12. What is the Septuagint, and why is it so important?

¹² The Greek Septuagint. The most important of the early versions of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the first actual written translation from the Hebrew, is the Greek Septuagint (meaning, “Seventy”). Its translation began about 280 B.C.E., according to tradition, by 72 Jewish scholars of Alexandria, Egypt. Later, the number 70 somehow came to be used, and thus the version was called the Septuagint. Evidently it was completed sometime in the second century B.C.E. It served as Scripture for the Greek-speaking Jews and was used extensively down to the time of Jesus and his apostles. In the Christian Greek Scriptures, most of the 320 direct quotations and the combined total of perhaps 890 quotations and references to the Hebrew Scriptures are based on the Septuagint.

13. What valuable fragments of the Septuagint have survived to this day, and of what value are they?

¹³ There are still available for study today a considerable number of fragments of the Septuagint written on papyrus. They are valuable because they belong to early Christian times, and though often just a few verses or chapters, they help in assessing the text of the Septuagint. The Fouad Papyri collection (Inventory No. 266) was discovered in Egypt in 1939 and has been found to be of the first century B.C.E. It contains portions of the books of Genesis and Deuteronomy. In the fragments of Genesis, the divine name does not occur because of the incomplete preservation. However, in the book of Deuteronomy, it occurs in various places, written in square Hebrew characters within the Greek text.d Other papyri date down to about the fourth century C.E., when the more durable vellum, a fine grade of parchment generally made from calf, lamb, or goat skins, began to be used for writing manuscripts.

14. (a) What does Origen testify as to the Septuagint? (b) When and how was the Septuagint tampered with? (c) What witness must the early Christians have given in using the Septuagint?

¹⁴ It is of interest that the divine name, in the form of the Tetragrammaton, also appears in the Septuagint of Origen’s six-column Hexapla, completed about 245 C.E. Commenting on Psalm 2:2, Origen wrote of the Septuagint: “In the most accurate manuscripts THE NAME occurs in Hebrew characters, yet not in today’s Hebrew [characters], but in the most ancient ones.”e The evidence appears conclusive that the Septuagint was tampered with at an early date, Kyʹri·os (Lord) and The·osʹ (God) being substituted for the Tetragrammaton. Since the early Christians used manuscripts containing the divine name, it cannot be supposed that they followed Jewish tradition in failing to pronounce “THE NAME” during their ministry. They must have been able to witness to Jehovah’s name directly from the Greek Septuagint.

15. (a) Using the chart on page 314, describe the vellum and leather manuscripts of the Septuagint. (b) What references does the New World Translation make to these?

¹⁵ There are hundreds of vellum and leather manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint still in existence. A number of these, produced between the fourth century C.E. and the ninth century C.E., are important because of the large sections of the Hebrew Scriptures that they cover. They are known as uncials because they are written entirely in large, separated capital letters. The remainder are called minuscules because they are written in a smaller, cursive style of handwriting. Minuscule, or cursive, manuscripts remained in vogue from the ninth century until the inception of printing. The outstanding uncial manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries, namely, the Vatican No. 1209, the Sinaitic, and the Alexandrine, all contain the Greek Septuagint with some slight variations. Frequent references are made to the Septuagint in the footnotes and comments in the New World Translation.f