The rendering of Daniel in the LXX, for example, was so loose that the Church replaced it with a better translation executed by Theodotion, a Hellenistic Jew of the second century AD. The quality and style of translation exhibited in the LXX can vary quite widely from book to book. The Septuagint translation began to circulate in a collection that was broader than the Hebrew canon mentioned by Josephus, and did not have a clear limit-in other words, the Septuagint had an open canon, including deuterocanonical works and some apocrypha. The remaining Old Testament books were translated progressively over the next two centuries. The translation of the Pentateuch was the first and perhaps best, and dates to c. According to the legend, seventy scholars were commissioned for this project: thus the name Septuagint, meaning “seventy,” and the commonly used abbreviation “LXX,” the Roman numeral for seventy.Īlthough the accounts of the translation of the Septuagint in the Letter of Aristeas, Philo, Josephus, and other ancient authors sound embellished, the historical kernel of the story seems plausible and fits known data: Ptolemy II commissioned a Greek translation of the Pentateuch for his library. When translating the Old Testament, scholars also consult the readings of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament books.Īccording to a semi-legendary account in a document known as the Letter of Aristeas, the Septuagint translation was begun when the Hellenistic king of Alexandria in Egypt, Ptolemy II, brought Jewish scribes from Jerusalem to Alexandria in order to translate the sacred books of the Jews into Greek for the Library of Alexandria in the third century BC. When translating or studying the Old Testament today, scholars typically begin from the Hebrew of the Masoretic text, usually a printed (or increasingly, an electronic) edition of Leningradensis. Leningradensis is almost universally regarded as the oldest and best copy of the Masoretic Text, the name given to the precise form the Hebrew developed by the Masoretes as their standard. Subsequently, every newly-written copy was carefully counted to verify its accuracy. The Masoretes also introduced various quality control measures for the reproduction of manuscripts: they tabulated the number of words and letters in each biblical book. In this way, they were able for the first time to record in writing the Jewish oral tradition of the pronunciation of Scripture. Among other innovations, they devised a system of markings (called “points”) placed above and below the Hebrew consonants to indicate the vowel to be pronounced after the consonant. The Masoretes raised the reproduction of the Hebrew Scriptures to a high art. It takes its name from the Masoretes, a school of Jewish scribes who flourished between AD 700 to AD 1000. The Masoretic Text is the standard Hebrew form of the books of the Jewish Bible, the form used for chant and proclamation in traditional Jewish synagogues to this day. Leningradensis is a complete copy of the Masoretic Text written in Galilee around AD 1000. the form of book most familiar to us) called Leningradensis, held in the Imperial Russian Library in St. However, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew of the protocanonical books of the Old Testament is a codex (a book formed by leaves of paper stitched on one side i.e. The oldest partial copies of the text of any biblical book are to be found among the Dead Sea Scrolls (treated in next post). The original manuscripts ( the autographs) written by the sacred authors themselves are no longer extant for any book of the Bible. The Oldest Manuscripts of the Old Testament In this follow up to the last post, we discuss important manuscripts (hand-written copies) of the Old Testament.
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