The Origin of the Septuagint

The following is a translation of a page of the Talmud, which addresses the origin of the Greek translation of the Scriptures, the Septuagint. This translation comes from the Davka CD-ROM Talmud. Numbers highlighted in blue denote footnotes beneath the Talmud quote.

‘R. Judah said: When our teachers permitted Greek, they permitted it only for a scroll of the Torah’.1 This was on account of the incident related in connection with King Ptolemy,2 as it has been taught: ‘It is related of King Ptolemy that he brought together seventy-two elders and placed them in seventy-two [separate] rooms, without telling them why he had brought them together, and he went in to each one of them and said to him, Translate3 for me the Torah of Moses your master.4 G-d then prompted each one of them and they all conceived the same idea and wrote for him, G-d created in the beginning,5 I shall make man in image and likeness,6 And he finished on the sixth day,and rested on the seventh day,7 Male and female he created him 8 [but they did not write ‘created them’],9 Come let me descend and confound their tongues,10 And Sarah laughed among her relatives;11 For in their anger they slew an ox and in their wrath they digged up a stall;12 And Moses took his wife and his children, and made them ride on a carrier of men;13And the abode of the children of Israel which they stayed in Egypt and in other lands was four hundred years,14 And he sent the elect of the children of Israel;15 And against the elect of the children of Israel he put not forth his and; (The Talmud goes to the next page to list the rest of the changes from the original Hebrew that were made in the translation.)

(1) Thus R. Judah forbade other books of the Scripture to be written save in the original language.
(2) It seems to be an historical fact that a Greek translation of the Pentateuch was made in the time of King Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt (285-247), but many regard this as apocryphal; cf, The Letter of Aristeas.
(3) Lit., ‘write’.
(4) Here follow a number of cases in which the translation of the Elders did not follow the Massoretic text. We do not find all these variants in our texts of the Septuagint.
(5) Instead of ‘In the beginning G-d created’. The purpose of this change was apparently to prevent the idea of Two Powers being read into the text, i.e., ‘In the beginning’ and ‘G-d’. V. Rashi and Tosaf. a.I.
(6) Gen. 1, 26, instead of ‘Let us make’, for the same reason.
(7) Ibid. II, 2, instead of ‘and he finished on the seventh day’, which might be taken to imply that some work was done on the seventh day.
(8) Ibid. V, 2.
(9) Which might be taken to mean that they were separate from the first.
(10) Ibid. XI, 7: ‘me’ instead of ‘us’. V. n. 7.
(11) Ibid. XVIII, 12: instead of ‘in herself’, in order to make a distinction between Sarah and Abraham, who also laughed inwardly.
(12) Ibid. XLIX, 6: ‘ox’ instead of ‘man’, to save the name of Jacob's sons.
(13) Ex. IV, 20: carrier of men’ instead of ‘ass’, to save the dignity of Moses.
(14) Ibid. XII, 40. The words ‘and in other lands’ are inserted because, according to the Biblical record, the Israelites were at the utmost 210 years in Egypt.
(14) Ibid. XXIV, 5: ‘elect’ instead of ‘young men’, which is regarded as not suitable to the context.
(15) Ibid. 11 : ‘elect’ instead of ‘nobles’.

Furthermore, we see corroboration of this from the works of Flavius Josephus, in his preface to Antiquities of the Jews.

I found, therefore, that the second of the Ptolemies was a king who was extraordinarily diligent in what concerned learning, and the collection of books; that he was also peculiarly ambitious to procure a translation of our law, and of the constitution of our government therein contained, into the Greek tongue. Now Eleazar the high priest, one not inferior to any other of that dignity among us, did not envy the forenamed king the participation of that advantage, which otherwise he would for certain have denied him, but that he knew the custom of our nation was, to hinder nothing of what we esteemed ourselves from being communicated to others. Accordingly, I thought it became me both to imitate the generosity of our high priest, and to suppose there might even now be many lovers of learning like the king; for he did not obtain all our writings at that time; but those who were sent to Alexandria as interpreters, gave him only the books of the law, while there were a vast number of other matters in our sacred books. They, indeed, contain in them the history of five thousand years; in which time happened many strange accidents, many chances of war, and great actions of the commanders, and mutations of the form of our government. Upon the whole, a man that will peruse this history, may principally learn from it, that all events succeed well, even to an incredible degree, and the reward of felicity is proposed by G-d; but then it is to those that follow his will, and do not venture to break his excellent laws: and that so far as men any way apostatize from the accurate observation of them, what was practical before becomes impracticable and whatsoever they set about as a good thing, is converted into an incurable calamity.

So, we see, the Septuagint, as it was in its original form, was only a translation of only the Torah for a specific reason, and that reason is that the Sages would not allow the Prophets and Writings to be translated at that time.  Often you find Christian apologists and missionaries pointing to the Prophets and the Writings in the Septuagint, saying "don't you see? This is how the rabbis translated it into Greek!"

Those portions of the LXX were translated by Christians to advance Christian theology.