Septuagint’s contested history comes into focus in review of Timothy Michael Law’s book

The Los Angeles Review of Books has published Kevin Hart’s review of Timothy Michael Law’s When God Spoke Greek, an account of the Septuagint’s origins, development and lasting influence on Jewish and Christian scripture.

The Septuagint began with a Greek translation of the Torah in Alexandria in the early to mid-third century BCE. Other Jewish scriptures were translated in later centuries, although the precise dates, locations and reasons remain uncertain. Hart stresses that the Septuagint was a work in progress rather than a single, settled canon.

The review also challenges the assumption that early Jewish and Christian communities shared a uniform biblical collection. Hart notes that scriptures were included, excluded and arranged differently across communities, and that “scripture” and “canon” were not interchangeable concepts.

The traditional story of 72 Jewish translators comes from the Letter of Aristeas, whose historical reliability is disputed. Hart says modern scholars generally regard the letter as a later Jewish work, while the name Septuagint derives from the Latin for “seventy”, following Josephus’s account.

The Septuagint’s significance extends beyond translation history. Hart highlights evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls that some ancient Hebrew manuscripts differed from the received Hebrew Bible and, in places, aligned more closely with the Greek text. The findings suggest that the received Hebrew Bible incorporated revisions of earlier textual traditions.

Early Christian communities treated the Greek scriptures as authoritative, and New Testament writers quoted the Septuagint. Hart points to Paul’s use of its wording in Romans as an example of how the Greek text shaped Christian interpretation. He describes Law’s book as a rare introduction to Septuagint studies written for readers beyond specialist academic circles.