Septuagint Influence

Overview

Septuagint influence denotes the formative role of Greek Jewish Scripture translations in Second Temple Judaism, the New Testament, early Christian theology, liturgy, and the later textual history of the Bible. The term points both to the Greek Pentateuch traditionally associated with Alexandria and to the wider corpus of Greek translations of Israel’s Scriptures that circulated in the Hellenistic world. As a vehicle for reading, teaching, prayer, and interpretation in Greek, the Septuagint shaped vocabulary, canon, and theological patterns available to Jewish and Christian authors.

Biblical shape

The story begins in the Hellenistic diaspora, where Hebrew Scripture was rendered into Koine Greek so that communities whose primary language was Greek could hear and study Torah and the Prophets. Greek Scripture then entered Jewish intellectual life—education, wisdom literature, apologetics, and liturgy—and bears witness to the pluriform textual situation of the Second Temple period. New Testament writers commonly quote and allude to Scripture in Greek forms that agree with the Septuagint or with Greek-scriptural idioms; these citations helped form christological readings, ecclesial identity, and missionary argument. Early Christians adopted the Greek Bible for preaching and worship even as Jewish readers produced revised Greek versions (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion) and the Hebrew tradition remained influential. Over time the Septuagint became the inherited Old Testament for many Greek-speaking churches, was embedded in liturgy (especially the Psalter), and became a primary witness for modern textual criticism alongside Hebrew manuscripts and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Key passages

• Deuteronomy 31:9–13 (public Torah reading as a prehistory to Greek translation)
• Nehemiah 8:1–8 (public reading and interpretation of Torah)
• Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:23 (Matthean citation follows Greek wording)
• Luke 24:44 (Jesus’ summary: “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms”)
• Acts 15:16–18 (use of Amos as cited in Greek forms)
• Romans 3:10–18 (Paul’s catena of scriptural texts in Greek idiom)
• Hebrews 10:5–10 (dependence on Greek Psalm forms)
• Psalm 40:6 and Hebrews 10:5 (illustrates divergence between Greek and Masoretic wording)
• Jeremiah 31:31–34 and Hebrews 8:8–13 (use of the Greek wording of Jeremiah on covenant)
• Psalm 110:1 LXX and Romans 10:13 (examples of Septuagintal vocabulary, e.g., kyrios)

Theological significance

Septuagint influence matters theologically in multiple, interconnected ways. First, translation furnished the Greek lexical resources—kyrios (Lord), christos (anointed), diathēkē (covenant/testament), nomos (law), ekklēsia (assembly)—through which early Christian authors articulated Christology, ecclesiology, soteriology, and covenantal theology. Second, the Septuagint functioned as Scripture in Greek-speaking communities and so shaped how the apostles and evangelists read Israel’s writings; many New Testament Christological and fulfillment claims are expressed via Greek-scriptural forms. Third, the existence of multiple Hebrew and Greek textual traditions reframes questions of canonical authority: Septuagintal readings are not simply errors or secondary paraphrases but witnesses to a pluriform Second Temple textual landscape that the early church encountered and inherited. Finally, because the Greek Bible undergirded liturgy and prayer in the East, its Psalter, lections, and diction continue to shape worship and devotional language.

The relation between Septuagint and Hebrew traditions is dialectical: sometimes the Greek translates a Hebrew text similar to the later Masoretic form; sometimes it reflects a different Hebrew Vorlage; sometimes it interprets as it translates; and sometimes its own Greek form becomes authoritative for readers. This complexity underlies why New Testament quotations sometimes differ from modern English Old Testaments that are based on the Masoretic Text.

Related Atlas concepts

• second-temple-judaism
• biblical-textual-criticism
• hellenistic-judaism
• history-of-biblical-interpretation
• septuagint-canon
• new-testament-use-of-the-old-testament
• greek-biblical-vocabulary
• old-greek-and