Almost every English Bible on the shelf today translates its Old Testament from the Masoretic text: the Hebrew text standardized by Jewish scribes, the Masoretes, between about the 7th and 10th centuries AD. Our oldest complete copy, the Leningrad Codex, dates to 1008 AD.
The Love Letter Version translates its Old Testament from the Septuagint instead: the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made by Jewish scholars in the centuries before Christ. Its great manuscripts, such as Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, are from the 4th century AD, more than 600 years older than the Leningrad Codex.
The Bible of the apostles
The Septuagint was the Bible of the early Church. When the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they usually quote it in a form that agrees with the Greek. Some examples:
- Hebrews 10:5 quotes Psalm 40 as "a body you have prepared for me". The Septuagint reads this way. The Masoretic text reads "my ears you have opened".
- Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14, "the virgin shall conceive", using the Greek parthenos, "virgin".
- Acts 7:14 says seventy-five souls went down to Egypt with Jacob, as the Septuagint of Genesis 46:27 says. The Masoretic text has seventy.
- Hebrews 1:6, "let all the angels of God worship him", quotes Deuteronomy 32:43 in a longer form found in the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not in the Masoretic text.
The Dead Sea Scrolls showed that more than one form of the Hebrew text existed in Jesus' day, and that some scrolls agree with the Greek against the later Masoretic text. The Septuagint is a witness to that older Hebrew.
From the LLV back to the Greek
The LLV Old Testament is a careful, audited modernization of the public-domain English translation of the Septuagint published in 1844. That translation follows Codex Vaticanus, and so does Swete's printed edition of the Greek. You can follow any verse back through each step: the LLV wording, the 1844 English with every modernized word marked, and the Greek words with their meanings.
The New Testament is simpler
The New Testament was written in Greek, so there is no second language in between. We also have far more early manuscripts of the New Testament than of any other ancient book, some within a few generations of the apostles. The LLV New Testament modernizes the 1881 English Revised Version, which was translated from a critical Greek text close to the one Westcott and Hort published the same year. Tracing an LLV New Testament verse takes you straight to that Greek.
Verse numbers don't always line up
Because the Greek and Hebrew traditions arrange some books differently, a verse can sit at a different number. The Psalms are usually one number apart (Psalm 23 in Hebrew-based Bibles is Psalm 22 in the Greek). Jeremiah's chapters are arranged in a different order, and parts of Exodus, 1 Kings, Proverbs, Joel and Malachi also differ. When you compare a verse, we match it by its wording and tell you where it sits in other Bibles.