Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures that dates from the 3rd century BC, containing both a translation of the Hebrew and additional and variant material, regarded as the standard form of the Old Testament in the early Christian Church and still canonical in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The Seventy—that is, the seventy (or more) persons who, according to the tradition, made a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.
  • noun A Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures made by the Seventy (see def. 1): usually expressed by the symbol LXX (‘the Seventy’).
  • Pertaining to the Septuagint; contained in the Greek copy of the Old Testament.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A Greek version of the Old Testament; -- so called because it was believed to be the work of seventy (or rather of seventy-two) translators.
  • noun the chronology founded upon the dates of the Septuagint, which makes 1500 years more from the creation to Abraham than the Hebrew Bible.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun An ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, undertaken by Jews resident in Alexandria for the benefit of Jews who had forgotten their Hebrew (well before the birth of Jesus); abbreviated as LXX. The LXX is the untranslated standard version of the Old Testament for the Greek Orthodox Church, but not for the Western Church, which since Jerome, has adhered to the Masoretic text. In the original Greek New Testament, when Jesus quotes the Old Testament, he is made to quote the LXX, which tends to disagree with the Masoretic text.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the oldest Greek version of the Old Testament; said to have been translated from the Hebrew by Jewish scholars at the request of Ptolemy II

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin septuāgintā, seventy (from the traditional number of its translators) : septem, seven; see septm̥ in Indo-European roots + -gintā, ten times; see dekm̥ in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin septuāgintā ("the seventy"), for the reputed 70 scholars who did the work.

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