Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
THE GREEK OLD TESTAMENT
THE ORIGIN OF THE SEPTUAGINT
Almost from the time that Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in Egypt in 331 bc, there was a Jewish element in its Greek-speaking population, and this element continued to increase in the generations that followed. There were Jewish settlements in most of the other Greek-speaking cities established throughout the area of Alexander’s conquests, but none was so important as that in Alexandria. The process of Jewish settlement there was facilitated by the fact that, until 198 bc, Judaea formed part of the kingdom of the Ptolemies, who succeeded to Alexander’s empire in Egypt and made Alexandria their capital.
Before long the Jews or Alexandria gave up using the language their ancestors had spoken in Palestine and spoke Greek only. This would have involved their being cut off from the use of the Hebrew Bible and the traditional prayers and thanksgivings, had the scriptures not been translated into Greek. The Greek translation of the scriptures was made available from time to time in the third and second centuries bc (say during the century 250–150 bc). The law, comprising the five books of Moses, was the first part of the scriptures to appear in a Greek version; the reading of the law was essential to synagogue worship, and it was important that what was read should be intelligible to the congregation. At first, perhaps, the law was read in Hebrew, as it was back home in Palestine, and someone was appointed to give an oral translation in Greek. But as time went on a written Greek version was provided, so that it could be read directly.
In the course of time a legend attached itself to this Greek version of the law, telling how it was the work of seventy or rather seventy-two elders of Israel who were brought to Alexandria for the purpose. It is because of this legend that the term Septuagint (from Latin septuaginta, ‘seventy’) came to be attached to the version. As time went on, the term came to be attached to the whole of the Old Testament in Greek, and the original legend of the seventy was further embellished. The legend is recorded originally in a document called the Letter of Aristeas, which tells how the elders completed the translation of the Pentateuch in seventy-two days, achieving an agreed version as the result of regular conference and comparison. Later embellishments not only extended their work to cover the whole Old Testament but told how they were isolated from one another in separate cells for the whole period and produced seventy-two identical versions—conclusive proof, it was urged, of the divine inspiration of the work! Philo, the Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, relates how the translators worked in isolation from one another but wrote the same text word for word, ‘as though it were dictated to each by an invisible prompter’; but both he and Josephus confirm that it was only the books of the law that were translated by the elders. It was Christian writers who extended their work to the rest of the Old Testament and, taking over Philo’s belief in their inspiration, extended that also to cover the whole of the Greek Old Testament, including those books that never formed part of the Hebrew Bible.
A WIDER CANON?
It has frequently been suggested that, while the canon of the Palestinian Jews was limited to the twenty-four books of the Law, Prophets and Writings, the canon of the Alexandrian Jews was more comprehensive. There is no evidence that this was so: indeed, there is no evidence that the Alexandrian Jews ever promulgated a canon of scripture. The reason for thinking that they did, and that it was a more comprehensive canon than that acknowledged in Palestine, is that Greek-speaking Christians, who naturally took over the Greek Old Testament that was already in existence, took over the Greek version of a number of other books and gave some measure of scriptural status to them also.
While it was at Alexandria that the Hebrew scriptures were first translated into Greek, the use of the Greek version quickly spread to other Jewish communities throughout the Greek-speaking world, not excluding Judaea itself, where (as the New Testament shows) there were ‘Hellenists’ (Greek-speaking Jews) as well as ‘Hebrews’ (Hebrew- or Aramaic-speaking Jews).
With few and fragmentary exceptions, the Septuagint manuscripts now in existence were produced by Christians. (From now on, the term ‘Septuagint’ is used in this work of the pre-Christian Greek version of the whole Old Testament.) Jewish copies of the Septuagint known to have survived are: (a) a fragment of Deuteronomy from the second century bc in the John Rylands University Library, Manchester ( 458), (b) another fragment of Deuteronomy of about the same date preserved in Cairo ( 266), (c) fragments from the Qumran caves of two scrolls of Leviticus (lxx Lva and lxx Lvb) and one of Numbers (lxx Num) from Cave 4, and of Exodus ( Ex) and the ‘Letter of Jeremiah’ (lxx Ep Jer) from Cave 7, (d) a fragmentary scroll of the Minor Prophets in Greek from Wadị Ḥever ( gr), hailed in 1953, shortly after it was discovered, as ‘a missing link in the history of the Septuagint’ (it turned out to be identical, or nearly so, with the Greek text of those books used by Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century ad).
The grandson of Jeshua ben Sira evidently knew the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible: in the preface to the Greek translation of his grandfather’s book he apologizes for any defects in his work, on the ground that ‘what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language. Not only this work, but even the law itself, the prophecies, and the rest of the books differ not a little as originally expressed.’
In 2 Maccabees 15:9 Judas Maccabaeus, encouraging his followers before their battle with the Greek commander Nicanor (161 bc), is described as ‘encouraging them from the law and the prophets’. Judas would have used the Hebrew scriptures, but it would probably be right to infer that ‘the law and the prophets’ were known in Greek to the compiler of 2 Maccabees (c 50 bc) and indeed to Jason of Cyrene, a Hellenistic Jewish writer whose five-volume work on the Maccabaean struggle is abridged in 2 Maccabees.
Philo of Alexandria (c 20 bc-ad 50) evidently knew the scriptures in the Greek version only. He was an illustrious representative of Alexandrian Judaism, and if Alexandrian Judaism did indeed recognize a more comprehensive canon than Palestinian Judaism, one might have expected to find some trace of this in Philo’s voluminous writings. But in fact, while Philo has not given us a formal statement on the limits of the canon such as we have in Josephus, the books which he acknowledged as holy scripture were quite certainly books included in the traditional Hebrew Bible. He indicates that special veneration is paid to ‘the laws, inspired oracles given through the prophets, hymns and the other books by which knowledge and piety may be increased and brought to perfection’. These are the books, he says, which the Therapeutae (a body of Jewish ascetics in Egypt comparable to the Essenes in Palestine) keep in their private sanctuaries. The books ‘by which knowledge and piety may be increased and brought to perfection’ are presumably poetical and wisdom books: how many of them Philo knew he does not say. He shows no sign of accepting the authority of any of the books which we know as the Apocrypha. It cannot be said certainly that he accepted all the books found in the Hebrew Bible: there are some, especially in the Writings, of which he makes no mention.
Josephus in his Antiquities generally depends on the Septuagint. He used the services of translators, to ensure the literary quality of his Greek, but the dependence on the Septuagint which the work evinces is probably his own and not simply theirs. For his precise delimitation of the canon of scripture, however, he almost certainly relied on Palestinian sources—this was what he had been taught by his instructors in the years before the war against the Romans which broke out in ad 66 (he had little enough opportunity of contact with Palestinian teachers after the war).
SEPTUAGINTAL ORDER OF BOOKS
The order of books in copies of the Septuagint which have come down to us differs from the traditional order of the Hebrew Bible, and lies behind the conventional order of the Christian Old Testament. The law, comprising the five books of Moses, comes first in both traditions; it is followed by the historical books, poetical and wisdom books, and the books of the prophets. As with the Hebrew Bible, so with the Septuagint, the order of books is more fluid when they are copied on separate scrolls than when they are bound together in codices. But there is no reason to think that the Christian scribes who first copied the Septuagint into codices devised a new sequence for its contents; it is more likely that they took over the sequence along with the text itself. It has been held indeed that the Septuagint order represents an early Palestinian order of the books in the Hebrew Bible, contemporary with, and possibly even antedating, the Hebrew order which became traditional. The evidence is too scanty for any certainty to be attainable on this matter.
After the Pentateuch, the second division of the Septuagint corresponds largely with the Former Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, but Ruth is inserted (in keeping with its dramatic date) between Judges and 1 Samuel, and the books of Samuel and Kings (called in the Septuagint the four books of Kingdoms or Reigns) are followed by the books of Chronicles (called Paraleipomena, ‘things left over’), 1 Esdras (a variant Greek edition of the history from 2 Chron. 35:1 to Neh. 8:13), 2 Esdras (our Ezra-Nehemiah), Esther, Judith and Tobit. Judith and Tobit are not included in the Hebrew Bible; Esther in the Septuagint is a considerably expanded edition of the Hebrew Esther.
The third division contains the poetical and wisdom books: Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Job, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus (the book of Jeshua ben Sira). Of these, Wisdom (originally written in Greek) and Ecclesiasticus (originally written in Hebrew) are not found in the Hebrew Bible. An additional psalm (Ps. 151, known in Hebrew at Qumran) is appended to the Psalter.
As for the fourth division (the prophetical books), the twelve minor prophets precede the others in the early uncial manuscripts (notably the Sinaitic, Vatican and Alexandrine codices). Jeremiah is followed not only by Lamentations but also by the book of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah, neither of which is in the Hebrew Bible. Daniel is amplified by two stories not in the Hebrew text—the History of Susanna, which is put at the beginning, and the story of Bel and the Dragon, which is added at the end—while a prayer of confession and a canticle of praise to God Benedicite omnia opera) are put in the mouths of Daniel’s three friends in the fiery furnace, so that 68 verses are inserted between verses 23 and 24 of chapter 3.
The books of Maccabees—two, three or four in number—form a sort of appendix to the Septuagint; they do not belong to any of its main divisions.
Those works which appear in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible are sometimes referred to as the ‘Septuagintal plus’; together with two or three other compositions they are the books which, since Jerome’s time, have commonly been called the Apocrypha.
THE SEPTUAGINT IN THE CHURCH
The scriptures known to Jesus and his disciples were no doubt the scrolls of the Hebrew Bible—the Law, the Prophets and the Writings—kept in synagogues for use during regular services and possibly at other times. When Jesus was about to read the second lesson in the Nazareth synagogue on the first sabbath that he visited his home town after the beginning of his public ministry, and ‘there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah’ (Luke 4:17), it was most probably a Hebrew scroll that he received. But even in Palestine, and not least in Jerusalem itself, there were many Greek-speaking Jews, Hellenists, and there were synagogues where they might go to hear the scriptures read and the prayers recited in Greek. Such was the Synagogue of the Freedmen where Stephen held debate in Jerusalem (Acts 6:9).
However much the wording of Stephen’s defence in Acts 7 may owe to the narrator, the consistency with which its biblical quotations and allusions are based on the Septuagint is true to life. Since Stephen was a Hellenist, the Septuagint was the edition of the scriptures which he would naturally use.
As soon as the gospel was carried into the Greek-speaking world, the Septuagint came into its own as the sacred text to which the preachers appealed. In was used in the Greek-speaking synagogues throughout the Roman Empire. When Paul at Thessalonica visited the synagogue on three successive sabbaths and ‘argued with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead’ (Acts 17:2f.), it was on the Septuagint that he based his arguments. We see him doing this earlier in greater detail in the synagogue of Pisidian Antioch. There, after the reading of the two regular sabbath lessons from ‘the law and the prophets’, he outlined the history of Israel from the Exodus in Moses’s day to the beginning of David’s reign, and showed how this course of events led inevitably and ultimately to the coming of Jesus, ‘great David’s greater Son’, in whose death and resurrection the promises made by God to David found their fulfilment (Acts 13:17–37). For Christians, the Old Testament pointed forward to Jesus; it was, in fact, meaningless without him.
The Septuagint played its part even when the gospel was presented to complete pagans, like the unsophisticated Lycaonians at Lystra, who mistook Paul and Barnabas for divine beings (Acts 14:8–18), or the sophisticated members of the Athenian court of the Areopagus, who had no such exaggerated estimate of Paul (Acts 17:16–32). To them the Septuagint was not specifically quoted, yet the preliminary arguments from God’s work in creation and providence were securely based on the Greek scriptures.
‘Greek Judaism’, it has been said, ‘with the Septuagint had ploughed the furrows for the gospel seed in the Western world’; but it was the Christian preachers who sowed the seed. So thoroughly, indeed, did Christians appropriate the Septuagint as their version of the scriptures that the Jews became increasingly disenchanted with it. The time came when one rabbi compared ‘the accursed day on which the seventy elders wrote the Law in Greek for the king’ to the day on which Israel made the golden calf. New Greek versions of the Old Testament were produced for Jewish use—in particular, the very literal rendering of Aquila and a more idiomatic rendering by Theodotion. (Theodotion’s version of Daniel was so far superior to the earlier Septuagint version that Christians preferred it: in almost all manuscripts of the Greek Bible it is Theodotion’s Daniel, not the original Septuagint version, that appears.)
THE NEW TESTAMENT EVIDENCE
While the New Testament writers all used the Septuagint, to a greater or lesser degree, none of them tells us precisely what the limits of its contents were. The ‘scriptures’ to which they appealed covered substantially the same range as the Hebrew Bible. We cannot say with absolute certainty, for example, if Paul treated Esther or the Song of Songs as scripture any more than we can say if those books belonged to the Bible which Jesus knew and used. Paul possibly alludes to Ecclesiastes when he says that creation was made subject to ‘vanity’ (Rom. 8:20), using the same word (Gk. mataiotēs) as is used in the Septuagint for the refrain of that book: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’(Eccles. 1:2; 12:8).
On the other side of the frontier which divides the books of the Hebrew Bible from the ‘Septuagintal plus’, the book of Wisdom was possibly in Paul’s mind as he dictated part of the first two chapters of Romans, but that would not give it scriptural status: if he does allude to it, he probably contradicts it here and there. The writer to the Hebrews probably had the martyrologies of 2 Maccabees 6:18–7:41 or 4 Maccabees 5:3–18:24 in view when he spoke of the tortures and other hardships which some endured through faith (Heb. 11:35b–38); and when he says in the same context that some were sawn in two he may allude to a document which described how the prophet Isaiah was so treated.
The Nestle-Aland edition of the Greek New Testament (1979) has an index of Old Testament texts cited or alluded to in the New Testament, followed by an index of allusions not only to the ‘Septuagintal plus’ but also to several other works not included in the Septuagint. Many of these last are resemblances rather than conscious allusions; only one is a straight quotation explicitly ascribed to its source. That is the quotation from ‘Enoch in the seventh generation from Adam’ in Jude 14f; this comes recognizably from the apocalyptic book of Enoch (1 Enoch 1:9). Earlier in Jude’s letter the account of Michael’s dispute with the devil over the body of Moses may refer to a work called the Assumption of Moses or Ascension of Moses, but if so, the part of the work containing this incident has been lost (Jude 9).
There are, however, several quotations in the New Testament which are introduced as though they were taken from holy scripture, but their source can no longer be identified. For instance, the words ‘He shall be called a Nazarene’, quoted in Matthew 2:23 as ‘what was spoken by the prophets’, stand in that form in no known prophetical book. It has been suggested that there may be an allusion to Isaiah 11:1, where the expected son of David is described as a ‘branch’ to grow out of the roots of Jesse, as though Heb. nēṣer (‘branch’) were to be read as noṣrî (‘Nazarene’).
Again, in John 7:38 ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water’ is introduced by the words ‘as the scripture has said’—but which scripture is referred to? An allusion to some such passage as Zechariah 14:8, ‘living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem’ (interpreted along the lines of the ‘river of the water of life’ in Rev. 22:1), has been suspected, but there can be no certainty.
Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2:9, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard …’, introduced by the clause ‘as it is written’, resemble Isaiah 64:4, but are not a direct quotation from it. Some church fathers say they come from a work called the Secrets of Elijah or Apocalypse of Elijah, but this work is not accessible to us and we do not know if it existed in Paul’s time. The triplet ‘Awake, O sleeper, / and arise from the dead, / and Christ shall give you light’ (Eph. 5:14), may be a primitive baptismal hymn, but it is introduced by the words ‘it is said’ (so for the more literal ‘he says’ or ‘it says’), exactly like the quotation from Psalm 68:18 ( 67:19) in Ephesians 4:8. Any resemblance to Jonah 1:6 is quite fortuitous. The naming of Moses’ opponents as Jannes and Jambres in 2 Timothy 3:8 may depend on some document no longer identifiable; the names, in varying forms, appear in a number of Jewish writings, mostly later than the date of the Pastoral Epistles.
We have no idea what ‘the scripture’ is which says, according to James 4:5, ‘He yearns jealously over the spirit which he has made to dwell in us’; we cannot even be sure of the sense, for it might mean, ‘The spirit which he has made to dwell in us yearns jealously.’
SEPTUAGINT AND NON-SEPTUAGINTAL VERSIONS
There are several places in which the Septuagint translators used a form of words which (without their being able to foresee it, naturally) lent itself to the purposes of New Testament writers better than the Hebrew text would have done. Thus, Matthew can quote as a prophecy of the virginal conception of Christ the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:14, ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son …’ (Matt. 1:23), where the Greek word parthenos means specifically ‘virgin’, as the Hebrew ʿalmāh need not. (Aquila, who provided a new Greek version of the Old Testament for Jewish use to replace the Septuagint, took care to employ the less specific Greek word neanis, ‘girl’ or ‘young woman’, to blunt the point of a Christian ‘argument from prophecy’.) Similarly, the Septuagint of Amos 9:11f. provided James the Just at the Council of Jerusalem with divine authority for the Gentile mission more directly than the Hebrew text could have done (Acts 15:15–18). (Here the Septuagint translators themselves had gone a long way towards spiritualizing and universalizing an oracle which originally spoke of national revival and expansion.)
But there are some places in the New Testament where the Old Testament is quoted in a different form from the Septuagint as it has come down to us. For example, in Matthew 12:18–21 the announcement of the Servant of the Lord in Isaiah 42:1–4 is quoted in what appears to be a non-Septuagintal version. The statement, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’ (from Deut. 32:35), is quoted in Romans 12:19 and Hebrews 10:30 in a form corresponding neither to the Hebrew text nor to the Septuagint, but to the Aramaic Targums on the Pentateuch. That renderings or paraphrases known to us only from the Targums were found also in Greek versions of the Old Testament in the first century ad is suggested also by such expressions as ‘lest they should … be forgiven’ (Mark 4:12) in a quotation from Isaiah 6:10 where the Hebrew and Septuagint read ‘lest they … be healed’; and ‘he gave gifts to men’ (Eph. 4:8) in a quotation from Psalm 68:18 (LXX 67:19) where the Hebrew and Septuagint read ‘… received gifts among men’.
There is also a little evidence for forms of the Greek version which approximated to distinctive features of the Samaritan Bible. For example, Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 is based throughout on the Septuagint, but his statement in verse 4 that Abraham left Harran for Canaan ‘after his father died’ is supported neither by the Septuagint wording (as we have received it) not by the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible; it is, however, consistent with the Samaritan text, which gives Terah’s age at death as 145, not 205 (Gen. 11:32).
There was a comparable practice in Hebrew-speaking synagogues in Palestine and farther east, where the reading of the law and the prophets in Hebrew was followed by an oral interpretation or targum in Aramaic. (See p. 53).
Philo, Life of Moses, 2.57.
Josephus, Antiquities, proem, 3.
See pp. 89, 96.
See Acts 6:1, according to which both these groups were represented at an early date in the church of Jerusalem.
Rylands Libary papyrus fragment of Deut. 23–28 (lxx)
Cairo papyrus fragment of Deut. 31–32 (lxx)
Fragment of Leviticus (lxx) from Qumran Cave 4
Another fragment of Leviticus (lxx) from Qumran Cave 4
Fragment of Numbers (lxx) from Qumran Cave 4
Fragment of Exodus (lxx) from Qumran Cave 7
Fragment of Letter of Jeremiah from Qumran Cave 7
MS of Minor Prophets in Greek from Wadi Hever
See D. Barthélemy, ‘Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant de l’histoire de la Septante’, Revue Biblique 60 (1953), pp. 18–29; Les devanciers d’Aquila, VTSup 10 (Leiden, 1963).
See p. 31.
Philo, On the Contemplative Life, 25.
See p. 32–34.
See P. Katz, ‘The Old Testament Canon in Palestine and Alexandria’, ZNW 47 (1956), pp. 191–217.
Esdras is the Greek form of Ezra. The nomenclature of the Esdras books is quite confusing. The following table provides a guide to the variations:
English ( av/kjv, rsv, etc.) Bible and Apocrypha
Septuagint
Latin Vulgate, Douay Bible, etc.
Ezra
=
2 Esdras 1–10
=
1 Esdras
Nehemiah
=
2 Esdras 11–23
=
2 Esdras
1 Esdras
=
1 Esdras
=
3 Esdras
2 Esdras
=
=
4 Esdras
2 Esdras (4 Esdras or 4 Ezra), which is not in the Septuagint, is for the most part (chapters 3–14) a Jewish apocalypse of the period following ad 70 (see p. 36), supplied with a Christian prologue (chapters 1–2) and epilogue (chapters 15–16).
In av/kjv the Letter of Jeremiah is printed as chapter 6 of Baruch.
In the earliest stage of the Greek version it was perhaps appended to the canonical book.
1 Maccabees relates the persecution of the Jews under Antiochus IV (175–164 bc) and the Maccabaean (Hasmonaean) resistance from a pro-Hasmonaean viewpoint; 2 Maccabees relates part of the same story from a Pharisaic viewpoint; 3 Maccabees describes a threat to the Jews of Alexandria under Ptolemy IV (221–203 bc); 4 Maccabees presents a moralizing meditation on the martyrdoms described in 2 Maccabees.
See pp. 90–93.
There were two scripture lessons in the synagogue service: the first lesson from the Law, the second from the Prophets (cf Acts 13:15).
A. Deissmann, New Light on the New Testament, E. T. (Edinburgh, 1907), p. 95.
Tractate Sopherim 1.8f. The ‘king’ is Ptolemy II of Egypt (285–246 bc) who, according to the legend in the Letter of Aristeas, lent his good offices in arranging for the seventy-two translators to come to Alexandria to carry out their work.
Theodotion’s version may have been in part a revision of an earlier one. Another Greek version, made by one Symmachus in the late second or early third century ad, was used by the Jewish Christian group known as Ebionites.
Two exceptions are LXX codices 88 (the Chigi manuscript of the Septuagint) and 967 (one of the Chester Beatty biblical papyri); these exhibit the original Septuagint version.
The exposure of pagan immorality in Rome 1:18–32 echoes Wisdom 12–14; the attitude of righteous Jews criticized by Paul in Rom. 2:1–11 has affinities with passages in Wisdom 11–15 (on these see A. Nygren, Commentary on Romans, E. T. [London, 1952], pp. 113–120).
This is particularly clear in his mention of ‘a better resurrection’ (verse 35b)—i.e. better than the restoration to mortal life granted to the sons of the widow of Zarephath and the Shunammite woman (verse 35a)—for a resurrection to immortality was the expressed hope of the mother and her seven sons in 2 Maccabees 7.
Perhaps the Ascension of Isaiah, a composite work of the 2nd century bc to the 4th century ad. The oldest part tells of Isaiah’s martyrdom under Manasseh.
See p. 85.
The extant part (also known as the Testament of Moses) is certainly incomplete, but the Assumption of Moses may have been a separate work from the Testament; if so, it has been entirely lost.
This device, by which it is suggested that one word be replaced by another having the same consonants but a different pattern of vowels, is familiar in the rabbinical writings: ‘Read not X but Y.’
On 1 Cor. 2:9 see p. 162 with nn. 8 and 9.
Revised Standard Version (1952, 1971)
Septuagint (pre-Christian Greek Version of OT)
See F. F. Bruce, Colossians, Philemon, Ephesians, NICNT (Grand Rapids, 1984), pp. 376–378.
The earliest occurrence, c. 100 bc (in the form ‘Yahaneh and his brother’), is in the Book of the Covenant of Damascus (CD 5.18). See H. Odeberg, ‘Iannēs, Iambrēs’, TDNT 3, pp. 192f.; A. T. Hanson, Studies in the Pastoral Epistles (London, 1968), pp. 26–28.
See P. H. Davids, The Epistle of James, NIGTC (Exeter/Grand Rapids, 1982), pp. 162–165.
LXX ‘that the remainder of mankind may seek [me]’ certainly makes a different impression from ‘that they [the dynasty of David] may take possession of the remainder of Edom’ (MT).
See P. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (London, 1947), pp. 166f., 2nd edition (Oxford, 1959), pp. 250–252; R. H. Gundry, The Use of the Old Testament in St Matthew’s Gospel, NovT Sup 18 (Leiden, 1967), pp. 110–116.
On Targums see pp. 44, 285. In Deut. 32:35; Is. 6:10 and Ps. 68:18 the Peshiṭta (the Syriac version of the Old Testament) agrees with the targumic construction.
The Masoretic text (MT) is the traditional Jewish text of the Hebrew Bible. If, as MT and LXX agree, Abraham was born when his father was 70 (Gen. 11:26) and left Harran for Canaan when he himself was 75 (Gen. 12:4), then Terah had still 60 years to live. In James Ussher’s chronology the statement of Acts 7:4 is reconciled with the MT evidence by the supposition that Terah was 70 when his oldest son was born but was 130 when Abraham was born.