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Greek culture and the Greek Bible

Hellenization and the Septuagint

After Alexander, the whole eastern Mediterranean became a Greek-speaking world, a process called Hellenization. Greek was the common language of trade, learning, and government, and Jewish communities scattered across the empire began to speak it too. So in Alexandria, beginning in the third century BC, scholars translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. That translation, called the Septuagint, let the nations read the promises of Israel and became the Bible the first Christians most often quoted. It was one of the quietest and most important works of the silent years.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.John 1:1 (KJV)

A Greek-speaking world

Alexander's conquests left behind more than kingdoms. They left a language and a way of life. From Egypt to Mesopotamia, Greek became the shared tongue of commerce, culture, and administration, not the polished Greek of the old Athenian poets but a simpler, common form known as Koine, which means common Greek. A merchant in Alexandria, a soldier in Antioch, and a scholar in Asia Minor could all understand one another. This spread of Greek language and culture across many peoples is what historians mean by Hellenization.

For the Jews, Hellenization was both an opportunity and a danger. Wherever they settled outside their homeland, in what is called the diaspora, they increasingly spoke Greek in daily life. In great cities like Alexandria, whole generations grew up for whom Greek, not Hebrew, was their mother tongue. This raised a pressing question for a people whose faith rested on a book. If the children no longer read Hebrew, how would they read the law and the prophets?

The making of the Septuagint

The answer was to translate. Beginning in the third century BC, most likely under the Ptolemaic kings in Alexandria, Jewish scholars rendered the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The five books of Moses were translated first, and over the following generations the rest of the Hebrew Bible followed. The result is called the Septuagint, from the Latin word for seventy, and is often abbreviated with the Roman numerals LXX. The name comes from an old tradition that about seventy translators produced it.

That tradition is preserved in a Jewish text called the Letter of Aristeas, which tells how seventy-two elders were brought to Alexandria and completed the translation of the law. Honesty requires noting that the Letter of Aristeas is a legendary account, written to honor the translation, and historians do not treat its details as sober fact. What is certain is the essential thing: in Alexandria, over the third and second centuries BC, the Hebrew Scriptures were carefully translated into common Greek, and the Septuagint became the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews throughout the ancient world.

Why the Greek Bible mattered so much

The Septuagint did something that had never been done before. For the first time the Scriptures of Israel, the account of creation, the law of Moses, the Psalms, and the prophets, could be read by anyone in the vast Greek-speaking world. Gentiles curious about the God of the Jews could now read the promises for themselves. Around the synagogues of the diaspora there gathered numbers of God-fearing Gentiles, people drawn to the one God and the high morality of Israel, who knew the Scriptures only in Greek. When the gospel later went out, these God-fearers would be among its readiest hearers.

The Septuagint also shaped the very language of the New Testament. When the apostles wrote of Christ, they wrote in Greek, and many of the words they used for God, for salvation, for glory, and for the covenant came ready-made from the Septuagint. When the New Testament quotes the Old, it very often quotes the Greek Septuagint rather than translating afresh from the Hebrew. The opening of John's Gospel, In the beginning was the Word, deliberately echoes the opening words of Genesis as Greek readers knew them, and announces that the eternal Word had now come in the flesh.

A striking example lies in the prophecy of Christ's birth. The prophet Isaiah had promised that a virgin, or a young woman, would conceive and bear a son called Immanuel. When the Septuagint rendered that verse into Greek, it chose a Greek word that means specifically a virgin, and it was this Greek reading that the Gospel of Matthew quoted to announce the birth of Jesus. In countless ways large and small, the words the apostles needed to tell the story of Christ had been prepared and put into circulation, in the common language of the world, generations before he came.

The temptation of a Greek world

Hellenization was not all gift. To live in a Greek world was to be pressed, constantly, to become Greek in more than language, to take up Greek dress, Greek entertainments, and Greek gods. Many Jews welcomed this, and a party of ambitious, Hellenizing Jews in Jerusalem itself grew eager to remake the holy city as a Greek town, complete with a gymnasium where the young men exercised in the Greek manner. Others saw in this a betrayal of the covenant and a slow dissolving of the faith of their fathers.

This tension between faithfulness and assimilation ran all through the later silent years, and it would explode into open crisis when a Seleucid king took the side of the extreme Hellenizers and tried to abolish the worship of the God of Israel by force. The story of the Maccabees, told on the next page, is at its heart the story of a people deciding how far they would let a Greek world reshape them, and what they would rather die than surrender.

A Bible ready for the nations

Seen with the eyes of faith, the translation of the Scriptures into Greek was one of the great preparations for the gospel. God had promised Abraham that in his seed all the families of the earth would be blessed. Now, in the quiet work of scholars in Alexandria, the promises of Israel were being put into the one language the nations could read. When the fulness of time came and the apostles carried the news of Christ across the empire, they carried a Bible the world could already understand, and they preached a Savior whose story had been written, in Greek, before he was born.

It is worth pausing over how remarkable this was. Never before had the Scriptures of one nation been opened to all nations in a shared tongue. The Septuagint remained the Bible of the early church for generations, read in worship, quoted in preaching, and carried by missionaries across the empire. When later Christians spoke of the Old Testament, it was most often the Greek that they held in their hands. A translation begun by Jewish scholars for their own children became, in the providence of God, the book through which the gospel first reached the wider world.

The Word became flesh in a world that had, without knowing it, been given the words to receive him. That is the hidden grace of the Septuagint, a labor of the silent years that opened the Scriptures to all people and made straight a highway for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

A note on the sources: the history above rests on well-attested ancient records, above all the books of First and Second Maccabees and the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. First and Second Maccabees are received as Scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians and read as valuable history by Protestants. Where a detail is a later tradition rather than early history, such as the account of the oil at Hanukkah, it is flagged as such. Dates in this period are approximate and are given as historians commonly reckon them.

Related: The Persian and Greek empires · The Maccabean revolt and Hanukkah · How God prepared the way · The 400 Silent Years hub