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Now, however, it is believed that the Jews of Alexandria did the work entirely themselves, although their Greek Bible is still called the 'Septuagint' that is, 'The Scriptures of the Seventy' in memory of the old tradition. Gradually, as the years passed, the Greek language spread to other nations, until at last it became, as we have seen, the leading language of the world.
It got into the Greek Septuagint version of the Prophet made by Egyptian Jews before 150 B.C. It should read, "in the midst of the years," not "animals." "Ah!" cried Hyzlo, "in this as in important cardinal doctrines have the faithful been the slaves of the learned and unscrupulous pious forgers. Even the notorious Apollonius of Tyana imitated the miracles of Christ all of them.
II. Whether it may rightly be argued from the concordance of the Hebrew text with the Alexandrine Greek text and other ancient versions, that the titles prefixed to the Hebrew text are older than the version known as the Septuagint, and that therefore they have been derived if not from the authors themselves of the Psalms at least from the ancient Judaic tradition? ANSWER: In the affirmative.
We should not be at liberty to allege the Septuagint as any authority, if it happened to countenance our own views; and, consequently, we could not be called on to recognise the Septuagint in any case where it should happen to be against us. I make this preliminary caveat, as not caring whether the word aeonios does or does not occur in the Septuagint.
Those are but secondary questions, archaeological and critical, upon which we have a right to consult the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known by the name of the Septuagint. Suffer me to pause at this point for the sake of premising an explanation needful to the unlearned reader.
That wheresoever the words translated decree or decrees are found in the New Testament, thereby are denoted, laws, statutes, or decrees: as "Decrees of Cæsar," Acts xvii. 7: "A decree from Cæsar," Luke ii. 1: Moses' ceremonial law, "The hand-writing to ordinances," Col. ii. 14: "The law of commandments in ordinances," Eph. ii. 15: and this word is found used only in these five places in the whole New Testament: and the Septuagint interpreters often use the word in the Old Testament to this purpose; for laws, Dan. vi. 8; for decrees, Dan. ii. 13, and iii. 10, 29, and iv. 3, and vi. 9.
The Septuagint translation of the Bible was one answer to the lying accounts of Israel's early history concocted by anti-Semitic writers. As we have seen, the Alexandrian Jews began early to write histories and re-edit the Bible stories to the same purpose. And for some time their writings were mainly apologetic, designed, whatever their form, to serve a defensive purpose.
Her threat to the prophet has a certain audacity of frankness almost approaching generosity. She will give her victim fair play. This woman is 'magnificent in sin. The Septuagint prefixes to her oath, 'As surely as thou art Elijah and I Jezebel, which adds force to it.
Zacchæus in translating the Old Testament into Syriac, from the Septuagint Greek; and he closes his labours with begging the reader to pray for the soul of his friend Thomas. Such was now the reputation of the Alexandrian edition of the Bible, that these scholars preferred it both to the original Hebrew of the Old and to the earlier manuscripts of the New Testament.
A copy of the Septuagint, as the Greek translation was called, was needed for the Alexandrine Library. Egypt, once the house of bondage, thus became a second house of Israel. It gave the world a new version of the Hebrew Bible which largely influenced the writers of the New Testament; it gave it also a new Canon which was adopted by the early Christian Church.
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