What Is the Septuagint?

Apostolic Life in the 21st Century

David K. Bernard

United Pentecostal Church International, Christianity, Apostolic Pentecostal, Religion & Spirituality, Oneness Pentecostal, Theology, David K. Bernard, Upci

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

What is the Septuagint, and how did it help shape the Bible we read today? In this episode of Apostolic Life in the 21st Century, Dr. David K. Bernard explains the origins of the Septuagint—the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament—and explores its lasting influence on Christianity. He discusses how the Septuagint became the Bible of many Greek-speaking Jews, how it shaped the language and quotations of the New Testament, and why it continues to play an important role in bibli...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dr. McGart, anybody who spent any time at all reading Christian books or listening to sermons
0:11.2	or exploring theological websites has probably stumbled across a reference to something known as
0:16.8	the Septuagint. It comes up frequently enough that it certainly matters because people are
0:22.0	always citing that or making references to it, but I think there's probably a lot of people that
0:25.8	don't really know what that term means, what that is referring to. So can you tell us today,
0:31.3	what is the Septuagint, when did it originate, and why does it matter to Christian thought?
0:36.8	The Septuagint, which by the way is often abbreviated by the Roman numerals LXX which means 70.
0:45.7	And its name comes from the word sept also means seven.
0:50.4	So its name comes from the legend.
0:53.5	It may be true, but we don't have no way of knowing for sure, that 70 translators, or sometimes 72 translators were the originators of it.
1:04.6	But the Septuagint is a translation of the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, from Hebrew into Greek. And it was made
1:13.7	in the third to second centuries BC. So why that's important is at the time of Christ then,
1:22.0	the Septuagint would have been the primary translation of the Bible, their Bible, the Old Testament, for Greek-speaking people.
1:30.4	Now, in New Testament times, the rabbis studied Hebrew, so they would have read the Old Testament
1:36.8	in the original Hebrew, and presumably Jesus and the apostles did as well.
1:40.4	But the average people in Palestine or Israel no longer spoke Hebrew in the everyday life.
1:47.0	They had been in the Babylonian captivity and so they came back with the language of the Babylon Empire, which is Aramaic.
1:53.0	So all the scholars seem to agree that Jesus in his everyday life would have spoken Aramaic.
1:58.0	So he would have known Hebrew, which is a scholarly
2:01.3	language, religious language, the language of scripture, so he could study the Bible,
2:05.3	but he would have spoken Aramaic, which is related to Hebrew. But then beyond Israel, the larger
2:12.1	world of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Roman Empire, of course, the Romans spoke Latin, but the
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