The Septuagint and the Canon: A Post-Mortem?

What influence did the LXX have on the development of the canon of Scripture? Several years ago, I started a series of posts on the LXX and Canon, in which I reviewed some scholarly works that addressed the question. (See here, here, here, and the five-parter on Hengel: part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.) My laziness prevented me from reviewing more works. Perhaps this post represents a post-mortem on that series, if not on the topic. That blog series was my attempt to work through some of the issues and develop my own thoughts, and I guess that paid off. 

My own approach to the issue of how the LXX influenced the development of the biblical canon is that it didn't. In my 2021 book on the LXX—which mostly deals with the reception of the LXX as text in the early church (see the front matter at my academia page)—the longest chapter concerns the canon, implicitly (or, maybe, explicitly) responding to the oft-repeated claim that early Christians viewed the deuterocanonical books as Scripture because they found these books in the LXX. This is nonsense. 

I recognize that by not quoting any particular scholar here, I open myself to the charge of caricature or straw-manning the argument. I will let readers decide whether I have correctly articulated a common position among scholars regarding the inclusion of the apocrypha/deuterocanonicals in the LXX. Or, better yet, get my book, where I think I do demonstrate that the view I am critiquing here is a common assumption among biblical scholars. (Or see my JBL article mentioned at the end of this post.)

The downfall of the assumption that the LXX included the deuterocanonicals is in the identity of the LXX. What is the LXX? I think when biblical scholars say things like, "The LXX included the books of Maccabees" or even "The LXX included the book of Isaiah," they are thinking that the LXX = the Greek Old Testament, and so whatever *we* consider a part of the Greek Old Testament is necessarily a part of the LXX. And to confirm whether a work is in the LXX, we can just pick up our copy of Rahlfs-Hanhart, which after all is called Septuaginta. 

But if we are talking about ancient Christianity, we should consider what ancient Christians thought about the identity of the LXX. As far as I can tell from reading their statements, they did not think that the LXX included all Jewish religious literature in Greek, or all Jewish Greek Scripture, or whatever. Rather, the concept of the LXX referred to a story of translation, having to do with Ptolemy II (usually) and his assembly of some Jewish scholars for the purpose of translating Jewish Scripture. Just which books did they translate? Or, rather, which books did ancient Jews and Christians say that Ptolemy's assembled scholars had translated? 

Ah, there's the question. Different ancient authors provide different answers to it, and those answers (I think) falsify the assumption that ancient Christians received the deuterocanonicals as Scripture because they found them in the LXX. And if that assumption proves invalid, I'm not sure how the LXX exerted any particular influence on the development of the biblical canon. Thus, the first sentence of the canon chapter in my aforementioned book: "The Septuagint had no bearing on the development of the canon of Scripture." 

If you want a taste of my argument, you can now get it at the wonderful Text & Canon Institute website, where the fine folks over there recently published my essay Paul and the Septuagint Canon. They have assigned it to the level of three dots—rather than one or two dots—which means that it might be slow-going for some readers unaccustomed to biblical scholarship. But I hope you read it and I hope you find it helpful. 

One more reference to my own work: a few months ago, the Journal of Biblical Literature published my article on the same topic: "Suddenly and Then Gradually: The Growth of the Septuagint and Its Canon" (here). If you can't get access to it, email me and I'll send you a copy. Here's the abstract. 

The Septuagint defies easy definition. Biblical scholars routinely use the term to designate the Greek Old Testament, though they recognize that such language is similar to talking about “the English Bible” or “the German Bible”: there is no such thing, or rather there are many such things. In this article, I urge closer attention to the way ancient people described the translation, particularly its scope. While modern scholars often seem (tacitly or not) to assume that the Septuagint began as the Greek Torah and then expanded its borders to welcome new Jewish scriptural books as they continued to be translated into Greek, ancient authors did not depict the Septuagint in this way. All ancient Jewish sources that mention the translation restricted the Septuagint to the Pentateuch, whereas most patristic sources attributed a Greek version of the entire Hebrew Bible to the Seventy translators. The most significant moment in the “growth of the Septuagint” was when it suddenly swelled from five books to perhaps a couple dozen or more. These ancient ideas on the extent of the Septuagint have implications for our notions of the Septuagint canon and for the use of this Greek version in the New Testament.

Why Does Satan Do What He Does?

My sister recently asked me what the Bible says, or what people have said, about Satan's motivations. What is it that has caused Satan to tempt humans or harm them? Why would he be so mean? 

This is a question that the Bible does not answer—or, not in any sort of direct way. People have found answers to this question in the Bible, in Isaiah 14 or Ezekiel 28, for instance, but of course those passages do not mention Satan. Indeed, I would argue that the entire Old Testament does not mention Satan, even where it does mention Satan. What I mean is that in the passages where Satan makes an appearance in our English Old Testaments (such as Job 1–2; Zechariah 3; 1 Chronicles 21:1), the Hebrew word satan does not function as a name (Satan, with a capital s) but would be better translated as opponent or adversary or executioner. In Christian Scripture, Satan is a character of the New Testament and not of the Old—at least if we're trying to interpret the texts according to their most probable original meaning. 

So, if you're going to look for Satan's motivations, it does you no good to look in the Old Testament, but neither does the New Testament really tell us anything about why he tempts or torments people. It just takes it for granted that he does these things. 

And yet there are ancient stories about Satan that fill in the details. One of the earliest (though hard to date) and most detailed accounts of Satan's fall from grace is in a work called The Life of Adam and Eve. I have been working on a project (as yet unpublished) that involves ancient traditions about Satan, and below I have pasted what I've written about this text. I have omitted the footnotes, but below the excerpt I have included some bibliography. The Life of Adam and Eve many centuries was asking the very same question as my sister recently asked, and it provides a fascinating answer, though I think one that would be a surprise to many of the people I go to church with. 

Here's the excerpt....

Perhaps the fullest ancient form of the legend of Satan’s fall is found in some versions of a work known as the Life of Adam and Eve. Now, this work, the Life of Adam and Eve, exists in several forms in different languages (Greek, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic), and the different versions do not all include the same episodes. It’s sorta like different iterations of Spiderman. (Thanks to my wife, Jodi, for help with this analogy.) If you mention Spiderman, everyone knows what you’re talking about, but everyone also knows that there are different versions of the story of Spiderman—the Toby Maguire movies, and the inferior movies starring other actors, not to mention the comic books with their own various iterations of the character and different storylines, and the television shows, etc. Gwen Stacy is a character in many of these Spiderman versions, but not all of them, and when she does appear, her storylines are often very different in the different versions. Sometimes the alter ego of Spiderman is not even Peter Parker, but Miles Morales, such as in the Spider-Verse franchise that has produced the greatest Spiderman moves (sorry, Toby).

The ancient text known as the Life of Adam and Eve exists in a variety of forms reminiscent of these different Spiderman properties. The basic storyline and characters are more-or-less the same across the different versions of the Life of Adam and Eve, but there are also major differences between the Greek version and the Latin version (and other versions). For example, the episode that interests us right now (and is quoted below), in which the devil explains his fall from grace, is not contained in the Greek version of the Life of Adam and Eve, but it is contained in the Latin and Armenian and Georgian versions. Usually scholars argue (or assume) that the Greek form of the story preserves the earliest form of the text, and that the earliest form of the text may date as early as 100 BC—though everything about the origins of the Life of Adam and Eve is debated, even whether its author was Jewish or Christian. The earliest Greek manuscripts date to the eleventh century AD. Since the Greek text (presumably the earliest) does not include the story of Satan’s fall, that story was apparently added to (some versions of) the Life of Adam and Eve sometime in the early Christian era. 

At any rate, the story of Satan’s fall in the Life of Adam and Eve (when it is included) represents the devil as jealous of the first humans. When God created Adam in his own image, he commanded all the angels to bow before Adam. The devil and some other angels refused. (chs. 11–17). He is called here the devil and Beliar (17:2). He describes his pre-fall nature: “My wings were more numerous than those of the cherubim, and I concealed myself under them” (12:1). Then the devil describes his rebellion, speaking to Adam. 

The very day when you were created, on that day I fell from before the face of God, because when God breathed a  spirit onto your face, you had the image and likeness of Divinity. And Michael came; he presented you and made you bow down before God. And God told Michael, “I have created Adam according to (my) image and my Divinity.” Then Michael came; he summoned all the troops of angels and told them, “Bow down before the likeness and the image of Divinity.” And then, when Michael summoned them and all had bowed down to you, he summoned me also. And I told him, “Go away from me, for I shall not bow down to him who is younger than I; indeed, I was master before him and it is proper for him to bow down to me.” When the six classes of other angels heard that, then my speech pleased them and they did not bow down to you. Then God became angry with us and ordered us, them and me, to be cast down from our dwellings to the earth. As for you, he ordered you to dwell in the Garden. When I had realized that I had fallen by your power, that I was in distress and you were in rest, then I aimed at hunting you so that I might alienate you from the garden of delights, just as I had been alienated because of you. (Life of Adam and Eve 13:2–16:3)

This story explains most of what we would want to know about the origins of Satan. He was created good and became evil by his own choice due to his jealousy of Adam. This all happened immediately after the creation of Adam. The devil wants to bring pain on Adam and pain on God in order to exact revenge for his own fall from grace.

Bibliography

John R. Levison, The Greek Life of Adam and Eve, Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023).

Gary A. Anderson and Michael E. Stone, eds., A Synopsis of the Books of Adam and Eve (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), where the episode narrating Satan’s fall is labeled “pericope 5.”

Forerunners and Heirs of Origen's Hexapla

This weekend I received in the mail my contributor's copy of a new book on the Hexapla. My mom happened to be visiting us in Alabama from Kentucky, and she saw me open the package and examine the volume, prompting her question, "What's a hexapla?" 

The hexapla is an ancient parallel Bible—the Jewish Scriptures, the Christian Old Testament—six columns in two different languages (Hebrew and Greek), compiled under the direction of Origen, the Greek Christian author who died in the mid-third century. The two Hebrew columns featured (1) the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and (2) Greek transliteration of the Hebrew text, while the other four columns contained four Greek translations of the text, those known as (3) Aquila, (4) Symmachus, (5) LXX, and (6) Theodotion. The Hexapla would have been enormous, and while portions of it were copied, there was probably no second copy of the whole thing, and it has largely been lost to time. Only fragments of portions of the Hexapla have been preserved. 

The new volume—blessedly open access—contains 12 studies by various scholars covering different aspects of the study of the Hexapla. Most of the papers were presented at a conference at Phoenix Seminary in November 2021, the inaugural conference of the Text & Canon Institute (TCI). The volume was edited by John Meade, my one-time co-author and the co-director with Peter Gurry of the TCI. 

There are two bonus studies in the volume: a brief paper by Felix Albrecht on "Origen's Fifth Column/Old Greek of Psalms" that was not presented at the conference; and a classic paper by Dominique Barthélemy on "Origène et le Texte de l'Ancien Testament," now translated into English by Peter Gentry. 

My contribution is called "The Hexapla in the Church According to Jerome," and the basic idea is to study what Jerome (the Latin scholar at the turn of the fifth century) said about the influence the Hexapla had on the church's Bible. Jerome's testimony is important both because he had actually seen the Hexapla (or so he says) and because he was the foremost biblical textual scholar of his day. He used Origen's text critical on the Old Testament as a model for his own work, though Jerome pushed beyond Origen in various ways. My essay contains two appendices: (1) a collection of all of Jerome's comments on the Hexapla (in Latin and English), along with discussion about the information about the Hexapla to be gleaned from Jerome; and (2) a translation of Jerome's four preserved prefaces to his translation of the LXX. I think this might be the first English translation published for some of these prefaces. 

Let me briefly explain what that second appendix contains. (And, again, the volume is open access, so go have a look yourself.) Jerome is most famous today as the chief translator of the Latin Vulgate, which for most of the Old Testament contains Jerome's translations of the Hebrew Bible into Latin. Jerome also published some Latin translations of the LXX—specifically, translations of Origen's new and improved recension of the LXX. We have the Latin text of these translations for the Psalms (that's the Gallican Psalter, which is in the Vulgate), Job, and Song of Songs, and we have prefaces to Jerome's translation of Greek Chronicles and the Greek Solomonic Books (not just Song of Songs, but also Proverbs and Ecclesiastes). So we know Jerome published these four translations of the LXX. Again, those are the Psalms, Chronicles, Solomonic books, and Job. We don't have all the translations, but we do have the prefaces. He may have produced more translations of the LXX, but we lack the evidence to say for sure. The second appendix of my paper in this volume contains an English translation of the four preserved prefaces of Jerome's translations of the LXX. 

Podcast About Scripture

For a couple of years now, I have presented (almost) weekly chapel lessons at my place of employment, Heritage Christian University. These are lessons are usually recorded, and the video is put up on YouTube (here), while the audio is made available as a podcast called About Scripture. You can find it on most podcast distributors. 

This past semester (Spring 2024) my series of chapel talks was on the book of Daniel. I try as best I can to make a devotional point in these lessons, and sometimes I achieve moderate success. I try to combine academic biblical studies with a theological and confessional approach to the text. My approach is decidedly non-dispensational; there's a lot in the text I take as intentionally figurative. 

These episodes on Daniel just dropped on the podcast maybe a day or two ago, so I thought it would be a good time to mention it on this blog. Earlier seasons of the podcast (i.e., earlier semesters of chapel talks) involved study of the character of Joseph in the book of Genesis and a study of what the Bible says about angels and demons. 

A new semester is about to begin (!), so I'm trying to figure out what topic will occupy me in my weekly chapels. 

Robert Kennedy (Sr.) and Edith Hamilton

At the gravesite for Robert F. Kennedy (wikipedia) in Arlington National Cemetery, one of the inscriptions (image, another one) quotes Kennedy quoting Aeschylus.

Aeschylus...wrote, "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

This quotation from Kennedy is from his famous, impromptu announcement of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the great speeches in American history, certainly one of the greatest more-or-less unplanned speeches in American history. See the Wikipedia entry on the speech, and watch it below. 

It's a remarkable speech that shows starkly the value of a humanities education. To be able to pull that quote from Aeschylus—well, that doesn't just happen. That takes preparation, not for this specific moment, but just for life in general. The ability to deliver such a speech in such a moment requires deep reflection on these issues years beforehand, in conversation with some of the great minds in world history. See this ten-minute video documentary on RFK's speech. 

Where does the quotation from Aeschylus come from? The basic answer is that the lines quoted by Kennedy come from the opening choral ode in the play Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy called The Oresteia, first performed in 458 BC. 

More specifically, Kennedy's quotation came from the translation of these lines by Edith Hamilton in her first published work, the popular book The Greek Way (1930), at the very end of her chapter on Aeschylus. 

I was reminded of Kennedy's affection for Hamilton a couple days ago when I was alerted to a new review of a recent biography of Hamilton. The biography (which I have not read) is Victoria Houseman, American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton (Princeton, 2023), and the review is by Robert L. Pounder at BMCR (here). (By the way, Pounder really liked the book.)

In his first paragraph, Pounder recounts a fleeting encounter he had with RFK in Athens in 1966. Pounder reports that the memory of this brief meeting is still fresh. 

Almost sixty years later I can still see the intense look in Kennedy’s eyes as he asked me my name, where I was studying, and whether I had read Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. When I responded that I had not read the Hamilton book, a collection of essays on mythological, literary, archaeological, philosophical, and historical topics first published in 1930, a cloud of disbelief passed over Kennedy’s face as his interest in me waned. It was as if I had committed heresy or disgraced myself shamefully. I was a big disappointment.

This wonderful anecdote provides more context for Kennedy's speech in April 1968. 

The translation of those lines by Aeschylus as quoted by Kennedy—and, by the way, Kennedy's memory failed him at one or two points, especially substituting "despair" for Hamilton's "despite"—was not the only translation produced by Edith Hamilton for those lines. She later produced a full translation of the Agamemnon, in which she offers this translation. 

Knowledge won through suffering.

Drop, drop—in our sleep, upon the heart

sorrow falls, memory’s pain, 

and to us, though against our very will,

even in our own despite,

comes wisdom

by the awful grace of God. (p. 170)

Kennedy was clearly relying on Hamilton's translation from The Greek Way and not from her full translation of the play. Hamilton herself had a deep affection for this passage from Agamemnon, as she highlights in his her aforementioned chapter on Aeschylus in her first work, as well as in the preface to the play in her translation of the full work (p. 161). Sarah Ruden has more recently translated the Agamemnon (here), and she also calls attention to this particular passage in her preface to her translation (p. 48). Her translation of the passage goes like this: 

Zeus puts us on the road

to mindfulness, Zeus decrees

we learn by suffering. 

In the heart is no sleep; there drips instead

pain that remembers wounds. And to unwilling 

minds circumspection comes. 

But this is the gods’ favor, I suppose, 

claiming by violence the place of awe, the helmsman’s bench.

(Agamemnon 176–183)

Finally, for reference, here is the Greek text and the prose translation by Herbert Weir Smyth in the LCL edition. I've also included in the English translation my attempt to determine which Greek words were being rendered by Smyth's English. 

τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ-

σαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος

θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. 

στάζει δ᾽ ἔν θ᾽ ὕπνῳ πρὸ καρδίας

μνησιπήμων πόνος· καὶ παρ᾽ ἄ-

κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. 

δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βί-

αιος σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων. 

Zeus, who (τὸν) leadeth (ὁδώσαντα) mortals (βροτοὺς) the way of understanding (φρονεῖν), Zeus, who (τὸν) hath stablished (θέντα) as a fixed ordinance (κυρίως ἔχειν) that “wisdom cometh by suffering” (πάθει μάθος) But even as trouble (πόνος), bringing memory of pain (μνησιπήμων), droppeth (στάζει) o’er the mind (πρὸ καρδίας) in sleep (ἔν ὕπνῳ), so to men in their despite (παρ᾽ ἄκοντας) cometh wisdom (ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν). With constraint (βίαιος), methinks (που), cometh the grace (χάρις) of the powers divine (δαιμόνων) enthroned (ἡμένων < ἧμαι) upon their awful seats (σέλμα σεμνὸν). (p. 19)

One more thing: Kennedy quotes "the Greeks" another time in his brief speech; on that quotation, see this article. 

LXX Canon: New JBL Article

I just received my offprint for a forthcoming article titled "Suddenly and Then Gradually: The Growth of the Septuagint and Its Canon," Journal of Biblical Literature 143 (2024): 303–22. Below I paste the abstract of the article. I'll update this post with the link to the online source for the article when it is published. [Update, July 6, 2024: see here.] And, in accordance with the SBL publishing agreement, after 18 months I'll post the offprint of the article at my academia.edu page. 

Readers will find on the first page that the article is dedicated to Jim Aitken, a renowned LXX scholar at Cambridge whose sudden death last year shocked and saddened me, along with many others (see here). I did not know Prof. Aitken well. During the Covid lockdowns, he offered a couple seminars via Zoom, and I joined in some of those sessions as an observer. He was an editor, along with Bruce Longenecker, of a forthcoming volume that features an essay by me on "The Use of the LXX in the Early Church." (The volume is called The Apocrypha and Septuagint, and it is to be volume 1 of this Zondervan series.) Besides these encounters, Prof. Aitken had a direct impact on this JBL article, as he was present at the session of the IOSCS in which I presented the paper in November 2022. He expressed interest in the paper and encouraged me to continue pursuing the subject, and he advised me on some ways to refine the argument. 

Let me also note how much I appreciate and admire the current JBL editor, Susan Hylen. In my experience publishing papers via biblical studies journals, I can say that she as an editor dedicated an unusual amount of time to my article, partly due to my own stubbornness. She patiently waited for me to realize the wisdom of her counsel. The review process for JBL is a long one, but one of the payoffs is getting to work with and learn from Prof. Hylen. 

By the way, this post sorta continues a series that I started years ago, on the LXX Canon, a renewal of that series after seven years. See here and follow the links back. Also, the subject of this article picks up on the topic of chapter four in my book on the LXX, a book that I seem to have never mentioned on this blog—not too surprising since this is my seventh post on this blog in four years or so (but the second in the past couple weeks!). 

Abstract:

The Septuagint defies easy definition. Biblical scholars routinely use the term to designate the Greek Old Testament, though they recognize that such language is similar to talking about “the English Bible” or “the German Bible”: there is no such thing, or rather there are many such things. This paper urges closer attention to the way ancient people described the translation, particularly its scope. While modern scholars often seem (tacitly or not) to assume that the Septuagint began as the Greek Torah and then expanded its borders to welcome new Jewish scriptural books as they continued to be translated into Greek, ancient authors did not depict the Septuagint in this way. All ancient Jewish sources that mention the translation restricted the Septuagint to the Pentateuch, whereas most patristic sources attributed a Greek version of the entire Hebrew Bible to the Seventy translators. The the most significant moment in the “growth of the Septuagint” is when it suddenly swelled from five books to perhaps a couple dozen or more. These ancient ideas on the extent of the Septuagint have implications for our notions of the Septuagint canon and for the use of this Greek version in the New Testament.

My Interview with Michael Halcomb

Today Michael Halcomb of GlossaHouse released on his podcast Provetext an interview he did with me a few weeks ago. See the video below. The episode is called "Making the Bible & Understanding the Septuagint: An Interview with Dr. Edmon Gallagher." The first several minutes we talk about personal stuff—family, educational background, etc.—but then we start talking about academic stuff at about the 7-min. mark. The whole episode is about 73 minutes. 

At about the 14-min mark, we start talking about the definition of "Septuagint," which is something about which I have a forthcoming academic article. Maybe I'll have more to say about that article later. 

We also talk about the use of κύριος in the LXX and its application to Jesus in the New Testament, and  whether Paul quoted the LXX. At about 27:30, we transition to talking about canon lists, and we stick to the topic of the biblical canon for the rest of the episode. About 15 minutes from the end, I mention another book I'm writing on the biblical canon, and then it comes up again at the very end of the podcast, where I mention that I am about to submit the manuscript to the publisher. I can now report that I did submit the manuscript, and it has now (just yesterday) been approved for publication. So now I'm making a few other little tweaks and will submit the completed and approved manuscript in the coming days.