't know the original languages. What would you suggest as a good translation for the Old Testament? So the St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint, which is what the Orthodox Study Bible uses, you said uses a lot of the Masoretic text.
Would there be a case for that translation being a good one? Yeah, I think that's one of the better translations of the Septuagint. I think it's just important to realize that they're not always translating from the Septuagint. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I think in places where the Septuagint is not clear, if you're doing a translation of the Septuagint and the Septuagint doesn't make any sense, then it makes sense to go to the Masoretic. What concerns me about the Orthodox Study Bible is there's times when the Septuagint makes better sense, and they go with the Masoretic text. So I just feel like I don't always trust the decisions they're making.
So you might want to read the Lexham English Septuagint, and you might want to read Breton, have two or three translations of the Septuagint that you look to if you do want to know what the Septuagint says. And for those who don't know Hebrew and Greek, I would just say that I would make something based on the Masoretic text your primary Old Testament that you read. But I would also have a Septuagint or two on hand, especially if you're preparing a message, you're preaching, or you're teaching, know what both of them say. And don't be afraid to say, "You know what? Here, this is what the English translation of the Masoretic text says, but I think the Septuagint is actually preferable."
Don't be afraid to do that because I think we can pull from both of those. I just don't like the idea of making the Septuagint our primary text because, again, a translation of a translation is generally going to be inferior to a translation of an original source.
Yep. And then just one more question here from me, and then I'll turn it to the audience. And that is, so it's very famously known that the Septuagint has different dating in Genesis for the chronology. And so obviously, the creation account is about 1,550 years earlier. There's an additional 1,550 years there.
Why do you think that difference exists, and where do you think that the truth lies there? I honestly don't know. I don't know which one is correct. I don't know why there's the differences. And one of my pet peeves with textual criticism is when people state their case in such a way that they seem to know what actually happened when these texts were copied. Nobody knows what actually happened. I mean, there's some that are very clear, some types of text-critical errors that are very clear. But for the most part, we simply don't know. We can make educated guesses, but that's all they are, our guesses. And if I were to give you an answer to that, it would be a guess.
I really don't know why there's a difference, and I don't know which one's right. Sure. Yeah, thank you. All right. So anybody here in the audience have questions you'd like to ask Adam at this time? Yes, I have about 50, but I'll try to keep it brief.
One thing that I'd like to give thanks for is this notion of the best of both worlds. That was my deep intuition as I've delved into this sort of thing, except I never congealed it into a simple statement like that. And thank you, Adam, for clarifying that and giving me peace because I stand in the taffy pull between the Septuagint as the Christian's Old Testament and my love for the Hebrew Scriptures. One of the things that I love about the Hebrew Scriptures that I think we lose if we throw that baby out with the bathwater is the puns. Are you familiar with, I think it's Jeremiah 1:12, where the Lord says to the prophet, "What do you see?"
And the prophet says, "I see a rod of almond." And God says, "Thou seest well, for I am watching over my word to perform it." Yeah.
And in English, it doesn't come through, but there's a play on words in the Hebrew there, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. One is shockhead and one is showkid. One is to watch, and the other one is a rod of almond. And that's just so rich. And if we throw the Hebrew out, we lose that. On the other hand, going back to something that was already mentioned, there are arguments that the Masoretic text was deliberately corrupted when it comes to chronologies of genealogies. And that has to do with Genesis 11. The genealogies from Arfaxad to Sirag lose about 100 years in the Masoretic text.
I think I have that right.
In any case, in one, it's like 35, so-and-so lived 35 years in Begat, and so-and-so lived 30 years in Begat. And in the other one, it's so-and-so lived 135 years in Begat, etc. And the suggestion is that this was deliberately corrupted. This is not just a copying error. And it was deliberately corrupted so that the genealogy works out so that Shem ends up to be contemporaneous with Abraham.
And this is used as justification for the idea that Melchizedek was not a priest of a distinctive order, that he passed; he was sort of a proto-Aronite. And he passed his mantle to the Aaronic priesthood. And so there's not any such thing as a distinct priest of Melchizedek, as the Book of Hebrews says. And they use that to skirt around what I think is a marvelous, fabulous thing in Scripture. Do you have a comment on that? I don't generally believe that texts are deliberately corrupted.
And then, okay, let me put it this way. There may be somebody that deliberately corrupts something, but I think they'll have a hard time getting that distributed to others. You think about it, there's a widespread distribution of Hebrew texts if you look at any point, anytime near the time of Jesus. And if somebody were to corrupt something, how would they make sure that everybody else that has copies of the Hebrew Scriptures would also make that same corruption?
I don't think that is generally the case. I think when a corruption comes into a text, maybe a scribe makes an error, maybe they deliberately change something, it's hard to get widespread distribution on that corruption. So I don't generally believe that the Masoretic text, as we have it, was deliberately corrupted.
I think it's just that we have different text types, just like we see in the New Testament, because we see the Masoretic text, the proto-Masoretic text dates back before Jesus, before the Christian movement. And so how was that text corrupted as a response to Jesus? I don't see that that's very likely.
I think people read into things. And so I don't generally put a lot of stock into deliberate corruptions that gain widespread popularity. I think that's, in a practical sense, that's very difficult to do. And I think the Jewish scribes were very interested in preserving the text as they received it. And we see that definitely in the Masoretics and the Masoretes. And I think that's probably true through history. If you have your sacred scriptures, you're generally not going to deliberately corrupt them.
So that's my thought on it. Okay. Thank you. Yep. What was the original Hebrew text for the Septuagint? Yeah, we don't know. I mean, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are, like I said, about 5% of the Hebrew texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls resemble the Septuagint.
So it seems that there were at least three textual families of Hebrew texts, one being the proto-Masoretic text, one being a Hebrew text that resembled the Septuagint, and one being a Hebrew text that resembled the Samaritan Pentateuch. And so we have those three different textual families. But I can't tell you in detail what that Hebrew text underlying the Septuagint was. But it seems that it was a textual family within these three different textual families at the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, at least.
So it was a different original than the Masoretic text was translated from. I can't say that definitively, but it would seem to be so. Yeah. I don't think you could account for all the differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text as saying the translators of the Septuagint just missed a lot in the Masoretic text or didn't translate it well. I think they're actually translating a somewhat different text than the Masoretic text. That would be my assumption there.
Kind of like how the English Standard Version translates from a different Greek text than the New King James Version. I would picture the same sort of situation, except in the Old Testament, it's more pronounced. The differences are more pronounced. The differences in the New Testament are generally pretty minor. The differences in the Old Testament are a little more significant, which is why I think it's important that we look at both the translation of the Masoretic and translations of the Septuagint.
I want to thank you for an excellent presentation. It cleared up a lot of questions in my mind. Oh, good. Thank you.
Adam, can you hear me? Yep. I was wondering about the use of the Hebrew Bible in the Hebrew Christian Church. There's certainly some conflict about who used what. And then the Second Temple rabbinic quotation style, where they freely quote verses from the prophets, it muddies the water a little bit on where the apostles really quoting from Hebrew or were they quoting from Greek?
I don't think anybody can answer that definitively. I mean, there are certain cases where they're directly quoting the Septuagint, especially in the Book of Hebrews. And I think Paul, there's places where he's directly quoting the Septuagint. In other places, like I said, it's hard to know. Are they quoting the Septuagint from memory? And are they quoting from a different Greek translation that we don't have anymore? Are they making their own translation of Hebrew? I think we just don't know.
All those seem to be possibilities. The only case where it's clear is where it's a direct quotation from the Septuagint. Then we can say, with certainty, they're quoting the Septuagint. Otherwise, I think we simply don't know exactly what they're doing.
Thank you.
Some have said the prophecies concerning Christ in the Old Testament are clearer in the Septuagint than they are in the English text we're using. Is that true? I have not examined that question. I would say that's true in certain cases, yeah. But then in something like Matthew 2:15, it's clear in the Masoretic text, "Out of Egypt, I called my son."
Septuagint reads, "Out of Egypt, I called his children." But in general, yeah, I would probably agree with that.
So, of course, Justin Martyr, in the dialogue with Trypho, there he accuses the Jews of corrupting the prophecies in the Hebrew text. And he's making the case for the Septuagint for the Greek. Do you think that Justin Martyr was correct about that, or you wouldn't go there?
I don't think he was. I mean, no, I don't think so. I find it hard for me to believe that the Jews who so highly valued their sacred text were deliberately corrupted to counter the growing Christian movement. And I read what you're referring to a long time ago, and I remember, I think it was referring to something in the Psalms.
And what Justin Martyr—and I may be incorrect about this. It may be somebody, one of the other early Christian writers. But one of them makes this argument about how the Jews were corrupting the Hebrew because it didn't match what he had in his edition of the Greek Septuagint. And what he quotes from the Greek Septuagint is actually from a single manuscript. And if you read most manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint, it doesn't read the way that he's quoting it.
So that tends to take away from the credibility of what he's saying in my mind because he's reading from a singular manuscript, a manuscript where that reading is found only in that manuscript, maybe a couple others. But it's not the reading of most manuscripts.
And Justin Martyr and others of those times, they simply didn't have the resources that we have now. We have 2,400 manuscripts of the Septuagint. They were lucky if they had access to one or maybe two. And that's no fault of their own. It's just the reality of the times we live in. We have tremendous resources that we can pull from as we make these sorts of evaluations and decisions.
They were very limited in what they had.
Yeah. Thank you.
Adam, thanks a lot for your talk. I really appreciated it. One quick question I have is, I've been running into the LXX 2012 a lot in my Bible app. I'm wondering, is that the same thing as the Lexham Septuagint, or is that something different?
Let me just take a quick look. I think just let me take a quick look at something. That might be the one from ebible.org. I'm just looking that up real quick. I know Michael Johnson, who runs ebible.org, yeah, the LXX 2012 Septuagint in American English. So Michael Johnson did a minor update of Brenton, similar to the one I did, where he tried to update the language into American English and update some of the these and thous and some of the archaic verb forms into modern verb forms. Unfortunately, Michael was working—remember, at the beginning, I said that a lot of the transcriptions that are out there, the electronic copies of Brenton, Brenton's English translation, have a lot of typographical errors.
Unfortunately, Michael was working from one of those copies when he did that. And so you're going to see a lot of those errors, typographical errors, preserved in LXX 2012 as well. But overall, it would be fine to read. Just realize you're going to probably run into those typographical errors here and there.
That's not the Lexham English Septuagint. That is the one on ebible.org produced by Michael Johnson.
He's a good friend of mine. And actually, I never met him in person, but we've communicated a lot electronically. And he's been very, very helpful and supportive of the work I've done. And so I appreciate all that he's done.
Adam, do you find that the Septuagint has a messianic reading of the Hebrew where there's variant translation possibilities?
Like I said, I've only worked in depth in Genesis and the first few Psalms. And so it's hard for me to comment on that authoritatively. I think one way that would come through is that we see the actual Greek word Christos, Christ.
And that resonates with us more than the Hebrew. And so, in fact, in Psalm 2, the beginning of Psalm 2, if you read that in the Septuagint, you actually see the word Christ. And so it feels stronger to us to read the actual word Christ than anointed one.
But that may just be a bias we have because we're used to the word Christ in English. And that sounds stronger to us than anointed one. But really, they mean the same thing. Christ just means anointed. Christos is the Greek word for anointed.
But I could see why you'd say that.
Matthew, I think you had started asking a question. Go ahead. Now, if I understand correctly, the Septuagint, it's almost more like a family of translations than the King James or something. There's multiple varieties of the same book. Is that the case?
I believe that's so. The Septuagint was—there's a story of the Septuagint, the 70, I think it was 72 translators going to Alexandria, Egypt to create a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. And there, I believe they only did the Pentateuch, the first five books. And then other books were translated later on. And in some books, you'll see two completely different translations.
Well, not completely different, but definitely different. I believe it's in the book of Judges, if I'm not mistaken, where you'll see some translations of the Septuagint will have two columns with text A and text B because they're different enough that they decide to print them side by side because they can't sort of bring them together. Yeah. So you'll see that in a couple of the books where there seems to be two different translations of Hebrew. And then the Septuagint was done by different translators at different times.
Some of the books are more literal translations. Some are more free. And so it's not a unified effort like the King James Version or the English Standard Version or the New King James Version. It's various efforts by different people over time that we've ended up lumping together in one book that we print, the Greek Septuagint. But it wasn't a unified effort to produce all those books at the same time by the same translators.
I missed part of the question that Glenn was asking. So let me know if this is a repeat of what he was asking. But that the prophecy in Isaiah that the virgin shall conceive in the Masoretic text just says a young woman.
Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. The Hebrew Masoretic text is young woman. The Greek text is virgin.
Yeah. But it's interesting that the translators of the Septuagint chose to translate that as virgin. So maybe they had greater insight into the meaning of that Hebrew word at that time and in that context than we do now.
And maybe there was something about the context, something about their understanding that made them say, "You know what? In this context, this Hebrew word, which can mean young woman, in this context, it seems to mean virgin." And they translated it that way. Again, I don't like to say that I know for sure why they translated it the way they did. But maybe they had greater insight into some linguistic features that have now been lost to us because of the passage of time. But yeah, it's definitely more messianic there in the Greek than in the Hebrew.
All right. Any other questions before we conclude here?
Yeah. My questions were answered in the discussion. So I just want to say thank you, Adam. It's obvious you've done a lot of work in this, and God bless your work in translation. Thank you.
Yes, amen. And yes, thank you very much. I appreciate all the work and the carefulness that you give this topic. All right. I think we will wrap it up here. Adam, if you would want to lead us in a prayer, and then just have a quick announcement following that. And go ahead.
Lord God, we thank you for this opportunity to meet together and let iron sharpen iron. These are all big questions that we have. But we're thankful, Lord, that we don't have to have all the answers in order to follow Jesus. God, we have these questions about textual criticism. Do we use Hebrew? Do we use Greek? Questions in the New Testament, about all the variants. But in the end, God, these questions aren't all that important as we strive to follow Jesus.
The things that we need to do to follow Jesus are very clear. And as a wise person said, "Lord," and I think it's true, "it's not the things that I don't understand that concern me. It's the things that I do understand." And so, Lord, help us as we wrestle with all of these issues to focus on the things that are clear and that we do understand, such as Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, the teachings in the New Testament of Jesus and the apostles, the teaching about the kingdom of God. Help us to be focused on those things and to not get too disconcerted about some of these more minor questions that we have.
And these are minor questions. They don't affect our faith. They don't affect our walk with Christ. They don't affect our understanding of Jesus' teachings and what it means to be citizens of the kingdom of God. And so, Lord, help us to be confident that we know what Jesus taught. We know what his apostles taught. And give us, Lord, the faith to walk in those teachings. And Lord, when we stumble, when we fall, we pray that you would pick us up, dust us off, and point us back in the right direction because you're a God of grace. You're a God of great love. And we are blessed to be your children. And so we thank you for this time to be together and wrestle with these issues.
And we thank you even more so that you've made your will clear to us through Scripture. Pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.
All right. Well, thank you again, Adam. So in two weeks from now, we will be having a meeting again at the same time in the morning. And that is December 30. December 30, one day before the end of the year, we're going to have three brothers give their testimonies of God's leading in their lives in 2023. So the details of that are yet to be announced, but you will find that on our website at strengthofstrength.org coming up here shortly.
Yeah. All right. So again, thank you all for joining us this morning. And we will see you in two weeks. And Lord bless you. As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.