Aquila's Greek Translation

Reflection

By the early second century, the Septuagint had become the Bible of the Christian church. Jewish communities that had long used the Greek translation began to feel its inadequacy for their purposes — partly because Christian apologists were arguing from it, partly because the Septuagint's loose translations at key passages (Isaiah 7:14 is the most famous) no longer matched what rabbinic exegesis was finding in the Hebrew.

Aquila of Sinope answered that need. A Gentile convert who studied Torah under Rabbi Akiva, Aquila produced around AD 130 a new Greek translation that aimed to mirror the Hebrew as closely as Greek would allow. He translated word for word, sometimes morpheme for morpheme. The result was Greek that violated normal usage but tracked the Hebrew with extraordinary precision. Aquila's translation became the standard Greek Bible of Greek-speaking Jewish communities for the next several centuries.

Most of Aquila's work is lost. What survives reaches us through three channels: the Cairo Genizah, where palimpsest leaves preserve portions of his text under later Hebrew writing; the Mercati Hexapla palimpsest, where Aquila stood in the third column of Origen's six-column Old Testament; and citations in Christian writers who consulted Aquila even when they disagreed with him.

For the believer today, Aquila's translation is a witness on two fronts. It witnesses to the seriousness with which second-century Judaism handled scripture — the willingness to retranslate the entire Hebrew Bible with extreme rigor. It also witnesses, by its very existence, to the strength of the church's claim on the Septuagint. The Jewish community would not have needed to commission a new Greek Bible if the old one had not been thoroughly claimed by the followers of Jesus. The Septuagint the apostles preached from is the Septuagint Aquila tried to displace — and the gospel that Septuagint carried is the gospel that still saves.