Chapter Four - From Hebrew to Greek

CHAPTER FOUR

From Hebrew to Greek

ALRIGHT — PICTURE THIS:
You’re a Jewish community living in Egypt. It’s 250-ish BCE.
You speak Greek now. Not Hebrew.

You’ve got traditions, prayers, and sacred scrolls… but your kids can’t read them.
So what do you do?

You translate.

And that one decision?
It changes everything.

A few centuries earlier, Alexander the Great had done what Alexander the Great does: conquer everything. Including Judea.

And when he died, Greek culture didn’t disappear — it spread. All across the eastern Mediterranean, Greek became the common language. Even many Jews outside of Israel didn’t speak Hebrew anymore. They were part of this new, blended, Hellenistic world.

So Jewish scholars in Alexandria decided: Let’s translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.

The result?
The Septuagint. (Also known as the LXX — because tradition says 70-ish translators worked on it.)

First of all, this made the Hebrew Bible readable outside the Hebrew community.

Suddenly:

• Greek-speaking Jews could study the Scriptures again
• Non-Jews (aka Gentiles) could access Jewish thought for the first time
• And the texts themselves started moving across borders

But more than that — the Septuagint wasn’t just a translation.

It included some extra books too. Stuff like:

• Tobit
• Judith
• 1 & 2 Maccabees
• Wisdom of Solomon
• Sirach

These became known later as the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical books — depending on who you ask. We’ll come back to them in Chapter 7.

For now, just know:
The Septuagint was huge. It became the Bible of the early Christian church. When Paul or the Gospel writers quoted Scripture?
They were usually quoting the Greek version, not the Hebrew original.

So now the Bible wasn’t just a local set of scrolls.
It was a translated, portable, multi-lingual library.

And that raised new questions:

• What counts as “Scripture”?
• Is translation sacred?
• Can different versions still tell the same story?

Big questions. Still asked today.

But back then, the answer was simple:
If people couldn’t read it, they couldn’t live by it.

So the Bible got translated.
And the world got bigger.