The Septuagint (LXX)

The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made at Alexandria in the last centuries before Christ, which the Letter of Aristeas tells of as the work of seventy-two elders, and the Bible of the apostles: most of the Old Testament quotations in the New follow it, sometimes where it differs from the Hebrew. It carries the books the Church reads beyond the Hebrew canon, such as Wisdom, Sirach and Tobit, and it numbers the Psalms and the books of Kingdoms its own way. The Orthodox Church reads the Old Testament in it: the Greek Church uses it as its text, and the Slavonic Bible was translated from it. The nineteenth-century Russian Synodal translation followed the Hebrew instead, which is still argued over. Where the Fathers read a prophecy of Christ in it, as the Virgin shall conceive, the Church reads it with them.