[11] Few people could speak and even fewer could read in the Hebrew language during the Second Temple period; Koine Greek[3][12][13][14] and Aramaic were the lingua francas at that time among the Jewish community.

[16] This phrase in turn was derived from the Koinē Greek: Ἡ μετάφρασις τῶν Ἑβδομήκοντα, romanized: hē metáphrasis tôn hebdomḗkonta, lit.

[17] It was not until the time of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) that the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures was called by the Latin term Septuaginta.

[20] This narrative is found in the possibly pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas to his brother Philocrates,[21] and is repeated by Philo of Alexandria, Josephus (in Antiquities of the Jews),[22] and by later sources (including Augustine of Hippo).

According to later rabbinic tradition (which considered the Greek translation as a distortion of sacred text and unsuitable for use in the synagogue), the Septuagint was given to Ptolemy two days before the annual Tenth of Tevet fast.

[15][25] According to Aristobulus of Alexandria's fragment 3, portions of the Law were translated from Hebrew into Greek long before the well-known Septuagint version.

Instead, he asserts that the real origin of the name "Septuagint" pertains to the fact that the earliest version was forwarded by the authors to the Jewish Sanhedrin at Alexandria for editing and approval.

[17] The Septuagint also formed the basis for the Slavonic, Syriac, Old Armenian, Old Georgian, and Coptic versions of the Christian Old Testament.

[8] The Hebrew Bible, also called the Tanakh, has three parts: the Torah ("Law"), the Nevi'im ("Prophets"), and the Ketuvim ("Writings").

[3][4] Extant copies of the Septuagint, which date from the 4th century AD, contain books and additions[37] not present in the Hebrew Bible as established in the Jewish canon[38] and are not uniform in their contents.

Among them are the first two books of Maccabees; Tobit; Judith; the Wisdom of Solomon; Sirach; Baruch (including the Letter of Jeremiah), and additions to Esther and Daniel.

The Septuagint version of some books, such as Daniel and Esther, are longer than those in the Masoretic Text, which were affirmed as canonical in Rabbinic Judaism.

[15] For example, according to Heinrich Guggenheimer, intentional mistranslations in Deuteronomy 6 make reference to ancient sources of the Passover Haggadah.

After the Reformation, many Protestant Bibles began to follow the Jewish canon and exclude the additional texts (which came to be called the Apocrypha) as noncanonical.

The association of the Septuagint with a rival religion may have made it suspect in the eyes of the newer generation of Jews and Jewish scholars.

Even Greek-speaking Jews tended to prefer other Jewish versions in Greek (such as the translation by Aquila), which seemed to be more concordant with contemporary Hebrew texts.

Irenaeus writes about Isaiah 7:14 that the Septuagint clearly identifies a "virgin" (Greek παρθένος; bethulah in Hebrew) who would conceive.

[61] The word almah in the Hebrew text was, according to Irenaeus, interpreted by Theodotion and Aquila (Jewish converts), as a "young woman" who would conceive.

To him that was heresy facilitated by late anti-Christian alterations of the scripture in Hebrew, as evident by the older, pre-Christian Septuagint.

[34] According to the New Jerusalem Bible foreword, "Only when this (the Masoretic Text) presents insuperable difficulties have emendations or other versions, such as the [...] LXX, been used.

These three, to varying degrees, are more-literal renderings of their contemporary Hebrew scriptures compared to the Old Greek (the original Septuagint).

801, 819, and 957) and 1st-century BC fragments of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and the Twelve Minor Prophets (Alfred Rahlfs nos.

These are the oldest-surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of the Old Testament in any language; the oldest extant complete Hebrew texts date to about 600 years later, from the first half of the 10th century.

There is only one noticeable difference in that chapter, at 4:7:[citation needed] The differences between the Septuagint and the MT fall into four categories:[69] The Biblical manuscripts found in Qumran, commonly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), have prompted comparisons of the texts associated with the Hebrew Bible (including the Septuagint).

[73] Emanuel Tov, editor of the translated scrolls,[74] identifies five broad variants of DSS texts:[75][76] The textual sources present a variety of readings; Bastiaan Van Elderen compares three variations of Deuteronomy 32:43, the Song of Moses:[74][failed verification] The text of all print editions is derived from the recensions of Origen, Lucian, or Hesychius: One of the main challenges, faced by translators during their work, emanated from the need to implement appropriate Greek forms for various onomastic terms, used in the Hebrew Bible.

[88][89][90][91] Reflecting on those problems, American orientalist Robert W. Rogers (d. 1930) noted in 1921: "it is most unfortunate that Syria and Syrians ever came into the English versions.

[92] The first English translation (which excluded the apocrypha) was Charles Thomson's in 1808,[93] which was revised and enlarged by C. A. Muses in 1954 and published by the Falcon's Wing Press.

[citation needed] The Orthodox Study Bible, published in early 2008, features a new translation of the Septuagint based on the Alfred Rahlfs' edition of the Greek text.

[citation needed] The Holy Orthodox Bible by Peter A. Papoutsis and The Old Testament According to the Seventy by Michael Asser are based on the Greek Septuagint text published by the Apostoliki Diakonia of the Church of Greece.

Because this approach shifts the point of reference from a diverse group to a single implied reader, the new LES exhibits more consistency than the first edition.