But that’s still a lot closer to the event than you and I are, in every way. The translators of the Septuagint were doing their work more than a thousand years after the golden calf incident of Exodus 32. You also turn to the Septuagint when it’s particularly useful to know what ancient Jews before Christ thought of a given passage-when you need to cut the distance between you and the event you’re reading about. Use the Septuagint when you need to cut the historical distance between you and the biblical event God’s authority isn’t stuck in Hebrew and Greek it flows through the languages of all the families of the earth. When Paul invoked the authoritative formula, “As it is written,” he found divine authority in the words of a translation-just as we do today with our Bible translations. Though there is (literally) one iota of difference between the two, 1 Corinthians 10:7 is a word-for-word LXX quotation: I’m not willing to offer a strict percentage and wasn’t able to locate one, but in my experience the majority of OT quotations in the NT are taken straight from the LXX. This is fairly obvious, but it’s particularly valuable to check the LXX when the New Testament quotes the Old Testament. Use the Septuagint when the New Testament quotes the Old Testament Let me suggest three guidelines for when to use the LXX. We will not be exhaustive here, however, but suggestive. But if you dutifully memorized this information from some class or some book, but have never used the Septuagint in your study of Scripture, this post is for you. The Lexham Bible Dictionary article would be a good place to start. If this is all new information to you, you’ll want to read more about the Septuagint (often abbreviated “LXX” because it was said to be the work of 72-later abbreviated to 70-translators) before trying to use it in biblical study. Instead of speaking of the Septuagint, it is better to think of it as “a general designation for the Greek tradition of the Bible” ( 2). And there were various revisions and subsequent (perhaps even competing?) Greek translations of various books.
Before the widespread use of the codex, collections of “books” were hard to establish. As the very helpful and accessible introduction in the T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint points out, it’s not perfectly clear which books belong in the Septuagint. It was also “the Bible of the apostolic church-the writers of the New Testament quote from it extensively” ( LBD).Ī title like “ The Septuagint” is a bit misleading, however. It was what Greek-speaking Jews like Jesus and Paul read (if they had access to it) and quoted and debated and obeyed-unless they also knew Hebrew, of course. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. But I suggest starting somewhere else, even to those who don’t read Greek or Hebrew: check the Septuagint. You could check the commentaries, of course, and you should. They mostly stick with the translation “play,” with a few going for “revelry.” That still doesn’t tell you what was so bad. Whatever the Israelites’ idolatrous play was, it was pretty bad.Ĭhecking the major English Bible translations doesn’t help a whole lot in this case, except to confirm the validity of the question. At the very least, the animal crackers were golden-calf-shaped, the pop was spiked, and the Scrabble games were for money.Īnd in the context of Exodus 32, which Paul quotes here, God tells Moses, up on the mountain, that the people have “corrupted themselves.” Moses descends to a “noise like war” and a kind of “dancing” that makes him so angry he shatters the tables of the ten commandments. Something about the eating, drinking, and playing was idolatrous.
In context, the eating, drinking, and playing are all explaining Paul’s word “idolaters.” So we know they weren’t eating animal crackers, drinking pop, and playing Scrabble. What’s so bad about eating, drinking, and, of all things, playing? I’ve puzzled over that word “play.” It seems a little out of place. Here’s a representative example:ĭo not be idolaters as some of them were as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.” (1 Corinthians 10:7 ESV) I’m always getting stopped by interesting little questions (and interesting big ones). I’m bad at reading the Bible quickly or in big chunks. Facebook Twitter Reddit Pinterest Email LinkedIn