Rethinking the Septuagint: Part One

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob and Your Life. Today we’re getting into an excellent sermon series that my pastor gave at Agape Kingdom Fellowship. It’s a sermon series on the Septuagint. If you don’t know, the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament and And a lot of Christians have started saying that the Septuagint is way more important than we ever gave it credit for. Typically, we would want to take the original Hebrew and translate that directly into English. But what a lot of Christians are now starting to think is, hey, that translation that was made before Jesus, taking that Hebrew version into Greek, and then a lot of people at Jesus’ time, including Jesus himself, likely including some of the apostles, they would have been using this Greek translation And so the thought is, hey, this Greek translation, there might be more to it than normal. Typically, we want to add that extra step to it, but considering this is what Jesus used and the historical significance of the Septuagint, there’s a little bit more to it than you would typically think. So this is my pastor’s series on why he changed his mind on the Septuagint, a really fun sermon series, a little bit heady. So put your thinking caps on. Now let’s jump right into it. This is part one.

SPEAKER 02 : 1:34

Great to see everyone this morning at AKF. I am especially grateful to see everyone here this morning, and I will just leave it at that. Before we jump into the sermon, I want to quickly state something, which is the power of God’s Word. The power of God’s Word became abundantly clear to me within the last couple weeks in a way that I never expected. And that is this. After I finished the four-part series on lying and deception, people started reaching out to me, telling me things that they had lied about, kept secret, and they felt compelled to tell me these things, and this includes my own family. Multiple family members actually reached out to me and said things based on that sermon series. They were convicted. And by the way, this has nothing to do, zero, with my sermon series. Zero. It has everything to do with Scripture. It was the vast amount of scripture that we covered in that series showing what God thinks of lying and deception. That is what convicted these people to reach out to me. And so again, multiple people reached out to me. Even multiple family members in my own family reached out to me. And so undoubtedly, more people were convicted by God’s Word because I would guess very few people out of all the people that were convicted felt the need to actually contact me individually. So that is a great testimony to the power of Scripture and why we need to be in the Bible so often in our lives. Okay. Okay. I have changed my mind. Those words usually grab your attention, right? I’ve actually long contemplated the anatomy of a mind change. What is it? What exactly causes someone to change their mind about something? What happens internally prior to a mind change? Do we change our mind on the fly? Or is it like a series of events that lead up over a long period of time to a mind change? Now, I don’t have answers yet to these questions, but it is quite fascinating to think about. And I actually think if we better understood what a mind change is, how it happens and what leads up to it, we might actually be more successful in convincing others to change their mind about something. So let me walk you through. what led up to me changing my mind on this particular opinion in my own life. Many years ago, I have no idea exactly how many, Bob Enyart told me something that I’ve never forgotten. You may have heard this from him, and you actually may have heard this elsewhere. This is semi-well-known, but he pointed out to me that the Septuagint uses the word virgin in Isaiah 7.14. Now, Isaiah 7.14, this is a very famous verse, which says, “…therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign, behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Now people claim that the Hebrew word here, which is translated virgin, it’s the Hebrew word Alma, actually means young woman and not virgin. And so people make the point that the Septuagint actually uses the Greek word for virgin in Isaiah 7.14, usually implying that the Hebrew word actually meant virgin and not young woman. Because the Septuagint predates Christ. Meaning, when the Hebrew was translated from Hebrew to Greek, it wasn’t being changed by someone to fit the narrative of what happened with Christ. This all happened before Christ. Very interesting, right? So what is the Septuagint anyway? What is the Septuagint? Well, I was very mistaken. on what the Septuagint was until recently and even the term Septuagint is very difficult to define and it’s very often misunderstood. So let me give you a little history behind it and I think this history will suffice in defining what the Septuagint is and was. We have to go back to the third century BC Long time ago. And King Ptolemy II, he’s also known as Ptolemy Philadelphus, he was king of Egypt, so pharaoh. And he reigned from 284 to 246 BC. Remember, BC, the numbers are going to go in reverse. And the great library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was most likely built by Ptolemy II. Now, this library was one of the biggest and most significant libraries in history. This is a big deal. The library actually helped Alexandria rise to become the capital of knowledge and learning at that time. Very important. Before the internet, right? And we learn from the letter of Aristeas that Ptolemy desired to have the law books of the Jews in his great library. That’s what he wanted. Now, since this was the great library of Alexandria in Alexandria, and after the time of Alexander the Great, He wanted the law books in Greek. Right? He wanted these law books of the Jews in the Greek language. By the way, Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II, they were actually the successors to Alexander the Great. Right? And so, as such, they wanted to continue the Hellenistic culture that Alexander the Great did such a good job of spreading to the world. And by the way, remember, Alexander the Great founded Alexandria, Egypt. So, the letter of Aristeas says that Ptolemy II asked 72 Jews to translate the Torah into from Hebrew to Greek. 72, because it was apparently six from each of the 12 tribes of Israel. Now, it was only the first five books of the Old Testament that he asked this Hebrew group of 72 to translate into Greek. He was interested in their law and the Pentateuch or Torah, the first five books of Moses, that’s what contains the Jewish law. And so it’s actually a bit of a misnomer when people use the word Septuagint to refer to a translation of the entire Old Testament by a single group of people. It definitely did not happen like that. It wasn’t like the King James Bible, where a group of people in the early 1600s translated the entire Bible as a single project and did it as a group. Now, you may have heard people refer to the Septuagint as the LXX, right? Now, people, including myself, I like to refer to the Septuagint as the LXX because It’s a lot easier to type, right? And by the way, LXX is not an acronym. This is actually a Roman numeral. L is 50 and each X is 10. And so LXX is the Roman numeral for 70. And since 70 is approximately the number of translators, according to the letter of Aristeas, who translated the first five books of Moses into Greek, the Septuagint has become known as the LXX. In fact, the word Septuagint comes from the Latin word for 70, which is Septuaginta. By the way, that is the extent of my Latin. Now, it would be remiss of me here to not mention that there are people that think the letter of Aristeas is not a completely accurate representation of what really happened. Some people believe there are historical aspects contained in the letter, some, but that the letter is more pseudepigraphal in nature. Now, There’s controversy everywhere you turn when it comes to the Bible. And whether or not this letter to Aristeas is a completely accurate representation of what happened, or semi-historical in nature, or even completely fictitious, it doesn’t matter, especially with what we will be discussing today. It doesn’t matter for what we are going to be discussing today. So, whatever position you take on the letter of Aristeas, That will be irrelevant to the rest of our discussion, and so we can all just move forward together in harmony. All right, continuing back on this journey of my mind change, I always kept the Septuagint in the back of my mind, considering that it uses the Greek word for virgin in Isaiah 7.14. But honestly, I didn’t really know anything else about it. As time went on, I really started to discount the Septuagint as being that important or that helpful in biblical studies. This idea that it uses the word virgin in Isaiah 7.14 almost just seemed like, let’s just use that when you need it, right? I don’t like that. Now, why was I discounting the Septuagint? Well, the main reason is because it’s a translation, right? It’s a translation. Remember, it’s a translation from Hebrew into Greek. Now, I try not to, as best I can, I try not to elevate translations of the Bible, even English translations, because they are, by nature, inferior to the original languages, right? If I could do whatever I wanted and could snap my fingers, I would much prefer to be fluent in Hebrew and Koine Greek and not even need an English Bible. I wish I could do that. But I read an English Bible because that’s the language that I know, and I use my limited knowledge of Greek and other resources to help me understand what underlies the English so as to ascertain what they originally meant as best I can. Now, since we have the Hebrew scriptures, who cares if we have a Greek translation? I’m not Greek. Why do I need it? And then our trip to Greece earlier this year, that was actually the final nail in the coffin for me with this Septuagint thing. Our tour guide, Costas, told me that the LXX translators changed the Hebrew When they thought they could improve upon it. What? This is insane. He even brought up Isaiah 7.14. And he said that the Greek translators saw that the Hebrews said young woman. And they didn’t think young woman was that great of a sign to King Ahaz. And so they changed it to virgin because that sounded more miraculous. This is preposterous. That was all I needed to hear to make the decision to throw the Septuagint into the garbage where it belongs. Not only was it a translation, but now I’m being told they changed things to make it sound better in their own eyes. No thanks. I’ll stick with the Hebrew Old Testament. Now everything I just told you really happened to me And it shows how easy it is to make a decision that feels good even though it was based on bad information. I made that decision with incorrect data. So I made the decision to disregard the Septuagint without having the whole picture. And because I was given information that sounded true. information that I believed to be accurate. So for part one on why I changed my mind on the Septuagint, we are going to look at someone from the Old Testament. We are going to look at one of the sons of Noah, particularly Shem. Now we have a very detailed genealogy of Shem in Genesis chapter 11. This genealogy starts with Shem and goes all the way to Abraham. That’s a long period of time, from Noah’s son to Abraham. Now, let’s read the genealogy to see just how long of a time frame this is. Starting with verse 10 of Genesis 11. This is the genealogy of Shem. Shem was 100 years old and begot Arphaxad, two years after the flood. After he begot Arphaxad, Shem lived 500 years and begot sons and daughters. Arphaxad lived 35 years and begot Shelah. By the way, the SH sound comes from the Hebrew pronunciation. After he begot Shelah, Arphaxad lived 403 years and begot sons and daughters. Shelah lived 30 years and begot Eber. After he begot Eber, Shelah lived 403 years and begot sons and daughters. Eber lived 34 years and begot Peleg. After he begot Peleg, Eber lived 430 years and begot sons and daughters. Peleg lived 30 years and begot Reu. After he begot Reu, Peleg lived 209 years and begot sons and daughters. Reu lived 32 years and begot Sirug. After he begot Sirug, Reu lived 207 years and begot sons and daughters. Sirug lived 30 years and begot Nahor. After he begot Nahor, Sirug lived 200 years and begot sons and daughters. Nahor lived 29 years and begot Terah. After he begot Terah, Nahor lived 119 years and begot sons and daughters. Now Terah lived 70 years and begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Okay, I felt it necessary to read through the entire genealogy of Shem for a couple reasons. First, you’ll notice a pattern in this particular genealogy, specifically stating how old each person was when they begat their son, and then how many years they lived after begetting that son. By the way, it does not say that these were firstborn sons. Second, it’s tempting when we read our Bible to either skip over these genealogies, or if we don’t want to skip them outright, to just gloss over them, right? I think we assume there is not much to learn or gain from these genealogies, so we just rush past them. But you may not ever do that again after what we see today. Now, does anything abnormal stand out to you in this genealogy as we read through the genealogy? Probably not. It sounds very precise. It’s very straightforward, right? Well, something very strange is going on here. And it’s easy to miss if you don’t actually plot out on paper what we just read. Now, if you know me at all, You know I love doing things like this, and so I love creating a good spreadsheet, so I went ahead and did this for you all in Excel. No need to thank me, my pleasure. So I’m going to show you right now a graphical representation of the Shem genealogy, and you can tell me what you think. I did this in Excel so that we could semi-easily count their ages. So each square that you see there represents 10 years. And since we just read that Shem was 100 years old when he begot Arphaxad, and that he lived 500 years after that, we know he died at 600 years old. So as you can see here, his orange line on the screen, his lifeline, covers 60 squares, which represent 10 years each, so 600 total years. Next, we add Arphaxad. And you’ll notice that I skipped 10 squares at the beginning, which represents the 100 years Shem lived before beginning Arphaxad. And Arphaxad lived a total of 438 years. Next is Shelah, who was born when Arphaxad was 35 years old and lived to 433. Next is Eber, who lived for 464 years. And then Peleg, who lived for 239 years. And then Riu, who also lived for 239 years. then Sirach, who lived for 230 years, then Nahor, who lived for 148 years, then Terah, who lived for 205 years, and finally Abraham, listed as Abram in Genesis 11, who lived for 175 years. It’s a helpful visual, right? Seeing these men’s lives laid out graphically helps us understand what was going on as opposed to just reading a bunch of numbers in Genesis 11. But let’s pull this chart back up and let’s take a closer look and see some interesting things. The first thing that really stands out is this guy Shem. Shem outlives his son Arphaxad. He outlives his grandson, Shelah. He outlives his great-great-grandson, Peleg. And he ends up outliving his great-great-great-grandson, Ryu, his great-great-great-great-grandson, Sirach, his great-great-great-great-great-grandson, Nahor, and finally his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, Terah. Oh, and not to mention, he lived at the same time concurrently with Abraham. Now this is rather peculiar to me. Does it really make sense that Shem outlived all of his relatives like this? Now you might say that ages of men, the ages that men lived to reduced after the flood, and therefore this kind of makes sense. That was actually my wife’s initial reaction when I showed her this chart. She has to put up with me getting excited about these charts I show her. But let me throw a huge wrinkle into this for everyone, okay? These men, these men are listed in the New Testament as well. These same men from Genesis 11 are listed in Jesus’ genealogy in Luke chapter 3. Now, you might not remember this because genealogies in the New Testament are also tempting to skip or gloss over, just like genealogies in the Old Testament. So let’s take a careful look at Luke’s genealogy in Luke chapter 3, starting with the second half of verse 34. Abraham, the son of Terah, the son of Nahor, the son of Sirug, the son of Reu, the son of Peleg, the son of Eber, the son of Shelah, the son of Canaan, the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem. Canaan? Who is this Canaan? Well, the New King James Version in my Logos Bible software has a little letter D next to Canaan’s name here in Luke 3.36. That’s called a superscript. And that means there is a note attached to Canaan’s name. Maybe that will tell us what’s going on here. When I hover over that little D, it says Genesis 11.12. Wow. I’m confused. Canaan was not mentioned in Genesis 11. I hope this is as shocking to you as it is to me. My Bible contains a cross-reference to Genesis 11-12 at Luke 3-36, specifically attached to the name Canaan, yet Canaan is not mentioned in Genesis 11-12. And by the way, it’s not just my digital Bible in Lagos. Bible.com has this cross-reference. My YouVersion Bible app on my cell phone has this cross-reference. How many people are going to look at the cross-reference and just trust that this Canaan guy is mentioned in Genesis 11-12? We can’t even count. So, ignoring for a second this fabricated cross-reference… Let’s look at the actual text of Luke 3 and Genesis 11. Luke 3 says that Canaan was the son of Arphaxad, but Genesis 11 says Shalah was the son of Arphaxad. Luke 3 says that Canaan was the father of Shalah, but Genesis 11 says that Arphaxad was the father of Shalah. So what gives here? You know what this is called? This is called a contradiction. That’s what this is called. This is what you call a problem. Luke 3 and Genesis 11 cannot both be right in this situation. They cannot both be right. This is a true dichotomy, meaning you have to pick one unless you’re going to try to argue that they’re both wrong, which no one’s arguing. Now, let me tell you what a lot of Christians do And this is exactly what Christians need to stop doing. And by the way, I’m guilty of this, okay? I think we all do this, and if you don’t, I tip my hat to you. Seriously. What we need to stop doing is panicking when presented something like this and immediately just looking for any way out of it. Any way to solve it, any way to reconcile it. Imagine it’s not me, your friend, your fellow Christian presenting this to you, but it’s an atheist or a skeptic trying to show you that the Bible is full of errors. You know the feeling. You start to panic. Your heart starts to beat faster and you don’t know how to respond because this looks really bad. It’s a contradiction. And instead of just being honest with them and telling them you need to research it, you start to think as fast as you can on your feet because you just want to neutralize their argument in the moment. You know what the problem with this is? We’re not even being honest with ourselves when we do that. We’re not really seeking the truth if we do that, are we? Are we really trying to figure out the truth? No, we’re not. How about we stop and just look at it and study it? Now, I get it. I know it’s not fun to not… Stop the tape.

SPEAKER 01 : 28:19

Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. If you want the rest, you’re going to have to get that at enyart.shop. That’s E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P, enyart.shop, and you will have to sign up for the Bob Enyart sermons. This was a Will Duffy sermon, but the Will Duffy sermons… are included in the Bob Enyart Sermon Library, so you do not want to miss that. All of Bob Enyart’s sermons are there. All of Will Duffy’s sermons are there. All of my sermons are there at enyart.shop, E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P. May God bless you guys.