Is the Septuagint A Re-engineered Text?

A dear brother and friend asked me about the responses I have been getting to my video on the Septuagint. The crux of his question is this:

“While they are forced to admit that there was a Greek translation of the Old Testament available before Christ, the pushback is the LXX we have now is a re-engineered text and us not accurate to the original. The charge is, We have lost too many ancient copies to construct an accurate LXX. There doesn’t seem to be an effort to copy and preserve it.”

Here’s the issue: Many KJV Onlyists and non-KJV Onlyists who may classify themselves as TR Onlyists or TR Defenders will bring up men like David Daniels and his book, “Did Jesus Use the Septuagint?” as evidence that the Septuagint is a re-engineered text. Daniels even goes so far as to say that, while it is claimed that there is a “BC Septuagint”, he rejects that. However, instead of focusing on actual manuscript evidence, he chooses to focus on the straw man of Aristeas’ embellishments on the origin of the Septuagint. He even asserts that the Septuagint is a hoax because of the book order. The structure of the Tanakh, The Law, the Prophets, and the Writings is something that Jesus spoke of and because of the order of the Septuagint in 4th century copies being inconsistent with that grouping, Daniels summarily dismisses it as a hoax. I wonder how Daniels feels about the book order being different in the KJV Old Testament than it was in Jesus’ day? Nevertheless, Daniels has chosen to ignore evidence like the Nahal Hever scroll that contains the Greek 12 Minor Prophets in the same grouping as found in the Tanakh. That document is from 50 BC to 50 AD. Daniels also dismisses the Septuagint because it contains apocryphal books. But here again, I find Daniels to be inconsistent and guilty of special pleading. He would not dismiss the AV 1611 for containing the apocryphal books. Daniels work is an unscholarly and biased work that passes the Septuagint off as a so-called fake Alexandrian perversion.

Others cling to the non-scholarly works of men like Phil Stringer who dismisses the Septuagint because it does not match the Textus Receptus. Unfortunately King James Onlyist, Phil Stringer, seems to have forgotten that the KJV translators hold the Septuagint in high regard, although they do not consider it to be superior to the Hebrew. Stringer wrote, “It is unthinkable to believe that the Jews in Palestine used a Greek Old Testament containing the rejected books of the Apocrypha. It is against all evidence of history to think that they used a Greek Old Testament at all” (Stringer, The Septuagint – LXX, 34). Remember this quote, it will become important later. KJV Onlyists and TR onlyists like to use William Whitaker who wrote about the Septuagint and how it is different from the Hebrew and called it “a mixed and miserably corrupted document” (Whitaker, Disputation on Scripture, 121). However, it is important to note that Whitaker lived in the 16th century, well before early Septuagint manuscripts began to be discovered and catalogued as we have them today. Whitaker deserves some grace on this subject. Daniels and Stringer have too much information accessible to them to hold the positions they do.

But my friend’s question is an excellent one. Regarding the question, “is the LXX we have now a re-engineered text and not accurate to the original”, I think it calls into question the very definition of what we mean by “original”. To answer this means we must apply the same question to the Hebrew. We have the following witnesses that we must reconcile:

• the medieval Masoretic Text containing the Niqqud that most Old Testaments are based on
• the medieval Samaritan Pentateuch written in paleo Hebrew script around the same time as the Masoretic Text
• the Septuagint found in Origen’s Hexapla fragments and so-called Alexandrian manuscripts, along with the Septuagint manuscript fragments that have been discovered over the years
• the Dead Sea Scrolls and fragments that testify to all of these in various ways
• the myriad of Greek New Testament manuscripts that contain quotations and references of Hebrew and Septuagint traditions
• the Aramaic Targums

What did Jesus read at Nazareth in Luke 4:18-19? That question will serve use well as we look at the lifestyle and liturgy of Judean Jews in the first century AD. The Hebrew Text during the 2nd Temple Period had a rigid scribal copying process. Hebrew was used in the Temple. However, Aramaic Targums were also used to provide translations and paraphrases for the people who were more familiar with Aramaic. In the synagogues it was common for a meturgeman (translator) to provide an Aramaic translation or perhaps Greek paraphrase where Hebrew readings were used.

In some synagogues throughout Alexandria and Judea, the Septuagint was used by more Hellenized Jews. This is evidenced by the excavation of synagogues at Jerusalem, Caesarea, Alexandria, and others. The Theodotos inscription, found in a Jerusalem synagogue dating to the first century BC or AD provides strong evidence that Greek was used in the synagogues during the time of Christ. In the synagogue at Caesarea, all inscriptions found were in Greek and all quotations were from the Septuagint. In some synagogues even the Shema prayer was in Greek. The Ostia synagogue near Rome had inscriptions in both Latin and Greek. While that is well outside of Judea, it demonstrates that Jews were not limited to Hebrew in their liturgy within the synagogue. Two scholarly works document the use of the Septuagint and Greek in Judean synagogues during the time of Christ: “The Revolutionary Effects of Archeology on the Study of Jewish History” and “The Archeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present”. This really does upend Stringer’s comment earlier that it is “unthinkable to believe that the Jews in Palestine used a Greek Old Testament”. When you consider the historical evidence, it really isn’t that unthinkable at all. On the contrary, there is real archeological evidence in support of it.

It is often suggested that when Jesus read from Isaiah at a synagogue in Nazareth that he read from both Isaiah 61:1-2 and then also from Isaiah 42:7 (recovery of sight to the blind) and Isaiah 58:6 (set free those who are oppressed). But this is not consistent with the typical reading of the Tanakh in synagogues. The Haftarah, or scheduled readings from the prophets, were continual passages. Isaiah 61:1-2 is not part of the regular Haftarah cycle, but is usually read during the afternoon service of Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement). Isaiah 42:7 would not have been read with this because it is read with Genesis 1:1-6:8, Isaiah 42:5-43:10 at the start of the annual cycle of reading. Isaiah 58:6 is part of a reading that spans Isaiah 57:14-58:14 that is also associated with Yom Kippur but at a different service than when Isaiah 61:1-2 is read. Therefore, it does not reason that Luke’s account is suggesting that Jesus opened the scroll to Isaiah 61:1-2, read that passage, paused, and inserted portions of the other two readings into it. The suggestion that he was reading from a Septuagint is strengthened by Luke 4:17,

“And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written,”

According to Luke, Jesus was handed the Isaiah scroll. He opened it himself and found the place where it was written (emphasis mine). We have no known Hebrew scroll of Isaiah with the reading as Jesus read it in Luke 4:18-19. But we do have late witnesses of Isaiah 61:1-2 in Greek with the exact quotation of Jesus. Here is our dilemma. Did Jesus have a corrupt copy? Did he change it? Did he misread it? Did Luke get it wrong? Did the Septuagint have to be re-engineered to fix either Jesus’ or Luke’s error? Did the Nazarene synagogue have a Hebrew Isaiah scroll with a variant that is no longer extant? Or, did Jesus have a copy of the Septuagint with this reading that matches later extant copies of the Septuagint? The obvious answer is that we cannot say with absolute certainty that Jesus had such a Septuagint at Nazareth. But we can make a highly probable determination based on a lot of circumstantial evidence. I would also remind the reader that circumstantial evidence is admissible in court and the law doesn’t distinguish between it and direct evidence in terms of importance or weight.

This is where our other evidence becomes relevant and important. The myriad of sources I listed near the beginning of this response all demonstrate one indisputable fact. There was some level of fluidity in the transmission of the Jewish scriptures before and during the time of Christ.

The Samaritan Pentateuch and Septuagint agree with the Masoretic Text in large swaths. But there are differences. For example, numbers and dates may be considerable different between these sources. But let us not forget that these problems are present between books in the Masoretic Text as well. The lifespans of men from Shem to Abraham and their ages when their sons were born vary considerably in the Masoretic Text when compared to the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch. In the Masoretic Text, Shem doesn’t die until Abraham’s day and outlives every man mentioned by name in the lineage of Abraham except for Eber. There are also chronological issues in the Masoretic Text that do not exist in the other witnesses. At the same time, there are clear errors in the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint. But, issues with portions of text such as how many stalls of horses Solomon had in the Masoretic Text are not an issue in the Septuagint. The issue with the age of Ahaziah’s father at his birth is also not a problem in the Septuagint.

Then there are texts like Psalm 21:16, Isaiah 7:14, Jeremiah 31:32, Hosea 11:1, Amos 9:11-12, and many others that are clearly different from the Masoretic Text in the Greek New Testament and in the Septuagint. In order to answer the question, is the Septuagint a re-engineered text, we must address these differences among sources even if we are unable to answer these issues definitively.

The DSS (Dead Sea Scrolls) affirm the Masoretic Text in many instances like in the Great Isaiah Scroll. But it affirms the Septuagint in other instances such as in Jeremiah and Lamentations. Then there is the Septuagint scroll from the Cave of Horrors. This scroll was not found at Qumran, but rather some miles to the south in a difficult to reach cave in the side of a vertical cliff. This scroll was buried by people who were a part of the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 130s AD. They burned many of their possessions, but they buried their scroll of the 12 minor prophets in Greek before they died rather than burning it. While we do not have extant early copies of Isaiah from the Septuagint, we do have portions containing the 12 minor prophets. This scroll attests to the consistency of Acts 2’s quote of Joel 2 from the Septuagint and Acts 15’s quotation of Amos 9 from the Septuagint. The Nahal Hever Minor Prophets Scroll (8HevXIIgr) has been one of the most amazing discoveries since the discovery of the DSS and it serves as an amazing witness to the Septuagint not being a re-engineered text.

Rather than suggesting that the Septuagint is a 4th century AD re-engineered text, one should accept that the transmission of the Jewish scriptures was somewhat fluid during the time of Christ. There were multiple texts in circulation in and around Judea during this time period and Jesus and the NT authors were not textual absolutists, instead choosing a view similar to the AV translators who considered even the meanest translation to not contain but be the word of God. Any view other than this one must call into question whether we have the words of Jesus and whether or not God has preserved his word in both the Old and New Testament. In the same way we do textual analysis on the New Testament, we must do the same to the Old Testament. While we have an abundance of NT evidence, we are limited in our OT witnesses. By all accounts, I reject any suggestion that the Septuagint is the true text and the Hebrew is corrupt. Likewise, I reject any notion that the Septuagint is a forgery or re-engineered text from the 4th century AD. I will cede that the Septuagint is a thought for thought translation of the Hebrew from around 250-100 BC. It is not perfect by a long shot. But it was used alongside the Hebrew text in first century Judea. The DSS attest to variants between Hebrew of that day and that of the Masoretes 900 years later. In the absence of any truly “original” Hebrew text, it is therefore only logical that we apply the same standards and methodologies of textual analysis to the Old Testament that we apply to the New Testament. But when your bibliology or presuppositions do not allow for any textual analysis, you have no choice but to reject anything that does not wholly conform to your position. As one brother told me earlier today, he was willing to use other witnesses like the Dead Sea Scrolls, when they support the truth as he understands it. But if you aren’t willing to consider witnesses that support the truth as you don’t understand it, you are only fueling your own confirmation bias with the acceptance of selective evidence. Your argument must be able to withstand the totality of evidence. And when we look at the totality of the evidence available to us, we should not view the Septuagint as a re-engineered text, at least not in the same way that something like Scrivener’s TR, which was a truly reverse-engineered text.