Codex Vaticanus and the Septuagint

This is one of the most important books in existence — the Codex Vaticanus. Dating to the fourth century, it is one of the earliest and most complete manuscripts of the Bible. But whereas its fame resides mostly in the history of Christianity (many scholars translating the New Testament rely on it), it has a special interest to me in what it shows about Ancient Judaism.

The entire manuscript is in Greek, which of course was the OG language of the New Testament. However, the portion of the Codex Vaticanus that applies to Judaism is also in Greek: obviously not the original language of the Hebrew Bible (which in Christianity is the Old Testament). However, this Greek version of the Hebrew Bible was super important, and more widely used by Jewish people at some points than was the Hebrew.

Called the Septuagint — which is a really phenomenal name IMHO — the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible was the first major translation of a religious text to another language. And the need for it came from the legacy of Alexander the Great’s expansion into the eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and parts further east: many Jews eventually could read the Greek of Alexander’s Hellenistic legacy more than they could Hebrew. A document from the 3rd or 2nd century CE (the Letter of Aristeas to Philoctetes) claims that the Septuagint was written at the behest of the Pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (d 247 BCE), who aimed to have every known book of the world translated.

The document goes on to claim that eventually 72 translators (two from each of the twelve tribes of Israel) gathered at a location near the Lighthouse of Pharos, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and had just been completed. There they sat translating in seclusion for 72 days until they had finished their task — the Septuagint refers to “seventy” in Latin. (I don’t know how the missing two got left off).

Indeed, the story is pseudo-legendary, even if Ptolemy did commission the Greek translation. Centuries later, when Christians assembled their own Bible, it was the Septuagint they first used as the Old Testament rather than the Hebrew.