William A. RossThe Septuagint is a collection of ancient Greek texts produced by Jews between the third century BC and the second century AD. Most of those texts are translations of the books of the Hebrew Bible. But there are also numerous others now known as the Apocrypha, most (but not all) of which were originally written in Greek.
As obscure as that may sound, these ancient Greek translations of the Old Testament have some important lessons for us in today’s Bible translation debates. After all, most of the authors of the New Testament not only knew Scripture in Greek, they also cite it directly in their writings. So it’s worth taking some time to think about the Bible translation in your Bible.
Diversity in the Septuagint
One of the most important things to keep in mind about the Septuagint is that it is not a unified, homogenous translation. (In fact, it’s not ideal to call it “the Septuagint,” but it’s hard to avoid in practice.) It wasn’t produced as a whole by a committee that shared a common vision for their work—rather, the opposite. The Septuagint was produced by different people, in different places, using different base texts, with various methods and goals, over several centuries.
Given that kind of diversity, it’s not all that surprising to find a wide variety of translation features and approaches represented in it. In fact, that variety might tempt us to dismiss the Septuagint as irrelevant to today’s concerns about Bible translation. With so little coherence to the production of the Septuagint as a whole, we might say, of course you’ll get a big jumble of approaches. How can this ancient Bible translation help us think about Bible translation today?
To avoid that objection, we will focus on one particular part of the Septuagint: The Greek Pentateuch. The five books of Moses were the earliest portion of the Hebrew Bible to be translated, and they became an important model for later translators (including, I would argue, modern ones). But more than that, scholars largely agree that the Greek Pentateuch was in fact translated by a committee of sorts—probably one person per book—working in tandem, with the approval and support of the Jewish community, and applying some established precedents in their work.
What can the Septuagint tell us about Bible translation?
Most of the time, English Bible translation debates are framed in terms of a spectrum of possible approaches. On the one side is formal or “literal” translation that is more concerned to convey the syntax or word order of the original text (e.g., NASB or NRSV). On the other side is functional or “free” translation that is more concerned to convey the sense or meaning of the original text (e.g., NLT or NIV). Although this spectrum is an oversimplification of the complex issues involved, it does provide some helpful guide rails. And we can see these same kinds of features in the Greek Pentateuch.
Blending formal and functional translation
The ancient Septuagint translators typically used a blend of both formal and functional approaches. This may seem odd, but actually both are possible at the same time. In fact, the prevailing characteristic of the Greek Pentateuch—much like most modern Bible translations—is its representation of each word of the source text, in order, using language that is both accurate and conventional.
Skilled Bible translators can pull that off in the majority of cases, and their readers are none the wiser. But a side effect of this approach is that it produces a text that has a distinctive ring to it—a rhetorical style that is recognizable because of the kinds of things that are said repeatedly (e.g., “And so it happened,” “Thus says the Lord,” “Behold”), if not because of the way they are said. This happened in the Greek Pentateuch, just as it does in modern translations.
Functional translations in the Septuagint
Sometimes the Septuagint translators favored a functional approach, departing from their source text in some way in order to use conventional Greek expressions. They did so for several reasons.
One was the simple reality of linguistic mismatch that made strictly formal translation impossible. For example, in Hebrew a possessive pronoun phrase like “my Lord” is a single word (adoni), but in Greek it has to be two or even three (o kurios mou). This kind of situation is inevitable in all translation.
Another reason was the possibility of linguistic choice. Most of the time, there is more than one way to say the same thing. Translators choose one over another because of cultural expectations, the communicative situation, and personal preference. This means that the same Hebrew word might get translated by different Greek words in different places. For example, the Hebrew verb tsavah means “to command,” but it is translated with different Greek words—entellomai or suntasso—depending on the social status of the figure speaking in the narrative itself. English Bible translators today often do the same kind of thing.
A third reason ancient Septuagint translators sometimes departed from a strictly literal translation of the Hebrew was a desire for clarity. This approach is distinctively reader-focused and usually reflects the perspective or concerns of the translators themselves. Sometimes it is fairly neutral, as when ancient translators chose to avoid the possibility of confusion among their readers by substituting a proper name like “Joseph” in their Greek text for a personal pronoun like “him” in their Hebrew source text (Gen 37:26)—something translators also do today.
But at other times, the desire for clarity is more culturally embedded. We see this in the use of language specific to Greek-speaking Egypt, where the Pentateuch was translated. For example, Joseph assists Pharaoh in appointing toparchs to prepare the land for the famine, an administrative term specific to the social context of the translators and their readers (Gen 41:34).
Formal translations in the Septuagint
Perhaps the least common feature of the Greek Pentateuch is when the translators rendered their source text in maximally strict, “formal” (“literal”) fashion. Because this approach produced renderings that would have sounded unconventional to Greek speakers in some way, they tend to get a lot of attention today.
Much of the time, unconventional Greek translations resulted from replicating Hebrew words item-for-item and in the same order. Sometimes the translators did this with Hebrew idioms (figures of speech). A good example here is the Hebrew idiom “to fill the hands,” which basically means “to ordain” a priest (see Exod 32:29). Rather than translating according to the meaning, the Septuagint translators chose to represent each individual word in Greek in the same order, which sounded as odd in Greek as it does in English.
Other times, the Septuagint includes unconventional translations that appear to have been created because the translators chose to use a single Greek word to match a single Hebrew word, even when not ideal in context. For example, the Hebrew word for sea, yam, was almost always translated with a Greek equivalent, thalassa. But the Hebrew yam could also mean the cardinal direction “west,” unlike the Greek thalassa.
So in certain texts where the Hebrew text is referring to the west, and the translators used thalassa anyway, the outcome is topographically puzzling, to say the least—as if Genesis 12:8 were saying, “From there Abram moved to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the sea and Ai on the east.”
(At least) one major lesson for today
So what lessons does the Septuagint have to teach us in the context of contemporary English Bible translation debates? Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the Greek Pentateuch as a translation is this: Even as the most intentional and consistent translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Greek Pentateuch nevertheless contains features and approaches from all across the spectrum of the contemporary debates.
Hopefully recognizing this state of affairs helps temper the more heated discussion and adds nuance. But to go a step further, it’s also important to note how in reality, translations are difficult to describe using a simple spectrum of formal to functional. All translation is a multidimensional task, perhaps most of all when the text at hand is holy Scripture.
Most Christians have a Bible translation that has come to feel like the default version for them personally, or perhaps within their church or denomination. Whatever sort of translation that is, others that differ from it can feel odd, innovative, or even threatening. But let’s take a lesson from the Septuagint: both formal and functional approaches, along with the many other dimensions of translation, go back to well before the time of Christ and even became part of the New Testament itself.
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This article was originally published in the March/April 2021 issue of Bible Study Magazine. Slight adjustments, such as title and subheadings, may be the addition of an editor.
Related articles
- The Best Bible Translations: All You Need to Know & How to Choose
- Who Wrote the Bible—God, Men, or Both?
- What Is the Septuagint and Is It Valuable for Bible Study?
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