Greek Old Testament: Exploring the Septuagint & Dead Sea Scrolls with Cross Bible

Introduction

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was a major turning point in biblical scholarship. Eleven caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea near Qumran yielded copies of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible, many of which were a thousand years older than what were previously considered to be the most ancient copies of Tanakh, what Christians refer to as the "Old Testament."

Initially, the scrolls appeared to closely match the modern Hebrew text of the standard Jewish Bible, used for centuries as the basis for Bible translations. This demonstrated the continuity of an ancient textual tradition that was remarkably stable and reliable. But when more fragments were deciphered and published, some of them revealed a distinct textual tradition, reflected by readings in Hebrew that were previously only known from the Greek translations of the Old Testament used by the authors of the New Testament.

This revelation has challenged the status quo among scholars, who are now better equipped to reconstruct the sources behind the Greek translations. Textual critics are now pushing back against the longstanding, institutional preference for the traditional Hebrew text, especially in places where more viable readings from the Dead Sea Scrolls converge with the Greek Old Testament.

However, despite all of these advancements, Bible publishers are still reluctant to break with tradition, especially when it comes to producing translations from what has long been regarded as the "original" Hebrew. If you go looking for this important information in the footnotes of your Bible, you may be disappointed. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel...

Navigating the Timeline

Welcome back to Cross Bible. In our last video, we explored fascinating textual artifacts from the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Isaiah. If you missed that video, be sure to go back and watch it. In this video, we'll dig even deeper into the rich history of the Old Testament, using features from the Cross Bible prototype, which is still a work in progress.

We're diligently developing our software to make this online Bible study platform available to the public as soon as possible. So, please visit our website and sign up for our mailing list for updates and early access. If you can afford to support our mission to enhance Bible study, we would really appreciate your help to make our features available even faster. And if you enjoy this content, please like and subscribe here on YouTube.

Now let's jump into the beta version of our Timeline of the Bible feature, which you can already access on crossbible.com. When you navigate to the Timeline, there are several options for exploring this interactive diagram:

Here in the top right corner of the browser, you'll find a button that lets you expand the Timeline to full screen. In the bottom right corner, there are buttons that let you zoom in and out, where you can also reset the zoom level. And you can open this handy minimap in the bottom right corner.

There are also intuitive navigation options, like double-clicking to zoom in, using the scroll wheel on your mouse, or even using finger gestures on touchscreens and trackpads. When you get the hang of it, navigating this timeline is really easy, even on mobile devices. And you can click on just about anything on the timeline to open up hyperlinks and notes with additional information. Just make sure you hit ESCAPE to return focus back to the overall timeline.

When you click on certain "Hotspots," you can collapse groups to simplify the diagram. Now that we have our bearings, let's dig in. This legend shows three different Old Testament textual categories or "text-types": The Hebrew Masoretic Text Family (abbreviated as "MT"), The Septuagint (or "LXX"), and The Samaritan Pentateuch ("SP").

History of the Greek Old Testament

By the 3rd century BC, many Jews around the Mediterranean had come under the influence of the growing popularity of Greek culture (a process called "Hellenism"), resulting in the widespread adoption of Greek education and language, which especially affected Jewish communities in the diaspora outside of their homeland.

A community of Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, produced the first translation of the first five books of Moses from Hebrew into Greek, which became known as the "Translation of the Seventy" (ἡ μετάφρασις τῶν ἐβδομήκοντα); also known widely by the Latin name "Septuagint," or by the Roman numeral for 70 - "LXX".

Even though, originally, this referred only to the first five books, the umbrella term "Septuagint" (or "LXX") is now used among scholars to refer to the entire Greek corpus, including a wide range of translations and original Greek compositions. The original Hebrew texts used for those translations are no longer extant, meaning that most of them are lost, preserved only in Greek, with the exception of key Hebrew fragments recovered from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So, why did this important version of the Hebrew Bible simply disappear? By the 1st century AD, another form of the Hebrew Bible that was preferred by the Pharisaic sect of Judaism began to emerge as the dominant form of the text that eventually supplanted the Hebrew version behind the Septuagint. This growing preference inspired several revisions of the Greek translations to make them conform to the emerging Hebrew standard. This revision process (known as "recension") began as early as the 1st century BC.

One of the earliest of these recensions is known as "Kaige," due to the translator's fondness for the phrase "and indeed" ("καί γε" in Greek). This text was often confused with a later revision by Theodotion, giving it the name "kaige-Theodotion." These recensions continued over several centuries: Aquila, Symmachus, Lucian, Hesychius, and, most importantly, Origen's massive six-version critical edition known as "The Hexapla".

The result of this long process has made it very difficult for modern scholars to reliably reconstruct the oldest form of the Greek translations, known as the "Old Greek" version to distinguish it from later recensions. Since the Pharisees emerged as the dominant form of Judaism after the destruction of the Jewish temple in 70 AD, they determined the version of the Hebrew Bible that became the universal standard. And that was the only form of the text that Jewish scribes, in the later Rabbinic tradition, chose to preserve.

The medieval scribes responsible for meticulously copying, annotating, and punctuating this Hebrew text, between roughly the 7th and 10th centuries, were known as the Masoretes, which gave us the name "Masoretic Text." One might expect the term "Masoretic Text" to refer to the final form of the Hebrew Bible, such as the manuscripts that were actually produced by the Masoretes. One key exemplar of a literal Masoretic Text, strictly speaking, is the Leningrad Codex, which most modern Bible translations are primarily based on.

However, the ancient predecessors of this version are so closely aligned with the later copies that they're categorized in scholarly literature using terms like "Masoretic Group" or "Masoretic Family" or "proto-Masoretic" texts (in the plural), even though these manuscripts long pre-date the group that gave this text its designation.

If that seems confusing, strap yourselves in. Here's where the use of these imprecise umbrella terms gets even more complex. Later recensions of the Greek Old Testament are often referred to by the name "Septuagint" because they're in Greek. But to the extent that they more closely align with the proto-Masoretic texts against the "Old Greek" version, in certain circumstances, the text-type of a given reading, or of a revision as a whole, may be referred to as "Masoretic," since these texts were mixed.

Some of the earliest complete Christian Bibles that include the Greek Old Testament are from the 4th and 5th centuries: Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Alexandrinus. Most standard Greek Old Testaments are based largely on these Bibles in particular. And it's not always clear exactly which Greek manuscripts reflect the "Old Greek" version, and which have been harmonized with the proto-Masoretic texts.

Nowadays, we have modern critical editions that attempt to reconstruct the earliest form of each text based on this limited and often distorted manuscript evidence. We're faced with similar puzzles when evaluating the New Testament's use of Jewish Scripture. Renowned Hebrew Bible scholar, Emanuel Tov, affirms that most Scripture references in the New Testament come from the "Old Greek" version. However, some quotations (especially in Paul and the Gospel of Matthew) seem to contain proto-Masoretic influence, leading some scholars to theorize that they come directly from Hebrew.

However, Tov posits that these readings are more likely derived from Greek intermediary translations like the "Kaige" revision. If you're still confused by it all, don't worry. We'll release a lot more content digging deeper into all of these fascinating topics to demystify the history of the Bible.

Deuteronomy 32 in Cross Bible

Let's shift gears, and dig into the Bible itself. We’ll examine a key example from the “Song of Moses” in Deuteronomy using the Cross Bible prototype. What you're about to see isn't available yet on the website. And we may not be able to roll out all of these features at once. This is just a sneak peek at what we're working on. From the Home screen, we're going to select the book of Deuteronomy chapter 32. Let's select the American Standard Version and jump to that chapter.

Now let's add one other version for side-by-side comparison: Brenton's English translation of the Septuagint. So, we have a Masoretic version on the left and a Septuagint version on the right. If we scroll down to verse 8, we'll find a well-known textual variant that brings up an interesting question: What did the earliest version of the Hebrew text say here?

Did it say that God set boundaries for the people according to the number of the "children of Israel" (who were human beings)? Or, did it say, "according to the number of the children of God" (who were angelic beings)? Let's open up our popover tool and check the Textual Apparatus tab to see what it reveals.

Here we see the Hebrew Masoretic Text, "children of Israel," contrasted against the Old Greek, "angels of God," which is corroborated by the Dead Sea Scrolls, "children of God." Since Cross Bible is designed to unlock the Bible's built-in commentary, it features prominent 'cross reference' flags on this verse. One flag is marked "OT-OT," pointing from Deuteronomy back to Genesis 11:8. The other flag is marked "OT-NT," pointing forward to Acts 17:26.

We do have the option to jump back and forth to the cross references using hyperlinks. But Cross Bible is designed to allow you to stay anchored in the current context, which optimizes the Bible study experience. And you can also make highlights and take notes for future reference, all within this handy window. I'll link some additional scholarship on Deuteronomy 32:8 in the description, so you can dig even deeper into that verse.

Now let's scroll down to an even more striking example right here in Deuteronomy 32, verse 43. Here you'll note right away that the English translation of the Greek Old Testament is much longer than any translation based on the traditional Masoretic Text. Let's highlight this key reference to "the sons of God," similar to what we observed in verse 8. Our handy cross reference flag points us to a similar verse in Psalm 97:7, which also refers to "angels," translated from the Masoretic Text as lowercase "gods."

Here we also have an OT-NT Cross Reference flag pointing us to the New Testament, where we see an echo of this same Greek version quoted by the author of Hebrews 1:6 - "let all the angels of God worship him." Let's dig even deeper into this example with this table that shows an English reconstruction (by Emanuel Tov) of the three key versions of the passage, where the Hebrew manuscript from Qumran cave 4 is very close to the Septuagint.

The table highlights that the traditional Hebrew Masoretic Text is missing two key poetic lines, lacking references to "angels of God" or "sons of God." Here the evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls clearly validates the authenticity and reliability of the Greek Old Testament. So, go look this up in your favorite English Bible translations. If you do that, what are you likely to find?

Well, here's a quick survey of the verses we just reviewed, as published in 10 popular English Bibles. In Deuteronomy 32:8, about half of them translate the phrase "sons of Israel" straight from the Masoretic Text, even though most scholars question the accuracy of that reading. Thankfully, most of them alert readers about this textual variant in the footnotes, for those who bother to read them.

But when it comes to the longer reading of verse 43, Bible publishers are still very reluctant to break with the traditional Hebrew text, which, as we observed earlier, is potentially missing two whole lines here. And some of these Bibles that include footnotes about verse 8 are oddly silent about verse 43, even though the evidence is stacked in favor of the longer reading.

One important point should be made very clear. There are plenty of valid reasons why modern Bible publishers favor the traditional Masoretic Text as the basis for translations. After all, the Hebrew Bible is the cornerstone of modern Judaism. Even though many scholars are challenging the pervasive bias for the Masoretic Text, it's still regarded as highly reliable in most circumstances. But there are exceptions, like the ones we've just reviewed.

Holistic Bible Study

This is why we are developing a tool to facilitate a holistic and eclectic approach to Bible study that brings to bear resources from the Greek Old Testament, especially when studying cross-references in the New Testament that explicitly cite that specific form of the text.

This is a major part of our mission at Cross Bible. We aim to shed light on the rich textual history of early Christianity and Judaism by providing users with easy access to these valuable resources. So, if other Bible study resources aren't giving you the answers you're looking for, Cross Bible will address that problem head-on.

Stay tuned for our next video, where we'll shift our focus onto the New Testament portion of our Timeline of the Bible. Don't forget to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and visit crossbible.com for more information. If you'd like to support our mission financially, all of the proceeds will help us roll out our software even faster. Thank you for watching.