The Orthodox Study Bible, Hardcover: Ancient Christianity Speaks to Today's World

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Thus, when the Apostles quote the Jewish Scripture in their own writings, the overwhelmingly dominant source for their wording comes directly from the Septuagint (LXX).

The Orthodox Study Bible was released in early 2008 with a new translation of the Septuagint based on the Greek text of Alfred Rahlfs Septuaginta, and with reference to the Brenton translation. Before his death in 1536, William Tyndale had translated about half of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew Masoretic text rather than the Septuagint Greek or the Vulgate Latin of Christendom. Ezekiel 17:22b-23a (Masoretic Text) reads ‘And I myself will plant a shoot on a high and lofty mountain; on the mountain height of Zion I will plant it.In Amos 4:13 God is described in the Hebrew Masoretic Text as making known to mankind ‘what is His thought’. Others demonstrated an unfortunate but understandable mistrust of the theology of other branches of Christianity. There is still some debate about whether Kyrios was the original Septuagint rendering of the Divine Name. In contrast, throughout the Septuagint there is an avoidance of those very characteristic Hebrew anthropomorphic expressions or metaphors that describe God as, for example, a ‘rock’ or ‘stone’.

Holy Scripture cannot be independent of the Church that canonizes it and says what it is, and Orthodox Christians should read and study Scripture according to the mind and understanding of the Church. The Orthodox Observer places the Church in the context of the current world we live in through a diverse and informative experience — offering participants meaningful exchange with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, her ministries, and affiliates. The Septuagint also clearly attests to the developing concept of the expected Messiah in the Hellenistic period.The notes to the New Testament are on the whole straightforward and some readers will find them a help in understanding many of the words and ideas in the text. They also show how significant the Septuagint was for the emerging Christian Church, because the early Church consistently read the Old Testament in the light of the New: ‘ Vetus Testamentum in Novo Receptum’ i. The KJV Septuagint - translated from the Septuagint edition published by the Orthodox Church of Greece's Apostoliki Diakonia, using the King James Version as a template. The ancient Greek Bible continues to this day to be the authoritative Old Testament text of the Orthodox Christian world.

There is no reason to believe the Textus Receptus is superior to the Alexandrian text (or modern critical texts), and there is very good reason to believe it is later and inferior.So for example, for the Hebrew expression ‘to lift someone’s face’ meaning ‘to favour’, the Septuagint uses the very literal λαμβανω προσοπον: ‘lambano prosopon’. While on the one hand Jerome argued for the superiority of the Hebrew texts when correcting the Septuagint on both philological and theological grounds, on the other, in the context of accusations of heresy against him, Jerome would acknowledge the Septuagint texts as well. The Masoretic text is a text that has not been preserved by the Church, and so while it is worthy of study and comparison, it is not equally trustworthy. In the Hebrew this verse from Isaiah simply reads: ‘Behold, I am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation: one who trusts will not panic’.

And it came out kinda what I expected with footnotes explaining what particular bible verse(s) means from an Orthodox point of view. The Orthodox Study Bible is interesting in that it includes the Apocrypha (some neat stuff in there! The OSB by contrast is destroyed by it's simply awful footnote material which very seldom quotes a Holy Father, instead sounding like the ruminations of a protestant Bible study. Another case in point is the NKJV NT, although correcting some mistranslations they added their own and it would have been so easy to have truly made a literal upgrade revised edition of the KJV. It also includes extensive introductory material and footnotes featuring significant inter-LXX and LXX/MT variants.The Greek translations of the remaining books of the Bible were the work of later hands between the third and first centuries B. The Thomson's Translation of the Old Covenant is a direct translation of the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament into English, rare for its time.