Septuagint vs Masoretic Text: Which Is Authoritative?

Question 1046.

When I open my Old Testament, I am reading a translation of ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and the Masoretic Text is the specific textual tradition standing behind almost every English version on my shelf, including the ESV. But it is not the only ancient witness to the Old Testament, and understanding how it relates to the Greek Septuagint that Jesus and the apostles so often quoted sits right at the heart of how we received our Bible and why we can trust it.

I want to explain what the Masoretic Text actually is, how it differs from the Septuagint, why those differences exist, and why none of this should unsettle confidence in the Scripture you hold in your hands.

What the Masoretic Text Actually Is

The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Scriptures, named after the Masoretes, Jewish scribes who worked primarily between the sixth and tenth centuries AD to preserve and standardise the Hebrew Bible with extraordinary care. They added vowel points to the consonantal Hebrew text, since ancient Hebrew was originally written without vowels, along with accent marks and marginal notes called the Masorah, all designed to protect the text from corruption in transmission.

The oldest complete manuscript of the Masoretic Text is the Leningrad Codex, dating to around AD 1008, though the Aleppo Codex, roughly a century older, is slightly earlier but incomplete. The Masoretic Text forms the basis for nearly all modern Old Testament translations, including the ESV, NIV and NASB, which is why it matters enormously for ordinary Bible readers, not only for specialists in ancient languages.

What the Septuagint Is

The Septuagint, often abbreviated LXX, is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, produced in Alexandria, Egypt, beginning around 250 BC. According to the Letter of Aristeas, seventy-two Jewish scholars, hence the name from the Latin septuaginta meaning “seventy”, translated the Torah for the library of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and over the following centuries the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures were rendered into Greek by later translators.

The Septuagint became the Bible of the early church, is quoted extensively in the New Testament, and remains the Old Testament of the Eastern Orthodox churches today. It represents an independent and, at points, remarkably early witness to a Hebrew text tradition that sometimes differs from what the Masoretes later preserved.

Why the Masoretic Text and Septuagint Differ

The differences between the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint are not simply translation choices. In some places, the Septuagint appears to reflect an older Hebrew text than the one the Masoretes preserved centuries later. This became dramatically clear with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. Among the scrolls found at Qumran were Hebrew manuscripts dating from the third century BC to the first century AD, well over a thousand years older than the Leningrad Codex.

What scholars discovered was remarkable. Some scrolls aligned closely with the Masoretic Text, others aligned with the Hebrew text underlying the Septuagint, and still others represented a previously unknown textual tradition altogether. The book of Jeremiah is a striking example. The Septuagint version of Jeremiah is about one eighth shorter than the Masoretic Text, and the material is arranged in a different order, and Qumran manuscripts have since shown evidence for both textual forms circulating in ancient Israel simultaneously.

Which Text Should We Trust: Resolving the Tension

I want to be honest that this is a genuinely interesting scholarly question rather than a threat to biblical confidence. For the vast majority of the Old Testament, the Masoretic Text and the Hebrew text underlying the Septuagint agree closely, and the handful of passages with substantial divergence, such as parts of Jeremiah and Samuel, are well documented and do not touch any point of Christian doctrine.

The ESV, like most evangelical translations, is based primarily on the Masoretic Text, while noting significant Septuagint variants in footnotes where they are text-critically important. This gives readers the benefit of both traditions without pretending the question is more complicated, or more threatening, than it actually is.

What the Dead Sea Scrolls Settled and What They Did Not

The Dead Sea Scrolls did something enormously valuable for confidence in the Masoretic Text: they confirmed that, apart from the recognised areas of divergence, the Masoretic tradition had been transmitted with remarkable, almost startling accuracy across a thousand years of copying by hand. The great Isaiah scroll from Qumran, for example, matches the medieval Masoretic text of Isaiah with only minor spelling variations across sixty-six chapters.

What the scrolls did not do is declare one tradition simply “correct” and the other simply “wrong”. They showed that more than one Hebrew textual tradition existed in ancient Israel, and that both the Masoretic and Septuagint traditions have genuine, ancient roots rather than one being a late corruption of the other.

Why This Matters for Confidence in Scripture

I think this whole debate is actually a wonderful advertisement for the seriousness with which the Jewish and Christian communities have handled the text of Scripture across the centuries. Nobody is hiding these textual differences. They are documented in footnotes in your English Bible, discussed openly in evangelical scholarship, and have been known to careful readers for as long as both traditions have existed side by side.

This transparency, I think, should increase rather than decrease confidence. A tradition trying to hide its textual history would not publish detailed footnotes documenting every significant variant. The open handling of these questions across generations of Jewish and Christian scholarship is part of what convinces me the text has been handled with integrity rather than manipulation.

How This Affects Preaching and Personal Study

In practical terms, this means that when I preach from the Old Testament, I am preaching from the Masoretic Text as reflected in the ESV, aware that a small number of passages carry a documented alternative reading from the Septuagint tradition, usually noted in a footnote. I do not think ordinary believers need to master textual criticism to trust their Bible. I do think it is healthy to know that these footnotes exist for good scholarly reasons rather than as evidence of some hidden crisis.

When a footnote does appear noting a Septuagint variant, I encourage believers to read it with curiosity rather than alarm. It usually reflects careful, transparent scholarship protecting you from, rather than exposing you to, an unreliable text.

A Word on the New Testament’s Own Practice

It is worth noting that the New Testament writers themselves quote from both traditions at different points, sometimes favouring a Septuagint reading over a strictly Hebrew one when the Septuagint rendering served their argument well, without any apparent anxiety about doing so. This tells me that the biblical authors did not treat one textual tradition as the sole legitimate vehicle of God’s word, while still treating the underlying Hebrew Scriptures as fully authoritative and inspired.

I explore this further in my companion article on why Jesus and the apostles quoted from the Septuagint, because it is a fascinating window into how the earliest Christians actually used their Bibles, and it helps explain why a New Testament quotation of the Old Testament sometimes reads slightly differently from the Old Testament passage as printed in your own English Bible.

A Brief Comparison with Other Ancient Versions

It also helps to know that the Masoretic and Septuagint traditions are not the only ancient witnesses available to scholars. The Samaritan Pentateuch, the Aramaic Targums, and the Syriac Peshitta each offer additional lines of evidence, and text-critical scholars weigh all of these witnesses together when a genuine question arises about a difficult reading. The wealth of independent witnesses is itself part of the case for confidence, because true corruption would be far harder to hide across so many independent lines of transmission spread across different languages and communities.

This is a very different situation from a text preserved by a single fragile chain of copying, where one corrupted link could compromise everything downstream of it. The Old Testament has come down to us through multiple independent streams that can be, and regularly are, checked against one another.

My Own Settled Confidence

After years of studying this question, my own settled position is straightforward. The Masoretic Text is a remarkably well-preserved, carefully transmitted witness to the Hebrew Scriptures, and it rightly forms the basis of our English Old Testament. The Septuagint remains a valuable, independent, ancient witness worth consulting, particularly in the handful of passages where the two traditions diverge. Neither discovery nor debate has ever produced evidence that the Old Testament we hold has been fundamentally corrupted.

What we have instead is a rich, well-documented history of careful transmission by two overlapping but distinct communities, both taking the task of preserving God’s word with the seriousness it deserves.

So, now what?

The next time you see a footnote in your Bible mentioning a variant from the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text, do not read it as a crack in the foundation. Read it as evidence of just how carefully both the Jewish and Christian communities have handled the text of Scripture across more than two thousand years. The manuscript evidence, taken as a whole, gives me great confidence that the Old Testament in your hands faithfully represents what was originally written, and that confidence is not naive. It is the settled conclusion of honest, patient scholarship.

“Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.”

Proverbs 30:5 (ESV)