Septuagint

The Septuagint is the earliest large-scale translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek and remains a foundational textual witness for both Jewish and Christian Bible history. Produced for Greek-speaking Jewish communities of the ancient Mediterranean world, it covers the Hebrew Bible, or more precisely the expanded Greek Old Testament canon, and was rendered from Hebrew and Aramaic source languages, resting on pre-Masoretic Hebrew textual forms as its base text. As a fresh translation tradition, its philosophy varied by book, ranging from the literal to the interpretive. Its most distinctive characteristic is that it was not the product of a single translation event: different books were translated at different times and with different techniques. Widely used in the early church, it shaped the wording of Old Testament citations in Christian writings and became the Old Testament of the Greek-speaking East, where its readings continue to inform textual scholarship.