#lxx

Completa

Minhas metáforas não são devidamente entendidas

Was the Septuagint Destroyed When the Library of Alexandria Was Burnt Down in 48 BC?

By Author Eli Kittim 🎓

The Argument

Some people (typically Jewish apologists) claim that the Septuagint doesn’t exist because it was destroyed when the Library of Alexandria was burnt down in 48 BC.

This conclusion, however, is both textually misleading & historically erroneous.

First

The Alexandrian Library and its collection were not entirely destroyed. We have evidence that there was only partial damage and that many of its works survived. According to Wiki:

The Library, or part of its collection, was

accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during

his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how

much was actually destroyed and it seems

to have either survived or been rebuilt

shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo

mentions having visited the Mouseion in

around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly

output of Didymus Chalcenterus in

Alexandria from this period indicates that

he had access to at least some of the

Library's resources.

Second

The Septuagint had already been written and disseminated among the diaspora since the 3rd century BC, and so many of its extant copies were not housed in the Library of Alexandria per se.

Third

Textual Criticism confirms that the New Testament authors used the Septuagint predominantly and quoted extensively from it. If the Septuagint didn’t exist, where did the New Testament authors copy from? And how do you explain the fact that the New Testament and the Septuagint often have identical wording in their agreements?

Fourth

The Dead Sea Scrolls also demonstrate that the Septuagint was far more accurate than the 10th-century-AD Masoretic text. See, for example, the textual controversy surrounding Deuteronomy 32:8. Both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint have “sons of God.” The Masoretic text is demonstrably inaccurate because it has “sons of Israel,” a later redaction. Israel didn’t even exist at that time!

Fifth

Emanuel Tov, a leading authority on the Septuagint who has explained the various textual families (or text-types) of the Old Testament, never once mentioned that we lost the Septuagint, or that it was destroyed, or that it was no longer in circulation. On the contrary, he claims that it continued to be in use during the Christian period and that it is much more older than the 10th-century-AD Masoretic text, which the Jews call the “Hebrew Bible.”

Sixth

If the Septuagint was completely destroyed, as some have erroneously suggested, from where were the later revisionists and translators copying from? We have historical evidence that they were, in fact, copying from the Septuagint itself. Wiki writes:

Theodotion … was a Hellenistic Jewish

scholar, … who in c. 150 CE translated the

Hebrew Bible into Greek. … Whether he was

revising the Septuagint, or was working

from Hebrew manuscripts that represented

a parallel tradition that has not survived, is

debated.

So there’s evidence to suggest that the Theodotion version is a possible *revision* of the Septuagint. This demonstrates that the Septuagint existed in the second century AD! Otherwise, where was Theodotion copying from if the Septuagint didn’t exist?

Seventh

The great work of Origen, Hexapla, compiled sometime before 240 AD, is further proof that the Septuagint was still in use in the 3rd century AD! Wikipedia notes the following:

Hexapla … is the term for a critical edition

of the Hebrew Bible in six versions, four of

them translated into Greek, preserved only

in fragments. It was an immense and

complex word-for-word comparison of the

original Hebrew Scriptures with the Greek

Septuagint translation and with other Greek

translations.

Encyclopedia Britannica adds:

In his Hexapla (“Sixfold”), he [Origen]

presented in parallel vertical columns the

Hebrew text, the same in Greek letters, and

the versions of Aquila, Symmachus, the

Septuagint, and Theodotion, in that order.

Eighth

Besides Origen’s Hexapla, we also have extant copies of the Septuagint. According to wiki:

Relatively-complete manuscripts of the

Septuagint postdate the Hexaplar

recension, and include the fourth-century-

CE Codex Vaticanus and the fifth-century

Codex Alexandrinus. These are the oldest-

surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of

the Old Testament in any language; the

oldest extant complete Hebrew texts date

to about 600 years later, from the first half

of the 10th century.

Ninth

There’s also historical and literary evidence that the Greek Septuagint was in wide use during the Christian period and beyond. Wiki says:

Greek scriptures were in wide use during

the Second Temple period, because few

people could read Hebrew at that time. The

text of the Greek Old Testament is quoted

more often than the original Hebrew Bible

text in the Greek New Testament

(particularly the Pauline epistles) by the

Apostolic Fathers, and later by the Greek

Church Fathers.

Tenth

February 14th

Apink - Dilemma

Epik High feat. Younha - Gray so Gray

LXX - Moody Blues

Rocking Doll - Heart Rider

Taeyeon (SNSD) - INVU

Tiger Eats Toast feat. Hyun Jihoon - Movie Star

Cho Eun Woo - Fantasy

15th

Kim Jeong_uk - Don’t forget me

Devita - Bonnie & Clyde

Han Seung Yun - Lovender

Treasure - JIKJIN

Te.O - Bomb

16th

Rumble-G - Every Other

YongYong x Han Yo Han - Dying Every Second

Wonho - Eye On You

So Eun - 헤어지자는 한마디

Jeong GaYi - Stay with you

Cho Hyung Woo - Be My Guest

17th

JWiiver - Jtrap ~ Debut

Suzy - Satellite

The Stray - Night

Vapo feat. M1NU - Sirius

Owler feat. Austn - Falling

18th

Kim Hyo-Min - The Reason

Phil Yoon - Pray On A Rope

By Me - My Star

19th

Ha Yea Song - Winter Rain

Jeong Ui Man - From Now On

20th

Kim Pureum - Dumb Goggles

Jero - Weekend

lxx icons

reblog if you save!

1) “Hebrew has been constantly spoken since antiquity.”

Hebrew was moribund during the Second Temple period and went extinct after the Bar Kokhba revolt during the third century. From then until the 1800s, there existed a “Medieval Hebrew” used almost exclusively by Jewish literati, none of whom spoke it natively. This was the basis of Modern Hebrew which was invented by Eliezar Ben-Yehuda, operating on his knowledge of medieval Hebrew as a second language. Even people who speak modern Hebrew as a native language are working on the basis of at best second-hand knowledge 1600 years after the language went extinct.

2) “Most Christian translations of the Tanakh use the Vulgate and/or Septuagint.”

During the Reformation, Martin Luther (before he became a vitriolic antisemite) used a version of the Tanakh compiled by Jacob ben Chaim, itself a compilation of Masoretic manuscripts. Protestant Bibles have primarily used Masoretic sources for translations of the Tanakh ever since, only rarely using the Septuagint (and even more rarely Targumim, and still more rarely the Vulgate) for Hebrew words of uncertain meaning. For the record, Jewish translations of the Tanakh do this too. The JPS Tanakh from 1985 translates hashmal as “amber” because the Septuagint calls it elektron. Ben-Yehuda repurposed the same word to mean “electricity” in Modern Hebrew for the exact same reason.

3) “Christians have altered the Tanakh for political reasons.”

Arguments like these open the door to arguments such as the one put forward by Israel Finkelstein, et. al. in the paper “Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah” that the ban on pork in the Torah was a post-Exilic addition made to distinguish the people of Judah from the people of the northern kingdom of Israel. Do not throw stones in glass houses.

4) “Jews have a better access to the original meaning of Hebrew simply for being Jewish.”

Language knowledge is not genetic. Jewish knowledge of ancient Hebrew and Christian knowledge of ancient Hebrew are both primarily dependent on the work of the Masoretes. We are working from the exact same texts. Of course there are differences in how Jews and Christians interpret the Tanakh, but since everyone has had to contend with ancient Hebrew as a second language (including native speakers of modern Hebrew), the Jewish interpretation is not innately superior.

5) “Speakers of modern Hebrew can read the Tanakh without difficulty.”

Tell that to Avraham Ahuvya, who is currently translating the Tanakh into modern Hebrew, or Ghil’had Zuckerman, a trained linguist who was born in Israel, speaks modern Hebrew, and thinks Ahuvya’s translation is necessary.

5) “Christian scholarship neglects the Dead Sea Scrolls.”