I N T R O D U C T I O N

T O T H E R E A D E R

This HOLY BIBLE is a treasury of divine and inscrutable mysteries, and a revelation of the benevolence of His will. First, as it was truly chosen for His own people, it was entrusted to the Hebrew nation, the descendants of Abraham, and stamped into writing in their native dialect. For the arch-prophet Moses laid the foundation of this record, and after him, wise men and prophets in every generation—those to whom God spoke in their minds—continued adding to it in the same Israelite lineage. They were commanded by God to write down not only the revelations of the future, which are the Prophecies, but also the didactic teachings for the guidance of righteous conduct, and the historical order of the events of their nation from the beginning until the end, under the paternal guidance of the hand of the Most High. Through this, the entire divine writing is summarized into these three main forms of expression. As long as the light of divine knowledge was possessed by the Hebrew nation, this holy and divine book was kept condensed in their single ancestral dialect for many centuries, like a treasure hidden from the unworthy and from foreign heathen nations. But when the time approached when, by the care of superior providence, it was necessary for the light of the Gospel to be radiated and spread among the general nations throughout the sphere of the universe, with the coming of the Lord, the only Son of God, who was the very goal of the words of the holy writings, then—according to the tradition of ancient faithful historians—it entered the heart of Ptolemy Philadelphus, King of the Egyptians, who at that time was assembling his magnificent library, to make a request for the Hebrew books as well. For this reason, he sent to Eleazar, the High Priest of the Jews, and received from him, as they say, seventy-two learned Hebrew masters, well-versed in both dialects, who translated the holy divine writings from their native Hebrew into the Hellenic Greek language, or better yet, as much as was accepted at that time into the canon of the Jews as a faithful divine tradition. I leave aside here the individual recounting of how the manner of completing this translation is told in the book of Aristeas, regarding which there are many and varied opinions among writers.

B. Now, this very Hellenic translation of the holy books, which took its name from the seventy-two translators, was commonly referred to as the Septuagint original: "Եօթանասնից", because of its precise fidelity and unerring correctness. In the beginning, among the wise men of the Jews, and after that, in the universal church of the Christians, starting from the apostles, it became so esteemed and honored by all that it was preached by many teachers of the East and West as the authentic divine word, inspired by the Holy Spirit. And thus, it was rightly considered even more precious than the aforementioned Hebrew original: not because of the uncertain conditions of the writing of that dialect, the exact reading of which remains a matter of conjecture for later generations, but also because of its gradual corruption, not only through the incompetence and mistakes of scribes, as usually happens, but also in many places through the malice of the Jews themselves, altering those passages that provided support for the Christian profession of faith. But the fair-minded scholar can see much of this investigation in those treatises whose authors have taken upon themselves the defense of truth, de-emphasizing the causes of the Jewish-inspired contentions. Those who, in comparison, presented the Hellenic copies—corrupted and altered by the passage of time—against the Hebrew one—I mean, the one that was later transposed by the artificial punctuation marks which are called the Masoretes—and noticed not a few differences in them, rushed to lament the foolishness, ignorance, and profound stupidity as they saw fit. Conversely, those Seventy, whose lifespan did not extend more than one hundred and fifty years after Ezra (who established the Hebrew original in order), being native Hebrews themselves—and thus better informed about their extensive dialect—and being skilled men chosen by the High Priest for this task, certainly had an incomparable advantage and superiority over those who, many centuries later, became students of the so-called Masoretic Hebrew scholarship, having learned it with beggarly skill from other nations and languages. There is nothing very similar to these in the early second century of Christianity; Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus appeared, who, having strayed into various heretical sects, and finally having turned to Judaism, and having been trained in the Hebrew dialect, took it upon themselves to produce new Hellenic translations, by this means—as they say—wishing to offer some support to their sects. In addition to these, there are other fragmentary translations of others who, seeing the diversity of the copies of the Septuagint, invented ways to correct...