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99-627: The Septuagint ( / ˈ s ɛ p tj u ə dʒ ɪ n t / SEP -tew-ə-jint ), sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy ( Ancient Greek : Ἡ μετάφρασις τῶν Ἑβδομήκοντα , romanized :  Hē metáphrasis tôn Hebdomḗkonta ), and often abbreviated as LXX , is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Hebrew . The full Greek title derives from

198-516: A critical apparatus with diacritical marks indicating to which version each line (Gr. στίχος) belonged. Perhaps the Hexapla was never copied in its entirety, but Origen's combined text was copied frequently (eventually without the editing marks) and the older uncombined text of the Septuagint was neglected. The combined text was the first major Christian recension of the Septuagint, often called

297-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

396-695: A Greek-English interlinear Septuagint. It includes the Greek books of the Hebrew canon (without the apocrypha) and the Greek New Testament; the whole Bible is numerically coded to a new version of the Strong numbering system created to add words not present in the original numbering by Strong. The edition is set in monotonic orthography . The version includes a Bible concordance and index. The Orthodox Study Bible , published in early 2008, features

495-525: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as

594-586: A future in which the twelve tribes of Israel are living in their land again. According to Joshua 13–19 , the Land of Israel was divided into twelve sections corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel. However, the tribes receiving land differed from the biblical tribes. The Tribe of Levi had no land appropriation but had six Cities of Refuge under their administration as well as the Temple in Jerusalem . There

693-861: A new translation of the Septuagint based on the Alfred Rahlfs' edition of the Greek text . Two additional major sources have been added: the 1851 Brenton translation and the New King James Version text in places where the translation matches the Hebrew Masoretic text. This edition includes the NKJV New Testament and extensive commentary from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. Nicholas King completed The Old Testament in four volumes and The Bible . Brenton's Septuagint, Restored Names Version (SRNV) has been published in two volumes. The Hebrew-names restoration, based on

792-476: A number of canonical and non-canonical psalms in the Dead Sea scroll 11QPs(a) (also known as 11Q5), a first-century-CE scroll discovered in 1956. The scroll contains two short Hebrew psalms, which scholars agree were the basis for Psalm 151. The canonical acceptance of these books varies by Christian tradition. It is unclear to what extent Alexandrian Jews accepted the authority of the Septuagint. Manuscripts of

891-498: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

990-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either

1089-435: A stronger Greek influence. The Septuagint may also clarify pronunciation of pre- Masoretic Hebrew; many proper nouns are spelled with Greek vowels in the translation, but contemporary Hebrew texts lacked vowel pointing . However, it is unlikely that all Biblical Hebrew sounds had precise Greek equivalents. The Septuagint does not consist of a single, unified corpus. Rather, it is a collection of ancient translations of

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1188-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

1287-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

1386-613: Is also found in the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud : King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: "Write for me the Torah of Moshe , your teacher". God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did. Philo of Alexandria writes that

1485-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

1584-721: Is found in Isaiah 7:14 , in which the Hebrew word עַלְמָה ‎ ( ‘almāh , which translates into English as "young woman") is translated into the Koine Greek as παρθένος ( parthenos , which translates into English as "virgin"). The Septuagint became synonymous with the Greek Old Testament, a Christian canon incorporating the books of the Hebrew canon with additional texts. Although the Catholic Church and

1683-641: Is identical in the Septuagint, Vulgate and the Masoretic Text, and Genesis 4:8 to the end of the chapter is the same. There is only one noticeable difference in that chapter, at 4:7: The differences between the Septuagint and the MT fall into four categories: The Biblical manuscripts found in Qumran , commonly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), have prompted comparisons of the texts associated with

1782-486: Is no evidence that the Septuagint included these additional books. These copies of the Septuagint include books known as anagignoskomena in Greek and in English as deuterocanon (derived from the Greek words for "second canon"), books not included in the modern Jewish canon. These books are estimated to have been written between 200 BCE and 50 CE. Among them are the first two books of Maccabees ; Tobit; Judith;

1881-434: Is widely known among all ancient peoples. Archaeology has found that many of these personal names of ancestors originally were the names of clans, tribes, localities, or nations. [...] if the names of the twelve tribes of Israel are those of mythological ancestors and not of historical persons, then many stories of the patriarchal and Mosaic age lose their historic validity. They may indeed partly reflect dim reminiscences of

1980-679: The Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about

2079-695: The Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran . Sirach , whose text in Hebrew was already known from the Cairo Geniza , has been found in two scrolls (2QSir or 2Q18, 11QPs_a or 11Q5) in Hebrew. Another Hebrew scroll of Sirach has been found in Masada (MasSir). Five fragments from the Book of Tobit have been found in Qumran: four written in Aramaic and one written in Hebrew (papyri 4Q, nos. 196-200). Psalm 151 appears with

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2178-767: The Eastern Orthodox Church include most of the books in the Septuagint in their canons, Protestant churches usually do not. After the Reformation , many Protestant Bibles began to follow the Jewish canon and exclude the additional texts (which came to be called the Apocrypha) as noncanonical. The Apocrypha are included under a separate heading in the King James Version of the Bible. All

2277-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek

2376-640: The Hexaplar recension . Two other major recensions were identified in the century following Origen by Jerome , who attributed these to Lucian (the Lucianic, or Antiochene, recension) and Hesychius (the Hesychian, or Alexandrian, recension). The oldest manuscripts of the Septuagint include 2nd-century-BCE fragments of Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Rahlfs nos. 801, 819, and 957) and 1st-century-BCE fragments of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and

2475-538: The Jews of Alexandria were likely to have been the writers of the Septuagint, but dismisses Aristeas' account as a pious fiction . Instead, he asserts that the real origin of the name "Septuagint" pertains to the fact that the earliest version was forwarded by the authors to the Jewish Sanhedrin at Alexandria for editing and approval. The Jews of Alexandria celebrated the translation with an annual festival on

2574-653: The Letter of Jeremiah , the Book of Odes , the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151 are included in some copies of the Septuagint. The Septuagint has been rejected as scriptural by mainstream Rabbinic Judaism for a couple of reasons. First, the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew source texts in many cases (particularly in the Book of Job ). Second, the translations appear at times to demonstrate an ignorance of Hebrew idiomatic usage. A particularly noteworthy example of this phenomenon

2673-717: The Letter of Jeremiah , which became chapter six of Baruch in the Vulgate ; the additions to Daniel ( The Prayer of Azarias , the Song of the Three Children , Susanna , and Bel and the Dragon ); the additions to Esther ; 1 Maccabees ; 2 Maccabees ; 3 Maccabees ; 4 Maccabees ; 1 Esdras ; Odes (including the Prayer of Manasseh ); the Psalms of Solomon , and Psalm 151 . Fragments of deuterocanonical books in Hebrew are among

2772-636: The MT seemed doubtful" Modern scholarship holds that the Septuagint was written from the 3rd through the 1st centuries BCE, but nearly all attempts at dating specific books (except for the Pentateuch, early- to mid-3rd century BCE) are tentative. Later Jewish revisions and recensions of the Greek against the Hebrew are well-attested. The best-known are Aquila (128 CE), Symmachus , and Theodotion. These three, to varying degrees, are more-literal renderings of their contemporary Hebrew scriptures compared to

2871-465: The Old Testament of his Vulgate from Hebrew rather than Greek. His choice was sharply criticized by Augustine , his contemporary. Although Jerome argued for the superiority of the Hebrew texts in correcting the Septuagint on philological and theological grounds, because he was accused of heresy he also acknowledged the Septuagint texts. Acceptance of Jerome's version increased, and it displaced

2970-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

3069-593: The Ptolemaic Kingdom , centred on the large community in Alexandria , probably in the early or middle part of the third century BCE. The remaining books were presumably translated in the 2nd century BCE. Some targums translating or paraphrasing the Bible into Aramaic were also made during the Second Temple period . Few people could speak and even fewer could read in the Hebrew language during

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3168-544: The Tanakh , along with other Jewish texts that are now commonly referred to as apocrypha . Importantly, the canon of the Hebrew Bible was evolving over the century or so in which the Septuagint was being written. Also, the texts were translated by many different people, in different locations, at different times, for different purposes, and often from different original Hebrew manuscripts. The Hebrew Bible , also called

3267-746: The Tanakh , has three parts: the Torah ("Law"), the Nevi'im ("Prophets"), and the Ketuvim ("Writings"). The Septuagint has four: law, history, poetry, and prophets. The books of the Apocrypha were inserted at appropriate locations. Extant copies of the Septuagint, which date from the 4th century CE, contain books and additions not present in the Hebrew Bible as established in the Jewish canon and are not uniform in their contents. According to some scholars, there

3366-626: The Tribe of Levi ) are descendants of a single Levite ancestor who came to Europe from the Middle East roughly 1,750 years ago. The growth of this specific lineage aligns with the expansion patterns seen in other founding groups of Ashkenazi Jews. This means that a relatively small number of original ancestors have had a large impact on the genetic makeup of today's Ashkenazi population. Attributed arms are Western European coats of arms given retrospectively to persons real or fictitious who died before

3465-627: The Twelve Minor Prophets ( Alfred Rahlfs nos. 802, 803, 805, 848, 942, and 943). 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

3564-578: The Twelve Tribes of Israel —from Jerusalem to Alexandria to translate the Tanakh from Biblical Hebrew into Koine Greek, for inclusion in his library . This narrative is found in the possibly pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas to his brother Philocrates, and is repeated by Philo of Alexandria , Josephus (in Antiquities of the Jews ), and by later sources (including Augustine of Hippo). It

3663-603: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between

3762-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

3861-560: The 19th century, however, historical criticism has examined the veracity of the historical account; whether the twelve tribes ever existed as they are described, the historicity of the eponymous ancestors, and even whether the earliest version of this tradition assumes the existence of twelve tribes. Biblical lists of tribes, not all of which number 12, include the following: Scholars such as Max Weber (in Ancient Judaism ) and Ronald M. Glassman (2017) concluded that there never

3960-475: The 2nd century BCE, and early manuscripts datable to the 2nd century BCE. After the Torah, other books were translated over the next two to three centuries. It is unclear which was translated when, or where; some may have been translated twice (into different versions), and then revised. The quality and style of the translators varied considerably from book to book, from a literal translation to paraphrasing to an interpretative style. The translation process of

4059-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

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4158-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

4257-412: The Bible, the twelve tribes of Israel are sons of a man called Jacob or Israel, as Edom or Esau is the brother of Jacob, and Ishmael and Isaac are the sons of Abraham . Elam and Ashur , names of two ancient nations, are sons of a man called Shem . Sidon , a Phoenician town, is the first-born of Canaan ; the lands of Egypt and Abyssinia are the sons of Ham . This kind of mythological geography

4356-623: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs,   Twelve tribes of Israel Jacob, later called Israel, was the second-born son of Isaac and Rebecca , the younger twin brother of Esau , and

4455-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for

4554-472: The English translation. Reflecting on those problems, American orientalist Robert W. Rogers (d. 1930) noted in 1921: "it is most unfortunate that Syria and Syrians ever came into the English versions. It should always be Aram and the Aramaeans". The first English translation (which excluded the apocrypha) was Charles Thomson's in 1808 , which was revised and enlarged by C. A. Muses in 1954 and published by

4653-669: The Falcon's Wing Press. The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English was translated by Lancelot Brenton in 1854. It is the traditional translation, and most of the time since its publication it has been the only one readily available. It has also been continually in print. The translation, based on the Codex Vaticanus , contains the Greek and English texts in parallel columns. It has an average of four footnoted, transliterated words per page, abbreviated Alex and GK . The Complete Apostles' Bible (translated by Paul W. Esposito)

4752-462: The Hebrew Bible (including the Septuagint). Emanuel Tov , editor of the translated scrolls, identifies five broad variants of DSS texts: The textual sources present a variety of readings; Bastiaan Van Elderen compares three variations of Deuteronomy 32:43, the Song of Moses : The text of all print editions is derived from the recensions of Origen, Lucian, or Hesychius: One of the main challenges, faced by translators during their work, emanated from

4851-405: The Hebrew Bible. In the Greek translation, the region of Aram was commonly labeled as "Syria", while Arameans were labeled as "Syrians". Such adoption and implementation of terms that were foreign ( exonymic ) had far-reaching influence on later terminology related to Arameans and their lands, since the same terminology was reflected in later Latin and other translations of the Septuagint, including

4950-463: The Hebrew text was, according to Irenaeus, interpreted by Theodotion and Aquila (Jewish converts ), as a "young woman" who would conceive. Again according to Irenaeus, the Ebionites used this to claim that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus. To him that was heresy facilitated by late anti-Christian alterations of the scripture in Hebrew, as evident by the older, pre-Christian Septuagint. Jerome broke with church tradition, translating most of

5049-479: The Hebrew text when it is unclear, corrupted, or ambiguous. According to the New Jerusalem Bible foreword, "Only when this (the Masoretic Text) presents insuperable difficulties have emendations or other versions, such as the [...] LXX, been used." The translator's preface to the New International Version reads, "The translators also consulted the more important early versions (including) the Septuagint [...] Readings from these versions were occasionally followed where

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5148-489: The Hebrews' tribal past, but in their specific detail they are fiction." Norman Gottwald argued that the division into twelve tribes originated as an administrative scheme under King David. Additionally, the Mesha Stele (carved c. 840 BCE) mentions Omri as King of Israel and also mentions "the men of Gad ". Recent studies of genetic markers within Jewish populations strongly suggest that modern Ashkenazi Levites ( Jewish males who claim patrilineal descent from

5247-403: The Old Greek (the original Septuagint). Modern scholars consider one (or more) of the three to be new Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible. Although much of Origen 's Hexapla (a six-version critical edition of the Hebrew Bible) is lost, several compilations of fragments are available. Origen kept a column for the Old Greek (the Septuagint), which included readings from all the Greek versions in

5346-402: The Second Temple period; Koine Greek and Aramaic were the most widely spoken languages at that time among the Jewish community. The Septuagint therefore satisfied a need in the Jewish community. The term "Septuagint" is derived from the Latin phrase Vetus Testamentum ex versione Septuaginta Interpretum ("The Old Testament from the version of the Seventy Translators"). This phrase in turn

5445-408: The Septuagint and from the Septuagint into other versions can be divided into several stages: the Greek text was produced within the social environment of Hellenistic Judaism , and completed by 132 BCE. With the spread of Early Christianity , this Septuagint in turn was rendered into Latin in a variety of versions and the latter, collectively known as the Vetus Latina , were also referred to as

5544-449: The Septuagint have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and were thought to have been in use among various Jewish sects at the time. Several factors led most Jews to abandon the Septuagint around the second century CE. The earliest gentile Christians used the Septuagint out of necessity, since it was the only Greek version of the Bible and most (if not all) of these early non- Jewish Christians could not read Hebrew. The association of

5643-440: The Septuagint initially in Alexandria but elsewhere as well. The Septuagint also formed the basis for the Slavonic , Syriac , Old Armenian , Old Georgian , and Coptic versions of the Christian Old Testament . The Septuagint is written in Koine Greek. Some sections contain Semiticisms , which are idioms and phrases based on Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Aramaic . Other books, such as Daniel and Proverbs , have

5742-441: The Septuagint was given to Ptolemy two days before the annual Tenth of Tevet fast. According to Aristobulus of Alexandria 's fragment 3, portions of the Law were translated from Hebrew into Greek long before the well-known Septuagint version. He stated that Plato and Pythagoras knew the Jewish Law and borrowed from it. In the preface to his 1844 translation of the Septuagint , Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton acknowledges that

5841-402: The Septuagint with a rival religion may have made it suspect in the eyes of the newer generation of Jews and Jewish scholars. Jews instead used Hebrew or Aramaic Targum manuscripts later compiled by the Masoretes and authoritative Aramaic translations, such as those of Onkelos and Rabbi Yonathan ben Uziel . Perhaps most significant for the Septuagint, as distinct from other Greek versions,

5940-411: The Septuagint's Old Latin translations . The Eastern Orthodox Church prefers to use the Septuagint as the basis for translating the Old Testament into other languages, and uses the untranslated Septuagint where Greek is the liturgical language. Critical translations of the Old Testament which use the Masoretic Text as their basis consult the Septuagint and other versions to reconstruct the meaning of

6039-410: The Septuagint. Matthew 2:23 is not present in current Masoretic tradition either; according to Jerome , however, it was in Isaiah 11:1 . The New Testament writers freely used the Greek translation when citing the Jewish scriptures (or quoting Jesus doing so), implying that Jesus, his apostles, and their followers considered it reliable. In the early Christian Church, the presumption that the Septuagint

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6138-416: The Septuagint. The Books of Chronicles , known collectively as Παραλειπομένων (Of Things Left Out) supplement Reigns. The Septuagint organizes the minor prophets in its twelve-part Book of Twelve, as does the Masoretic Text. Some ancient scriptures are found in the Septuagint, but not in the Hebrew Bible. The books are Tobit ; Judith ; the Wisdom of Solomon ; Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach ; Baruch and

6237-504: The Westminster Leningrad Codex, focuses on the restoration of the Divine Name and has extensive Hebrew and Greek footnotes. Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ),

6336-416: The Wisdom of Solomon; Sirach; Baruch (including the Letter of Jeremiah), and additions to Esther and Daniel. The Septuagint version of some books, such as Daniel and Esther , are longer than those in the Masoretic Text , which were affirmed as canonical in Rabbinic Judaism . The Septuagint Book of Jeremiah is shorter than the Masoretic Text. The Psalms of Solomon , 1 Esdras , 3 Maccabees , 4 Maccabees ,

6435-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

6534-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

6633-425: The beginning, middle, and end of this picture and the account of the conquest under Joshua has largely been abandoned. The Bible's depiction of the 'period of the Judges' is widely considered doubtful. The extent to which a united Kingdom of Israel ever existed is also a matter of ongoing dispute. Living in exile in the sixth century BC, the prophet Ezekiel has a vision for the restoration of Israel, of

6732-452: The books in Western Old Testament biblical canons are found in the Septuagint, although the order does not always coincide with the Western book order. The Septuagint order is evident in the earliest Christian Bibles, which were written during the fourth century. Some books which are set apart in the Masoretic Text are grouped together. The Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings are one four-part book entitled Βασιλειῶν ( Of Reigns ) in

6831-533: The city gates ( Ezekiel 48:30–35 & Revelation 21:12–13 ). In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , a patriarchal blessing usually contains a declaration of the lineage of the recipient of blessing in relation to the twelve tribes of Israel. The Quran (7th century CE) states that the people of Moses were split into twelve tribes. Surah 7 ( Al-A'raf ) verse 160 says: "We split them up into twelve tribal communities, and We revealed to Moses , when his people asked him for water, [saying], 'Strike

6930-420: The descendants of twelve sons of the biblical patriarch Jacob . Jacob also had at least one daughter, Dinah , whose descendants were not recognized as a tribe. The sons of Jacob were born in Padan-aram from different mothers, as follows: Deuteronomy 27:12–13 lists the twelve tribes: Jacob elevated the descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh (the two sons of Joseph and his Egyptian wife Asenath ) to

7029-563: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

7128-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under

7227-510: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at

7326-687: The eastern parts of the Roman Empire at the time and the language of the Greco-Roman Church, while Aramaic was the language of Syriac Christianity . The relationship between the apostolic use of the Septuagint and the Hebrew texts is complicated. Although the Septuagint seems to have been a major source for the Apostles , it is not the only one. St. Jerome offered, for example, Matthew 2:15 and 2:23 , John 19:37, John 7:38, and 1 Corinthians 2:9 as examples found in Hebrew texts but not in

7425-458: The first half of the 10th century. The 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus also partially survives, with many Old Testament texts. The Jewish (and, later, Christian) revisions and recensions are largely responsible for the divergence of the codices. The Codex Marchalianus is another notable manuscript. The text of the Septuagint is generally close to that of the Masoretes and Vulgate. Genesis 4:1–6

7524-523: The grandson of Abraham and Sarah . According to biblical texts, he was chosen by God to be the patriarch of the Israelite nation. From what is known of Jacob, he had two wives, sisters Leah and Rachel , and two concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah . The twelve sons form the basis for the twelve tribes of Israel, listed in the order from oldest to youngest: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin. Jacob

7623-572: The island of Pharos, where the Lighthouse of Alexandria stood—the location where the translation was said to have taken place. During the festival, a large gathering of Jews, along with some non-Jewish visitors, would assemble on the beach for a grand picnic. The 3rd century BCE is supported for the translation of the Pentateuch by a number of factors, including its Greek being representative of early Koine Greek, citations beginning as early as

7722-637: The land, within the context of folktales that had evolved over time." He goes on to argue that most of the tribal names are "not personal names, but the names of ethnic groups, geographical regions, and local deities. E.g. Benjamin , meaning "son of the south" (the location of its territory relative to Samaria ), or Asher , a Phoenician territory whose name may be an allusion to the goddess Asherah ." Historian Immanuel Lewy in Commentary mentions "the Biblical habit of representing clans as persons. In

7821-637: The need to implement appropriate Greek forms for various onomastic terms, used in the Hebrew Bible. Most onomastic terms (toponyms, anthroponyms) of the Hebrew Bible were rendered by corresponding Greek terms that were similar in form and sounding, with some notable exceptions. One of those exceptions was related to a specific group of onomastic terms for the region of Aram and ancient Arameans . Influenced by Greek onomastic terminology, translators decided to adopt Greek custom of using "Syrian" labels as designations for Arameans, their lands and language, thus abandoning endonymic (native) terms, that were used in

7920-492: The number of scholars was chosen by selecting six scholars from each of the twelve tribes of Israel . Caution is needed here regarding the accuracy of this statement by Philo of Alexandria , as it implies that the twelve tribes were still in existence during King Ptolemy's reign, and that the Ten Lost Tribes of the twelve tribes had not been forcibly resettled by Assyria almost 500 years previously. Although not all

8019-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

8118-408: The people of the ten tribes were scattered, many peoples of the ten tribes sought refuge in Jerusalem and survived, preserving a remnant of each tribe and their lineages. Jerusalem swelled to five times its prior population due to the influx of refugees. According to later rabbinic tradition (which considered the Greek translation as a distortion of sacred text and unsuitable for use in the synagogue),

8217-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

8316-417: The rock with your cane,' whereat twelve fountains gushed forth from it. Every tribe came to know its drinking-place. And We shaded them with clouds, and We sent down to them manna and quails: 'Eat of the good things We have provided you.' And they did not wrong Us, but they used to wrong [only] themselves." For thousands of years, Christians and Jews have accepted the history of the twelve tribes as fact. Since

8415-516: The status of full tribes in their own right due to Joseph receiving a double portion after Reuben lost his birth right because of his transgression with Bilhah. In the biblical narrative the period from the conquest of Canaan under the leadership of Joshua until the formation of the United Kingdom of Israel passed with the tribes forming a loose confederation, described in the Book of Judges . Modern scholarship has called into question

8514-425: The story recorded in the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates that "the laws of the Jews" were translated into the Greek language at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–247 BCE) by seventy-two Hebrew translators —six from each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel . Biblical scholars agree that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were translated from Biblical Hebrew into Koine Greek by Jews living in

8613-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

8712-467: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with

8811-421: The tribes originating as postdiction , as eponymous metaphor giving an aetiology of the connectedness of the tribe to others in the Israelite confederation. Translator Paul Davidson argued: "The stories of Jacob and his children, then, are not accounts of historical Bronze Age people. Rather, they tell us how much later Jews and Israelites understood themselves, their origins, and their relationship to

8910-481: The twelve tribes of Israel". The Epistle of James ( 1:1 ) addresses his audience as "the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad". The Book of Revelation ( 7:1–8 ) gives a list of the twelve tribes. However, the Tribe of Dan is omitted while Joseph is mentioned alongside Manasseh . In the vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem , the tribes' names (the names of the twelve sons of Jacob ) are written on

9009-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

9108-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in

9207-478: Was a fixed number of tribes. Instead, the idea that there were always twelve tribes should be regarded as part of the Israelite national founding myth : the number 12 was not a real number, but an ideal number, which had symbolic significance in Near Eastern cultures with duodecimal counting systems, from which, among other things, the modern 12-hour clock is derived. Biblical scholar Arthur Peake saw

9306-834: Was derived from the Ancient Greek : Ἡ μετάφρασις τῶν Ἑβδομήκοντα , romanized :  hē metáphrasis tôn hebdomḗkonta , lit.   'The Translation of the Seventy';. It was not until the time of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) that the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures was called by the Latin term Septuaginta . The Roman numeral LXX (seventy) is commonly used as an abbreviation, in addition to G {\displaystyle {\mathfrak {G}}} or G . According to tradition, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (the Greek Pharaoh of Egypt) sent seventy-two Hebrew translators —six from each of

9405-475: Was known to display favoritism among his children, particularly for Joseph and Benjamin, the sons of his favorite wife, Rachel, and so the tribes themselves were not treated equally in a divine sense. Joseph, despite being the second-youngest son, received double the inheritance of his brothers, treated as if he were the firstborn son instead of Reuben, and so his tribe was later split into two tribes, named after his sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. The Israelites were

9504-537: Was no land allotment for the Tribe of Joseph , but Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh , received their father's land portion. Thus the tribes receiving an allotment were: The twelve tribes of Israel are referred to in the New Testament . In the gospels of Matthew ( 19:28 ) and Luke ( 22:30 ), Jesus anticipates that in the Kingdom of God his disciples will "sit on [twelve] thrones, judging

9603-908: Was published in 2007. Using the Masoretic Text in the 23rd Psalm (and possibly elsewhere), it omits the apocrypha. A New English Translation of the Septuagint and the Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included Under that Title (NETS), an academic translation based on the New Revised Standard version (in turn based on the Masoretic Text) was published by the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies (IOSCS) in October 2007. The Apostolic Bible Polyglot , published in 2003, features

9702-405: Was that the Septuagint began to lose Jewish sanction after differences between it and contemporary Hebrew scriptures were discovered. Even Greek-speaking Jews tended to prefer other Jewish versions in Greek (such as the translation by Aquila ), which seemed to be more concordant with contemporary Hebrew texts. The Early Christian church used the Greek texts, since Greek was a lingua franca of

9801-490: Was translated by Jews before the time of Christ and that it lends itself more to a Christological interpretation than 2nd-century Hebrew texts in certain places was taken as evidence that "Jews" had changed the Hebrew text in a way that made it less Christological. Irenaeus writes about Isaiah 7:14 that the Septuagint clearly identifies a "virgin" (Greek παρθένος ; bethulah in Hebrew) who would conceive. The word almah in

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