Starting in the third century b.c.e., Hebrew Scripture began to be translated into Greek, apparently for the use of Greek-speaking Jews in Hellenistic centers like Alexandria, Egypt. A legend eventually sprang up about this translation to the effect that seventy, (or seventy-two in another version of the tradition) Jewish scholars, one from every known nation, were brought to Alexandria at the order of Ptolemy II (ca. 285–247 b.c.e.) to work on a translation of the Pentateuch, each in an isolated cell; when the translations were compared, they all agreed in every detail, for the translators had been divinely guided. As a result, this translation came to be known as the Septuaginta (“seventy”), and its name is sometimes abbreviated as LXX (Roman: 70). Subsequently, the name “Septuagint” also came to include the old Greek translation of the other books of the Hebrew Bible, a translation made in stages from the third to the first century b.c.e.

Any translation by nature contains a good deal of interpretation: ambiguities in the original text can rarely be duplicated in translation and, as a result, the translator must take a stand and render the ambiguity one way or another. Moreover, translators aware of this or that traditional interpretation will sometimes incorporate it (consciously or otherwise) into their translation. For both these reasons, the Septuagint, although it may present a fairly close rendering, can frequently provide information about how a particular verse or phrase or single word was understood by Jews as early as the third century b.c.e.

However, there are great difficulties in using evidence from the Septuagint in an overall study of ancient interpretation of the Bible. To begin with, the biblical texts that were used by the Septuagint translators were often slightly, and in some cases, drastically, different from that of the traditional Hebrew text; they bear witness to the coexistence of different text-forms of the Hebrew Bible in late antiquity. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has dramatically confirmed this fact. No one of these text-forms can be said to be correct or “the best.” Instead, there exists a whole branch of modern biblical scholarship, textual criticism, which is devoted to examining each and every verse of the Bible as preserved by various textual witnesses in order to understand the significance of any differences that might exist between different versions of that verse. Textual criticism is an art, not a science, and the conclusions of one textual critic are not necessarily shared by others.

All this is of some consequence to the whole matter of ancient biblical interpretation. For example, it is often far from clear whether a particular difference between the Septuagint and the MT (the Masoretic text, that is, the traditional Hebrew text of the Bible preserved by Jews through the ages) represents a case of the Septuagint translators interpreting in some nonliteral fashion the same Hebrew text as that found in the MT, or whether the difference between the Septuagint and the MT represents a difference in two different forms of the Hebrew text that were in circulation in late antiquity, the one having been used by the Septuagint translators and the other preserved in the MT. The same is true, by the way, of differences between the Septuagint and other textual witnesses such as the Samaritan Pentateuch or ancient biblical manuscripts from Qumran. Nor, for that matter, is it often easy to establish which of various forms of a biblical verse attested in different sources represents the “most original” form of the verse (and which others, therefore, might represent some secondary, often simplified or interpreted, form of the same verse). Further complicating matters is the fact that the Septuagint itself underwent a complicated process of transmission and revision, so that there is no one, single “Septuagint” to refer to.