Why Did the New Testament Writers Often Quote the Greek Septuagint Instead of the Hebrew?

let's go to ryan in yukon oklahoma welcome to the line of fire hi dr brown um i had a question that i'm sure that you have answered many times um and uh it is a question that a lot of people that get serious about studying their bible will come across and the question is and i've got an example the question is why are there so many times when the writers of the new testament including jesus himself and of course apostle paul would quote the old testament but they would go out of their way perhaps to quote the greeks instead of the hebrew the septuagint that was translated i guess about 100 years before christ and in in so doing there are many times where i get frustrated because i try to square the new testament with the old testament reference and they don't come out uh quite the same and the classic example i found was jeremiah 31 32 and hebrews 8 9 and i'll just be real brief the clause in hebrews 31 32 finishes by saying my covenant which they broke although i was a husband to them declares the lord but in hebrews 8 9 it says for they did not continue in my covenant and i did not care for them says the lord and so that's a classic example of where the greek new testament or the greek new testament is quoting the greek old testament but it's at odds with the old testament of hebrew and i wanted to see if you what you could talk to us about along those lines yeah of course uh thank you for the question and it is an important one and of course it's one that that anyone that just studies the bible carefully and as you say tries to dig deeper into the original text will raise so the simple answer is because the new testament writers were writing in greek they quoted the greek bible that was most widely used in their day later revisions symmetricus aquila though those would would post state new testament for the most part in terms of being widely distributed or used so it would be just like in the days when the king james bible was the english bible right and let's let's say i'm a pastor and i've got congregations in several different states maybe it's the 1700s and i'm writing a letter and i'm quoting scripture to them maybe i can read it perfectly from the greek or from the hebrew but i'm quoting it to them and say hey read this look this up in your bible the bible they have is the king james bible so that's what i'm going to quote from as long as the overall substance of it is accurate then i'm going to leave it like that so that was the bible that people had access to that was the bible that they would check for references and things like that so that's why they quoted it as far as jesus i don't believe that he would have referenced or quoted the septuagint because he would have been quoting the scriptures in hebrew and if he was teaching in a colloquial way he would have been teaching in aramaic so it's simply if a gospel writer say luke writing in greek is quoting jesus he's now going to use the septuagint the same way because just that's the bible of the people the one they're familiar with and the one that they can reference and look things up uh you know in if if they can get to a scroll or or someone has it memorized etc uh the the lesson would be that if the overall force of the message is coming across accurately then that's what matters that there may there may be a couple of different traditions in terms of how a word is translated or what the original text said did it say ba'alti for that passage in jeremiah 31 i was a husband to them uh as as in the hebrew uh could it have been a variant maybe alti i rejected them as as others might render it is that what the septuagint saw did the septuagint have a different understanding of the hebrew word so that's that's what's debated there's a a german word for laga which means the the text that is before you in other words when the septuagint translators were translating that did their text did their four loggers say alti or did it say something else or did they have a different understanding of the word either way they translate it differently and they're very close to it right they were they were 2 200 years before us in terms of closeness to the text so that would be the lesson which would also tell me that when when the bible is translated into multiple languages that's a good thing for example the quran you're supposed to read in the original arabic and if it's translated it's called the translation of the quran or the meaning of the quran because the quran technically is only in arabic that was not god's intent with the bible and therefore as long as the overall message gets out then we can we can debate very specific words and details but that's what we learned from the new testament usage dr brown i think that was a great point that you said uh thank you very much especially about how the gospel writers are quoting jesus jesus himself perhaps likely like you said did not quote from the septuagint but the gospel writers taking the material that he spoke went and when they would reference the old testament it seems that they that would be the times especially it seems like matthew takes a lot of liberty we would say with with some of those old testament scriptures but you know you know it's interesting though what's interesting ryan is that for example matthew 8 17 that's matthew's own translation from the hebrew we don't have anything like it in the targums and we don't have anything like it in in the septuagint in the same way in the 27th chapter where he's quoting from zechariah 11 with reference to to probably jeremiah 19 as well but he's quoting that he seems to provide his own translation there as well so when he felt it was important for a point that was being made to emphasize that he would do it but if you think for example the quotation in hebrews 8 of jeremiah 31 verses 31 to 34 which by the way is the longest quotation of any passage from the old testament in the new all four verses quoted the whole emphasis is the new covenant new covenant new covenant new covenant that's the emphasis and that comes across loudly and clearly hey again thank you for the questions feel free to call us again with more hey friends i hope you enjoyed that video if you did click on one of the boxes on the screen check out another one of our videos and be sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss a single video you know we discovered that about 60 of you that are watching our videos aren't subscribers so subscribe today doesn't cost your dime and if you want to support our work line of fire and all the things that we do follow one of the links on the screen below

Channel: The Line of Fire

Views: 20,930

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Id: ehRstUsBYTI

Length: 6min 58sec (418 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 13 2022