The Septuagint (from the Latin septuaginta, “seventy”) is a translation of the Hebrew Bible and some related texts into Koine Greek. The title (Greek: Ἡ μετάφρασις τῶν Ἑβδομήκοντα, lit. “The Translation of the Seventy”) and its Roman numeral acronym LXX refer to the legendary seventy Jewish elders who solely translated the Five Books of Moses into Koine Greek at the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, (285–247 BCE) for the library in Alexandria, Egypt and the Jewish Community of Alexandria in general, most of whom did not speak Hebrew. The story of the elders being invited to Egypt and writing the translation is mentioned in The Letter of Aristeas, Josephus (Ant. Jud., XII, ii), Philo (De vita Moysis, II, vi), and the Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 9a-9b).
Today, there are three main manuscripts of the Septuagint, in existence: Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. The manuscripts include all of the Tanach and some additional apocryphal books that used to be in the Hebrew Bible, but were removed from it during the Talmudic period. Two out of the three manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus are available online now.
1) Codex Sinaiticus (dispersed between 4 libraries)
Description of Codex Sinaiticus from the British Library Website:
What is the Codex Sinaiticus?
The literal meaning of ‘Codex Sinaiticus’ is the Sinai Book. The word ‘Sinaiticus’ derives from the fact that the Codex was preserved for many centuries at St Catherine’s Monastery near the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt.
The Codex is the remains of a huge hand-written book that contained all the Christian scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, together with two late first-century Christian texts, the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas. This book was made up of over 1,460 pages, each of which measured approximately 41cm tall and 36cm wide.
Just over half of the original book has survived, now dispersed between four institutions: St Catherine’s Monastery, the British Library, Leipzig University Library (Germany), and the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg. At the British Library the largest surviving portion – 347 leaves, or 694 pages – includes the whole of the New Testament.
All the texts written down in the Codex are in Greek. They include the translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint. The Greek text is written using a form of capital or upper case letters known as Biblical majuscule and without word division. The pages of the Codex are of prepared animal skin called parchment.
Who made the Codex Sinaiticus?
Modern scholars have identified four scribes as responsible for writing the Greek text. Trained to write in very similar ways they, and their contributions to the manuscript, have been distinguished only after painstaking analysis of their handwriting, spelling and method of marking the end of each of the books of the Bible.
As is the case with most manuscripts of this antiquity, we do not know either the names of these scribes or the exact place in which they worked. Successive critics have argued that it was made in one of the great cities of the Greco-Roman world, such as Alexandria, Constantinople, or Caesarea in Palestine.
During the production of the Codex each of the scribes corrected their own work and one of them corrected and rewrote parts by another. These corrections contain many significant alterations and, together with further extensive corrections undertaken probably in the seventh century, are some of the most interesting features of the manuscript.
How did the Codex come to the British Library?
The 694 pages held by the British Library were purchased for the British nation in 1933. Over half of the price paid, £100,000, was raised by means of a public fund-raising campaign. The seller, the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin, sold the Codex to obtain desperately needed foreign capital.
2) Codex Alexandrinus (British Library, Royal MS 1 D VII)
So far the British library put online only the text of volume 4 which contains only the New Testament. The Septuagint itself is still not online.
Description of Codex Alexandrinus from the British Library Website:
The Codex Alexandrinus contains the Septuagint (the Koine Greek version of the Old Testament) and the New Testament, in addition to a few additional pieces of text that do not appear in standard Bibles, such as part of the Epistles of Clement. The beginning lines of each book are written in red ink and sections within the book are marked by a larger letter set into the margin. Words are written continuously in a large square uncial hand with no accents and only some breathing marks. It contains 773 pages, 630 for the Old Testament and 143 for the New Testament. Each page measures 32cm x 26.5 cm.
3) Codex Vaticanus (Vatican Library, Vat, Gr. 1209)
Description of Codex Vaticanus from Wikipedia:
Codex Vaticanus is one of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Greek Bible (Old and New Testament). The Codex is named after its place of conservation in the Vatican Library, where it has been kept since at least the 15th century. It is written on 759 leaves of vellum in uncial letters and has been dated palaeographically to the 4th century.
The manuscript is believed to have been housed in Caesarea in the 6th century, together with the Codex Sinaiticus, as they have the same unique divisions of chapters in the Acts. It came to Italy – probably from Constantinople – after the Council of Florence (1438–1445).
The manuscript has been housed in the Vatican Library (founded by Pope Nicholas V in 1448) for as long as it has been known, appearing in the library’s earliest catalog of 1475 (with shelf number 1209), and in the 1481 catalog. In a catalog from 1481 it was described as a “Biblia in tribus columnis ex membranis in rubeo” (three-column vellum Bible).
If you would like to read the Septuagint in English you can purchase the translation by Lancelot Brenton or by Oxford University Press below.
The Septuagint with Apocrypha
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A New English Translation of the Septuagint
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The Septuagint with Apocrypha
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A New English Translation of the Septuagint
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I don’t know what justifies calling the Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, & Alexandrinus OT portions the Septuagint. Where do those codices say “Septuagint”? I know it is common to refer to them as the LXX, but I know of no justification for that. So far as I know, the only copies of the LXX consist of a few fragments. What we do have in those 3 codices are Greek translations of the Old Testament. And they were published 4th-5th centuries AD, long after the LXX was produced & long after the NT was finished. The NT contains citations of the OT in Greek. I know of no reason why those NT citations would not have made it into the 4th-5th centuries codices.
I believe that the producers of those 3 codices wanted to have the best Greek OT possible available to Christendom. So, they should have preferred readings from the NT of the Greek OT to all other sources. Thus I am convinced that trying to show that the NT used the LXX vs the Hebrew OT based on 4th-5th century codices, is an erroneous method.
Gum Boocho,
We do not have many extant manuscripts or fragments of the Septuagint. We have a few, but they are rare. There is a scholarly dispute about whether the name Septuagint or LXX (taken from the story in the Letter Aristeas) should refer only to the original translation of the Pentateuch or the entire Greek Old Testament (GOT). Some scholars stick to calling only the Pentateuchal translation “the Septuagint”, since (if the story in the Letter of Aristeas is basically trustworthy – whether or not it fudges a few historical details) the only portion of the Greek Old Testament that would have been created at that time under Ptolomy II was the Pentateuch only. The remainder of the GOT would have been produced over the course of perhaps 100 or more years. Scholars have simply taking to calling those portions of the GOT the “Old Greek” Scriptures. However, at a popular level, and indeed even at a scholarly level, the term “Septuagint” or “LXX” has sometimes supplanted that distinction and simply refers to all of the GOT translates over a period of time in the B.C. era.
Now, as to answering your question about why we rely on such late manuscripts. Really, as is also the case with the Hebrew old testament (with the medieval Masoretic text being the most complete, and our earlier “fragments” from the Dead Sea Scrolls attesting a significantly smaller corpus) the fullest example we have of a “near complete” GOT or Septuagint is in Sinaticus and Vaticanus.
Sinaticus and Vaticanus do not contain JUST the Old Testament, but they have both books from the Old and New Testaments. That’s why they are not simply called “Septuagint” manuscripts, because they are more than that: they are a mostly complete Christian Bible. The LXX of Vaticanus is missing a few books from the Apocrypha though, and the NT is a bit fragmentary. See the Wikipedia article for a list of the extant books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Vaticanus.
Sinaticus and Vaticanus, however, can indeed rightly be said to CONTAIN the Septuagint/LXX or GOT. Yes, that late is the best we have thus far for mostly complete documents. We have no earlier manuscripts which are as complete as Sinaticus and Vaticanus have yet been discovered (or rather “recovered” — preservation is an obvious issue). We do indeed find evidence of earlier copies than Sinaticus and Vaticanus, but they are much more fragmentary. Origen’s Hexapla is helpful especially, but unfortunately we do not even possess complete manuscripts of the Hexapla and it itself is fragmentary. Then there were even some LXX fragments (very tiny) among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the B.C era, such as 4QLXXDeut.
The best way to piece together this messy and complex manuscript situation for yourself is to look at the extant manuscript list in chronological order, which you can conveniently find listed here: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rak/earlylxx/earlypaplist.html
Have fun researching the Septuagint!
Regards,
Josh
Apologies for typos in my previous comment. That was somewhat hastily written.
-Josh
Thank you for the link with the fragments list. Very usefull.