[Box/​Pictures on page 26]

This fragment of the Septuagint (right) dated to the first century C.E. and containing Zechariah 8:19-21 and Zec 8:23–9:4 is in Jerusalem’s Israel Museum. It contains God’s name four times, three of which are indicated here. In the Alexandrine Manuscript (left), a copy of the Septuagint made 400 years later, God’s name has been replaced in those same verses by KY and KC, abbreviated forms of the Greek word Kyʹri·os (“Lord”)

In later copies of the Septuagint, God’s name was removed and words like “God” (The·osʹ) and “Lord” (Kyʹri·os) were substituted. We know that this happened because we have early fragments of the Septuagint where God’s name was included and later copies of those same parts of the Septuagint where God’s name has been removed.

The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Volume 2, page 512) says: “Recent textual discoveries cast doubt on the idea that the compilers of the LXX [Septuagint] translated the tetragrammaton YHWH by kyrios. The oldest LXX MSS (fragments) now available to us have the tetragrammaton written in Heb[rew] characters in the G[ree]k text. This custom was retained by later Jewish translators of the O[ld] T[estament] in the first centuries A.D.”