The Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint because it’s the Old Testament the Apostles used. Simple as that.
When Christ and the disciples quoted Scripture, they quoted it in Greek. When St. Paul wrote to the churches, he quoted the Greek Old Testament. The New Testament is full of quotations from the Septuagint, not the Hebrew text that Protestants translate from today. For Orthodox Christians, this isn’t a minor detail, it’s about continuity with the Apostolic Church.
What Is the Septuagint?
The Septuagint (we abbreviate it LXX) is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Jewish scholars in Alexandria started translating it around 250 BC for Greek-speaking Jews who’d lost their Hebrew. By the time of Christ, it was the Bible for most Jews outside Palestine.
The early Church inherited it. Greek was the common language of the Roman Empire, and the Septuagint was the Bible Christians used from the beginning. When you read the Church Fathers, St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Athanasius, they’re quoting the Septuagint. When the liturgy developed, it drew from the Septuagint. The text is woven into Orthodox worship in ways most people don’t notice until someone points it out.
Why Not the Hebrew?
Here’s where it gets interesting for folks coming from Protestant backgrounds. Most modern Bibles translate the Old Testament from the Masoretic Text, a Hebrew version standardized by Jewish scholars between the 7th and 10th centuries AD. That’s a thousand years after Christ.
The Septuagint reflects an older Hebrew tradition. Sometimes the Greek translators had access to Hebrew manuscripts that differ from what later became the Masoretic standard. Sometimes the differences are minor. Sometimes they’re not.
Take Isaiah 7:14, the prophecy about the virgin birth. The Septuagint says “virgin” (parthenos). The Hebrew word in the Masoretic Text is almah, which can mean “young woman” or “virgin”, it’s less specific. St. Matthew quotes the Septuagint version when he tells us about Mary. The Apostles saw the Septuagint as Scripture, and so do we.
The Septuagint also includes books that Protestants call the Apocrypha and Catholics call Deuterocanonical. We just call them Scripture. Books like Wisdom, Tobit, and the Maccabees. They’re in the Septuagint, they were in the early Church’s Bible, and they’ve always been part of Orthodox worship.
Living in the Church’s Tradition
For Orthodox Christians, Scripture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It lives in the Church. We don’t approach the Bible as individuals trying to figure out what it means on our own. We receive it as the Church has always received it, read it as the Church has always read it, and hear it in the context of liturgy where it’s always been proclaimed.
That’s why the Septuagint matters. It’s not just that it’s older or that the Apostles used it (though both are true). It’s that this is the text the Church has prayed with, sung from, and been formed by for two thousand years. When we hear Psalm 50 at Orthros or listen to Isaiah at Vespers, we’re hearing the same words in the same language that Christians heard in Antioch and Constantinople and Alexandria in the fourth century.
The Antiochian Archdiocese sponsored the Orthodox Study Bible partly to give English speakers access to the Septuagint. If you pick up a copy at St. Michael’s bookstore, you’ll see the Old Testament translated from Greek, not Hebrew. It reads differently in places. Some prophecies are clearer. Some passages make more sense of how the New Testament quotes them.
What This Means for You
If you’re used to a Protestant Bible, don’t panic when you notice differences. You’re not losing anything. You’re gaining the Bible as the early Church knew it.
You’ll find books you’ve never read before. You’ll see familiar verses with slightly different wording. You’ll notice that the Psalms are numbered differently (Psalm 23 in most Bibles is Psalm 22 in the Septuagint, which throws everyone off at first). These aren’t errors or corruptions. They’re signs that you’re entering a different stream of the same river, one that flows directly from the Apostles.
When you stand in church and hear the reader chant from the Psalter, you’re hearing the Septuagint. When the priest reads the Old Testament lesson at Vespers, that’s the Septuagint too. The text shapes our worship, and our worship shapes how we understand the text. They can’t be separated.
This is what we mean when we talk about Holy Tradition. Scripture didn’t drop from the sky as a leather-bound book. It grew up in the Church, was recognized by the Church, and has been preserved by the Church. The Septuagint is the form that growth took in the Greek-speaking world where Christianity first spread. We’re not being stubborn or archaic by using it. We’re being faithful to what was handed down.
If you want to go deeper, ask Fr. Michael about getting a copy of the Orthodox Study Bible. Read the introductions to the books you’ve never heard of. Let the Septuagint surprise you. You might find that the Old Testament makes more sense when you read it the way the Apostles did.
