What is the Septuagint, and why it matters?
The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, produced in Alexandria roughly between 300–100 BC. Its abbreviation is LXX — the Roman numeral for 70, after the legend that it was translated by seventy scholars working independently and producing identical texts.
The legend isn’t historically reliable. The translation itself is.
Why the Septuagint shows up in New Testament scholarship
When New Testament authors quoted the Old Testament, they usually quoted the Septuagint. Not the Hebrew. They were writing in Greek, for Greek-speaking communities, and the LXX was the scripture those communities knew.
This has concrete consequences. Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 using the Greek word parthenos (virgin). The underlying Hebrew word, almah, means “young woman” — not specifically a virgin. Matthew’s rendering follows the Septuagint’s translation choice, not the Hebrew directly. Understanding that shift — and why it matters — requires access to both traditions.
The same applies to Paul. When he quotes the Psalms in Romans, the Greek often follows the LXX rendering, which sometimes diverges from modern English translations made from the Hebrew. The theological weight Paul places on certain words reflects how those words functioned in the Greek tradition the early church inherited.
The lexical bridge
Many Greek words in the New Testament carry meaning shaped by their usage in the LXX, not by classical Greek. The word agape (love) barely appears in classical literature but saturates the LXX and NT. Ekklesia (assembly/church) picks up its sense from how the LXX renders the Hebrew qahal.
If you’re using a reference built only on classical Greek usage for NT word study, you’re working with the wrong frame for a significant portion of what you’re reading. The value of a full lexicon over a one-line gloss is exactly that it records this range — how a word was used in classical sources, in the papyri, and in the Septuagint.
When New Testament authors quoted the Old Testament, they usually quoted the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation made in Alexandria around 300–100 BC — so words like agape and ekklesia carry meaning shaped by the LXX rather than classical Greek. A lexicon like Liddell-Scott-Jones documents that Septuagint usage directly.
Practically speaking
Access to the Septuagint as a readable Greek text on mobile is limited. Logos has it as part of desktop library packages. STEP Bible has it in a browser. Blue Letter Bible doesn’t offer it. YouVersion doesn’t.
Here’s the honest position on Scribe: it does not include the LXX as a readable, side-by-side translation. Its 14 translations are 12 English and 2 Tagalog; there are no readable parallel original-language Bible texts — the originals live at the word level.
What Scribe does give you is the lexical layer that makes the Septuagint matter for NT study. Tap a Greek word on the BSB or MSB and you get its full Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) entry — the standard Greek lexicon, which documents classical, Koine, and Septuagint usage. So while you can’t read the LXX itself in Scribe, the record of how its vocabulary was used — the reason a word like agape means what it means in the NT — is there when you study the word.
This isn’t a reason on its own to choose any particular app. If you aren’t doing original-language work, LSJ access is irrelevant. If you are, it’s a layer that’s genuinely hard to find on a phone. For the mechanics of that study — Strong’s, lexicons, morphology — see Greek and Hebrew word study on your iPhone, and for why a Strong’s number alone falls short, Greek word study beyond Strong’s. If you want to go further, the optional AI research assistant can reason over the passage and its LSJ entries using your own AI key (Anthropic or OpenRouter).