Septuagint vs. Masoretic Text: Why Orthodox Christians Use a Different Old Testament
Scripture • Canon History • Orthodox Theology • The Old Testament Question
Septuagint vs. Masoretic Text: Why Orthodox Christians Use a Different Old Testament
Open a Protestant Old Testament and an Orthodox Old Testament side by side and you will not find the same book. The order is different. The wording is different in hundreds of places. Entire books are missing from one and present in the other. This is not a modern dispute. It is a question the Church has answered the same way for two thousand years — and the answer has everything to do with which Old Testament the apostles themselves were holding.
Septuagint vs. Masoretic Text — At a Glance
- The Septuagint (LXX)
- Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures • Begun c. 280 BC in Alexandria, Egypt
- The Masoretic Text
- Standardized Hebrew text • Finalized by Jewish scribes c. 600–1000 AD
- Who Uses the Septuagint
- The Eastern Orthodox Church, officially and exclusively, for its Old Testament
- Who Uses the Masoretic Text
- Protestant Bibles • Most Catholic Old Testaments translated after the Reformation
- Books Included Only in the Septuagint
- Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees, additions to Esther and Daniel
- New Testament Quotations
- The majority of Old Testament quotes in the New Testament match the Septuagint’s Greek wording
- Dead Sea Scrolls Evidence
- Pre-Christian Hebrew fragments found at Qumran agree with the Septuagint against the later Masoretic readings in multiple places
- Best English Translation of the LXX
- Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton’s 1851 translation, still the standard reference today
- Best Study Bible Using the LXX
- The Orthodox Study Bible (Thomas Nelson) — Old Testament translated directly from the Septuagint
Two Old Testaments, One Church Question
Walk into a Protestant Bible study and ask someone to read the Book of Daniel aloud, then walk into an Orthodox parish and ask the same thing. You will not hear the same text. The Orthodox Daniel includes the Prayer of Azariah, the Song of the Three Young Men, and the stories of Susanna and Bel and the Dragon. The Protestant Daniel does not. Ask for the Book of Esther and the difference repeats: the Orthodox text is roughly a sixth longer, with material that gives God's name explicit mention in a book the Hebrew version pointedly never mentions Him by name at all.
This is not a translation quirk. It is the visible surface of two different underlying Old Testaments, transmitted through two different ancient communities, and the Orthodox Church has never treated this as a minor footnote. It has held, consistently, since before there was a New Testament canon to compare it to, that its Old Testament — the Septuagint — is the correct one, and that the later Hebrew standardization adopted by the Reformers is not simply an alternate translation choice but a different and in places inferior textual tradition.
Understanding why requires going back to Alexandria, Egypt, nearly three centuries before Christ was born.
What Is the Septuagint?
The Septuagint, commonly abbreviated LXX after the Roman numeral for seventy, takes its name from an ancient account claiming seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars were commissioned to translate the Hebrew Torah into Greek for the great library of Alexandria. Whatever the precise historical details of that account, the translation project itself is well documented: beginning around 280 BC and continuing over roughly the next century, the entire Hebrew Scriptures were rendered into Koine Greek, the common trade language of the eastern Mediterranean world that Alexander the Great's conquests had spread from Egypt to Persia.
This was not a marginal project undertaken by a fringe community. By the time of Christ, the Jewish diaspora across the Greek-speaking world vastly outnumbered the Hebrew-speaking population of Judea itself, and for most of those Jews, the Septuagint was simply the Bible. It is the version Philo of Alexandria quotes. It is the version the historian Josephus relies on. It is, overwhelmingly, the version the writers of the New Testament reach for when they quote the Old Testament — a point so significant it deserves its own section below.
Why Alexandria, and Why It Matters
Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the ancient world, home to the great Library and a massive, well-established Jewish community that had largely lost fluency in Hebrew after generations of life under Greek rule. The Septuagint was not an act of theological innovation. It was a practical necessity, produced by Jewish scholars, for a Jewish audience, centuries before Christianity existed as a distinct religion. That detail matters enormously for the canon debate: the Septuagint cannot be dismissed as a "Christian" text invented to support later doctrine, because it predates Christianity by nearly three hundred years.
What Is the Masoretic Text?
The Masoretic Text is the standardized Hebrew text of the Old Testament that most modern Bibles ultimately rely on for their Hebrew-to-English Old Testament translations. It was produced not in the time of Christ but centuries afterward, by groups of Jewish scribes called the Masoretes, working primarily between the seventh and tenth centuries after Christ in Tiberias and Babylon. Their achievement was considerable: they added vowel pointing to a previously consonant-only Hebrew text, standardized spelling and pronunciation, and produced the carefully preserved manuscript tradition — most famously the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex — that underlies nearly every Hebrew Bible printed since.
The difficulty the Orthodox Church identifies is not the Masoretes' scholarly care, which was genuinely meticulous. It is the historical context in which their standardization occurred. By the time the Masoretic tradition was being fixed in writing, Judaism and Christianity had been bitterly divided for centuries, and rabbinic Judaism was actively engaged in distancing itself from the Greek-speaking, Septuagint-using Christian world that had, from a rabbinic point of view, misappropriated the Hebrew Scriptures. Several Old Testament passages that Christians had long cited as messianic prophecy fulfilled in Christ read differently, and less messianically, in the Masoretic tradition than they do in the older Septuagint.
The Most-Cited Example: Isaiah 7:14
The Septuagint renders the famous Isaiah prophecy using the Greek word parthenos, meaning virgin, which Matthew's Gospel quotes directly: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive." The Masoretic Hebrew uses almah, a word that can mean virgin but more commonly simply means young woman. This is not a small translation nuance. It is precisely the kind of divergence Orthodox theologians point to as evidence that the later Hebrew standardization reflects, whether deliberately or simply through natural textual drift in a community no longer reading the text christologically, a different interpretive trajectory than the one the apostles inherited.
Which One Did the Apostles Use?
This is, in many ways, the entire argument in a single question. Scholars who have done the painstaking work of comparing every Old Testament quotation in the New Testament against both the Septuagint and the Hebrew tradition consistently find that the overwhelming majority of New Testament citations follow the Septuagint's Greek wording, not the Hebrew text that would later become standardized as Masoretic. Paul, writing to Greek-speaking congregations across the Roman world, quotes the Septuagint. The author of Hebrews quotes the Septuagint, including, notably, language from Psalm 40 that exists in the Greek but does not match the Hebrew as precisely. Even the Gospel writers, composing in Greek for audiences scattered across the Mediterranean, reach for Septuagint phrasing again and again.
The Orthodox argument follows directly from this evidence: if the apostles, taught by Christ Himself and writing under the inspiration the Church believes was given to them, consistently quoted the Septuagint as authoritative Scripture, then the Septuagint is the Old Testament the Church received from the apostolic age. To set it aside in favor of a Hebrew standardization fixed centuries later, by a community no longer in communion with the apostolic Church and actively contesting Christian readings of the prophets, is to substitute a later text for the one Christ and His apostles actually used and authorized.
The Missing Books: Tobit, Maccabees, and the Deuterocanon
The Septuagint contains a number of books and additional passages that the Masoretic Text does not include at all. These are generally called the Deuterocanonical books, meaning "second canon," though Orthodox usage and Catholic usage of that term differ slightly in which books are included and how they are categorized. The core list includes Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees, along with the longer versions of Esther and Daniel mentioned earlier.
These books were not Christian inventions added to inflate the canon. They existed in Greek, were read and cited by first-century Jews across the diaspora, and were part of the Scripture inherited and used by the early Church without controversy for centuries. It was only with the Reformation, and the Reformers' decision to follow the Hebrew Masoretic canon over the Greek Septuagint canon, that these books were set aside in Protestant Bibles as merely useful but non-canonical "Apocrypha." The Orthodox Church, along with the Catholic Church in its own canon, never made that move, and Orthodox Bibles continue to include them as fully canonical Scripture to this day.
A Note on the Catholic Canon
It is worth correcting a common misconception here. Many people assume the Catholic biblical canon was set at the Council of Trent in 1546, in direct response to the Reformation. In fact, the Catholic canon, including the Deuterocanonical books, had already been formally established more than a thousand years earlier, at the Council of Rome in 382 AD under Pope Damasus I. Trent reaffirmed an already-settled canon in response to Protestant rejection of it; it did not create that canon from scratch. The Orthodox East, working from its own conciliar tradition and the Septuagint directly, arrived at substantially the same Old Testament canon through an independent and equally ancient path.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Surprise
For most of Christian history, the strongest objection to the Septuagint's antiquity was simple: it is a translation, and translations are inherently secondary to the original Hebrew. That objection took a serious hit in the mid-twentieth century with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran.
Among the thousands of fragments recovered, scholars found Hebrew manuscripts of Old Testament books that predate Christ by one to two centuries — far older than any manuscript underlying the Masoretic tradition. Crucially, in a number of passages, these ancient pre-Christian Hebrew fragments agree with the Septuagint's readings against the later Masoretic Text. The Book of Jeremiah is the clearest case: the Septuagint's version is significantly shorter than the Masoretic version, and for over a millennium this was assumed to mean the Greek translators had simply abridged the text. Then Qumran fragments of Jeremiah turned up in Hebrew that matched the shorter Septuagint structure, not the longer Masoretic one. The implication was unavoidable: the Septuagint had not abridged anything. It had translated a genuinely older and different Hebrew text, one that the Masoretic tradition had later expanded.
This single discovery reframed the entire conversation. The Septuagint was no longer a translation of uncertain fidelity to "the" Hebrew text. It was, in at least some cases, a faithful witness to an older Hebrew text that the Masoretic tradition itself had departed from.
Why the Masoretic Text Came Later — and Why That Matters
None of this is meant to suggest the Masoretes acted in bad faith or that their work lacks scholarly value. The Masoretic tradition is a monumental achievement of textual preservation, and even Orthodox scholars consult it. The point the Orthodox Church makes is narrower and more specific: the Masoretic Text, as the standardized document we have today, did not exist in the form we now possess until long after the apostolic age, and its finalization occurred within a religious community that had, by that point, formally and permanently separated from the Church and from messianic readings of its own Scriptures.
A text finalized under those conditions is not disqualified from scholarly use. But it cannot simply be assumed to be more original or more reliable than the Septuagint merely because it is in Hebrew and the Septuagint is in Greek. Language of composition is not the same thing as textual priority, and the Dead Sea Scrolls evidence above demonstrates that point concretely rather than abstractly.
The Orthodox Church’s Position
The Eastern Orthodox Church has never wavered on this question. The Septuagint is, and has always been, the official Old Testament of Orthodox liturgy, Orthodox patristic commentary, and Orthodox Bible translation. This is not treated as one defensible option among several. It is treated as the inheritance of the apostolic Church, received continuously from the first century without the interruption or reconsideration that the Reformation introduced into the Western Christian world.
This explains why an Orthodox Christian picking up an English Bible needs to be deliberate about which edition they choose. Many widely available English Old Testaments, including most Protestant translations and several Catholic ones produced after Trent, are translated primarily from the Hebrew Masoretic Text rather than the Greek Septuagint, even when they include the Deuterocanonical books. An Orthodox Christian who wants an Old Testament that actually reflects the text the Church has read for two thousand years needs a Septuagint-based translation specifically — not simply a Bible that happens to include the right table of contents.
How to Actually Read the Septuagint in English
For an English-speaking reader, there are two practical starting points. The first is the Brenton translation, completed in 1851 and still the most widely used English rendering of the Septuagint nearly two centuries later. It is a straightforward, complete translation without extensive commentary, well suited to someone who wants the text itself.
The second is the Orthodox Study Bible, which translates its Old Testament directly from the Septuagint and pairs it with study notes, book introductions, and commentary drawn from Orthodox and patristic sources. For someone who wants both the correct underlying text and guided commentary on how the Church has historically read it, this is generally the better starting point.
If you are still deciding between formats, translations, and price points more broadly, our complete Orthodox Bible Buyer's Guide walks through every major option in detail, and our guide to the best Orthodox study Bibles for beginners narrows the field specifically for someone just starting out.
Complete Timeline
- c. 280–130 BC The Septuagint is translated from Hebrew into Greek in Alexandria, Egypt, over roughly a century and a half.
- 1st century AD The New Testament authors write in Greek and quote the Old Testament overwhelmingly according to the Septuagint's wording.
- 382 AD The Council of Rome under Pope Damasus I formally affirms the biblical canon, including the Deuterocanonical books drawn from the Septuagint tradition.
- c. 600–1000 AD Jewish scribes known as the Masoretes standardize the Hebrew Old Testament text, adding vowel pointing and fixing the manuscript tradition that becomes the Masoretic Text.
- 1546 AD The Council of Trent reaffirms the already-ancient Catholic canon in response to the Protestant Reformers' adoption of the Masoretic canon.
- 1672 AD The Synod of Jerusalem's Confession of Dositheus explicitly affirms the Septuagint's priority over the Hebrew text for the Orthodox Church.
- 1851 AD Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton publishes his English translation of the Septuagint, still the standard English reference edition today.
- 1947–1956 AD The Dead Sea Scrolls are discovered at Qumran, including pre-Christian Hebrew fragments that agree with Septuagint readings against the later Masoretic Text.
- 2008 AD The Orthodox Study Bible is published with a complete Old Testament translated directly from the Septuagint, the first major English study Bible to do so.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Old Testament the Apostles Held
Two thousand years before search engines and side-by-side Bible comparisons, the question of which Old Testament was authoritative had already been settled inside the Church — not by committee vote, but by the apostles' own use of Scripture. The Septuagint was the Bible Christ's apostles opened, quoted, and preached from. The Orthodox Church has never set it aside, and the manuscript evidence recovered from the Dead Sea in the twentieth century has only strengthened the case for why it never should.
If you want to hold that same Old Testament in your hands, start with the Brenton translation or the Orthodox Study Bible. Both are available below, and our full buyer's guide can help you choose the edition and format that's right for you.
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