Septuagint is the accepted term for the collection of books considered scriptural by the Hellenized Greek speaking Jewry of Alexandria Egypt. This was the case for an about 400 year interval from around 250 BCE until about 150 CE The Septuagint takes its name from the origin of the first translation of the Five Books of Moses into Greek. That was done by 72 Jews accordingto the Letter of Aristeas. When naming the work, the number was rounded down to 70 [but see next paragraph], dubbed the Septuagint and in time represented by the Roman numeral LXX.
Whether or not Ptolemy Philadelphus wanted to expand his library or to disprove the divine origin of the Torah, the Jews of Alexandria and all other Jews who were conversant in Greek but unable to understand or speak Hebrew needed translations of all the Hebrew scriptures. The translators of the Targum haShibiym --the Pentateuch-- were authorized to do so. According to Mishnah Soferiym 1:8 there were exactly 70 of them acting under inspiration. Each one of them, though working separately, produced the exact same text including 11 deliberate "mistranslations."
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Translation of the canonical Hebrew books continued but not by the same translators nor by divine inspiration or royal edict. The Jewish community in Egypt spoke Greek and little Hebrew. They needed a translation in the Egyptian tinged Greek that they understood. So term Septuagint refers to the translation of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings into the Greek idiom not, as originally, just to the Torah alone. Besides these, the extra- canonical Apochrypa are also part of the Septuagint. This complete work was used by Greek speaking Jewish communities throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean. It was a composite work by disparate authors not by the same persons who did the Five Books of Moses. The quality of the translations vary, none as high as the original translators authorized by the Zugoth, i.e. the Nasi and the Ab Beth Diyn back in Judea. In some instances midrash replaces the actual N"K text. The Septuagint translations of the Nebi'iym and the Ketubi'iym were made over a hundred year period after the Targum haShibiym was completed.Those translations weren't authorized and their level of scribal scholarship varies from book to book. Interspersed within the Septuagint N"K are several books that were composed after the time of Ezra and the Anshei K*nesseth haGadol (the Men of the Great Assembly). Due to their non-inspired origin, the added books came to be called Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical.
Some of the Alexandrian Septuagint Apocrypha are known to pre-Temple destruction era Tannaitic Jewry. Hhaz"l discuss the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus and even quote it at times (TB Baba Bathra 146a, TB Niddah 16b, Yebamoth 63b, etc.) though suggesting it shouldn't be in common usage (TB Sanhedrin 100b). The Qumran library/scroll depository/copy shop, which was shut down in 68 CE had, in Hebrew or Aramaic, the apocryphal works: * Susanna 4Q551; * Tobit 4Q196-9, 4Q200, 4Q478; * Ecclesiasticus (The Wisdom of ben Sira) 2QSir; * Psalm 151 11Q5; * the Greek Septuagint Epistle of Jeremiah 7QLXXEpJer.
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The 7th cave at Qumran contained texts written in Greek. A few of them are actually fragments of the Septuagint (7QLXXExod and 7QLXXEpJer). It may be possible, though unlikely, that those Qumran Hebrew texts which agree with the Septuagint are back translations from Greek into Hebrew.
It's important to realize that the Qumran collection isn't authoritative.
A version found in Qumran doesn't mean it was the official text recognized by Jewry outside of the Qumran sect. Many sectarian texts were found amidst the works stored at Qumran. The people associated with Qumran were a bit separatist and even somewhat isolationist. Would they have valued or thought the scrolls of the Temple Court were correct? The Temple Court scrolls were the only ones that legitimate copies could be made from. What most never seem to note is that Qumran did have many more texts reading like the Masoretic than it did ones reading like the Septuagint.
Another thing to note is that there was a cache of scrolls at Masada. Masada wasn't sectarian. The scrolls there agree with the Masoretic. The Masada scrolls were certainly copies made by the professional sopheriym of the Temple Court. Remember, the Septuagint N"K are unauthorized translations; the effortis mostly a poor attempt; Greek speaking Jewry abandoned it for the Aquila circa 127 CE at which point the Septuagint found itself on trash heaps but never stored away in a geniza. That's why there are no authentic copies of Alexandrian Jewry's Septuagint.
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There does not exist a single surviving copy of the Alexandrian authored Septuagint. That on going work remained in use between 280 BCE and 150 CE when the Aquila translation replaced it. The Aquila contained only the books re-affirmed canonical by the minor sanhedrin at Yabneh circa 92 CE. Before Yabneh, the Apocrypha and the works labeled Pseudepigrapha (because they were falesly attributed to famous authors) circulated among Jews. Some of these works incorporated either alien theology blatantly pagan in origin or theology simply outside of the received tradition. The Septuagint with its Apocrypha fell out of Jewish usage.
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Hhaz"l [the intelligentsia of Judea and the Diaspora before c.600 CE] have pointed out the known and intentional mistranslations employed by the Jewish translators of the Septuagint. Once Greek speaking Jewry accepted the Aquila translation's superiority they used it up until the 7th century CE. The Septuagint basically became worthless in the 2nd century when Jews abandoned it. The early Christians chose the Greek Septuagint as their core Bible. Many variant copies of it were then made by Christians. Origen derived his Septuagint (circa 245 CE) from flawed copies floating around in the Christian community. Not one authentic Alexandrian Septuagint was in circulation by Origen's time. In the hundred years since Aquila they had been discarded as trash.What is true is that the Septuagint available today is not the Alexandrian one which disappeared by 245 CE. It's not even Origen's attempt to reconstruct the Alexandrian Septuagint. And Origen's Hexapla Septuagint is a pastche with fabrications of his own invention. Origen left notes indicating "defective" and "filled out" text. In other words he had no complete copy only fragments and made up some text himself for various passages.
Even Origen's Septuagint is unavailable today. All we have are variant copies full of copyist errors to an already admitted pastiched text derived from fragments. What we have today is the Christian Septuagint and it shouldn't be mistaken for the Alexandrian Jewish Septuagint TN"K compiled and used before the birth of Christianity. There are no extant copies of the Septuagint in use by the community of Jews in Alexandria Egypt or in their offshoot communities such as the one in Brooklyn. Only fragments of the Jewish Septuagint remain. Most of these fragments were found in Egypt. A few were found at the repository in Qumran. As noted above Qumran scroll 4QJerb (written in Hebrew) is the Septuagint version of Jeremiah. The Septuagint books of Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, and Susanna (all in Hebrew) and the letter of Jeremiah and Psalm 151 (both in Greek) were all found at the Qumran library which closed down circa 68 CE. That date assures that no Christian elements appear in those works.
A timeline relating to the Septuagint:
code:
c280 BCE Septuagint - Pentateuch; Jewish c180 BCE Septuagint - completed with N"K and Apocrypha; Jewish c 20 CE Philo - the "pearl" of Alexandrian Jewry c 68 CE Qumran - library/copyshop shutdown; Jewish c127 CE Aquila - complete TN"K; Jewish c240 CE Origen - Hexapla; Christian
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A timeline relating to the Septuagint:
code:
c280 BCE Septuagint - Pentateuch; Jewish c180 BCE Septuagint - completed with N"K and Apocrypha; Jewish c 20 CE Philo - the "pearl" of Alexandrian Jewry c 68 CE Qumran - library/copyshop shutdown; Jewish c127 CE Aquila - complete TN"K; Jewish c240 CE Origen - Hexapla; Christian
A list of the extra-Pentateuch books in the Septuagint:
IHSOUS NAUH Joshua, the son of Nun KRITAI Judges
ROUQ Ruth
BASILEIWN A Kings I. (1 Samuel) BASILEIWN B Kings II. (2 Samuel) BASILEIWN G Kings III. (1 Kings) BASILEIWN D Kings IV. (2 Kings)
PARALEIPOMENWN A Chronicles I. PARALEIPOMENWN B Chronicles II.
ESDRAS A Esdras I.
ESDRAS B Esdras II. (Ezra) NEEMIAS Nehemiah ESQHR Esther
IOUDIQ Judith
TWBIT Tobit
MAKKABAIWN A I. Maccabees MAKKABAIWN B II. Maccabees MAKKABAIWN G III. Maccabees MAKKABAIWN D IV. Maccabees
YALMOI Psalms
PROSEUXH MANASSH Prayer of Manasseh
PAROIMIAI Proverbs EKKAHSIASTHS Ecclesiastes ASMA Song of Solomon IWB Job
SOFIA SALWMWN Wisdom of Solomon SOFIA SEIRAX Wisdom of the Son of Sirach
BAROUX Baruch QRHNOI Lamentations of Jeremiah EPISTOLH IEREMIOU Epistle of Jeremiah
IESEKIHL Ezekiel
DANIHL Daniel
TWN TRIWN PAIDWN AINESIS Song of the Three Children SWSANNA Susanna BHL KAI DRAKWN Bel and the Dragon
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Septuagint related reply in a Dead Sea Scrolls discussion (same year).
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Bob I probably won't have much to contribute to the discussion but I'll try to give my thoughts on your questions here now. A perusal of any non-polemic scholarly books, --without an agenda or religious bias-- about the DSS will verify what I write below.
THE SIGNIFICANCE - A weighty question but a bit vague to me. Significance in precise relation to what? That might narrow it down to a few points I could reply to. If you examine an inventory or catalog of the DSS you find many scrolls unconcerned with TN"K. There are pseudipigraha, a "warehouse" record, sectarian manuals, etc.
POINT OF THE DDS - The scrolls of Qumran are just part of a repository. They're more extensive than the Masada repository. The DSS have Torah and TN"K versions that agree with at least 3 "schools," the Masoretic, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan. The point is the DSS are a collection not an attempt to define what text is authentic or authorized. The DSS allows us to see the variety of Jewish thought during the time the sectarian shop at Qumran was open and in operation, the last centuries of the 2nd Temple era.
COUNTERING THE DSS - I don't think what I wrote counters anything except the mistaken notion that one set of Torah/TN"K texts found at Qumran, and a minority text at that, prove that a "proto-Masoretic" didn't exist at the time. The vast majority of Torah/TN"K texts of Qumran are infact supportive of the Masoretic.
A minority of such texts are in support of the Septuagint or are actually copies of the Septuagint.
A minority of such texts are in support of a "proto-Samaritan." There is even a large minority of Torah/TN"K texts from Qumran that agree with neither the Septuagint, Samaritan, nor Masoretic but are unique to the DSS collection. (Josephus gives a verse or two from Samuel found only in the DSS.)
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