“In his Life of Moses (vii:41-2), Philo writes that an annual festival was still held at Pharos in his day to celebrate the translation of the Septuagint. He witnessed a joyous festival, in which not only Jews, but a great number of ‘persons of other nations sailed across the bay to honor the placed where the first light of interpretation shone forth, and to thank God for that ancient piece of beneficence…. And after the prayers and the giving of thanks, some of them pitched their tents on the shore, and some of them lay down without any tents in the open air on the sand of the shone, and feasted with their relations and friends, thinking the shore at that time a more beautiful abode than the furniture of the king’s palace.’”
Two thousand, three hundred years after its appearance, the Septuagint is still the most unbiased record of God’s revelation to His people. And that is why we, the new Israel, the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostle Church, still cherish it.
10 – The Books Of The Old Testament
The text that follows has been prepared by Father Arsenius, monk, of Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Brookline, MA.
If you are Orthodox you need more than a mere list of books. The translation of the books in question must be made from the authentic text of those books. The translations “made from the original Hebrew” which Protestant preachers are always waving about in the air and thumping, are, alas! not what they claim to be. When the last Jewish editors of the present Hebrew text finished revising it, (which was over 1000 years after Christ) they demanded that all copies of Hebrew scripture which varied from their own be completely destroyed on pain of death if the owner of any such copies failed to comply. This demand was carried out so faithfully from Toledo in Spain to Babylon in Mesopotamia (an enormous area, if you look at your map) that until the finding of the so-called “Dead Sea Scrolls” only one earlier copy of the older Hebrew text had ever been recovered (the celebrated “Cairo Genizeh” copy.)
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