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Tuesday 23 August 2016

Hebrews 1:10-12 - Septuagint or Masoretic?

Now the writer quotes from Psalm 102:25-27. In the Hebrew version these verses are addressed to God, so it seems that the writer is using the principle that any words applied to God can be applied to Christ. However, in the Septuagint version these words are applied to “some anonymous figure”. This figure is Christ. Now is this a purely random use or interpretation of Scripture? Well Jesus did the same sort of thing when speaking about Psalm 110 in Matt 22:44-46 talking about “the Lord said to my Lord”, and Jesus said it was speaking about Him. So the writer of Hebrews is treating this passage in the same way that Jesus treated Psalm 110. That still leaves the question of the Septuagint, which the New Testament most often uses as its “version of the Bible”, and the writer of Hebrews does almost entirely. So is the New Testament using a reliable “version”. Well I am no expert in this area, so the following are only thoughts I have picked up from here and there and what follows should be treated with some caution.
The original Hebrew was written with no vowels. The earliest Hebrew version that had vowels that we have is called the Masoretic text and comes from the 9th century AD.The Septuagint was a translation of the non-vowel version and is a good translation, and was produced about one thousand years prior to the Masoretic text. So it seems possible that the Septuagint is actually a more reliable text than the Masoretic, or at least that the NT use of the Septuagint is perfectly justifiable.

So the writer of Hebrews is using the version of the Old Testament that his readers were familiar with, and is using it in a consistent manner.

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