Bibliography

Batey, Richard A. Jesus and the Forgotten City: New Light on Sepphoris and the Urban World of Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1992.

Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of the Holy Land: From the Destruction of Solomon’s Temple to the Muslim Conquest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Meyers, Eric M. “Sepphoris.” Pages 306–307 in vol. 18 of Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 2007.

Meyers, Eric M., Carol M. Meyers, and Ehud Netzer. Sepphoris. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1992.

Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. 2nd ed. Cambridge Middle East Studies 18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Nagy, Rebecca Martin, Carol L. Meyers, Eric M. Meyers, and Zeev Weiss. Sepphoris in Galilee: Crosscurrents of Culture. Raleigh, N.C.: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1996.

Netzer, Ehud, and Zeev Weiss. Zippori. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1994.

Strange, James F., Thomas R.W. Longstaff, and Dennis E. Groh. University of South Florida Probes in the Citadel and Villa. Vol. 1 of Excavations at Sepphoris. Leiden, Brill, 2006.

Michael D. Morrison

Septuagint (Latin, septuaginta; “70”). The translation of the Old Testament into Greek; read in the early church and often quoted by the New Testament writers.

Name

The Septuagint often is represented as Roman numerals: “LXX” (L [50] + X [10] + X [10] = 70). According to Philo, Josephus, the Letter of Aristeas, and rabbinic sources, King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–247 bc) assembled 70 (or 72) translators to render the Law of Moses into Greek. In the most limited sense, “Septuagint” refers just to this project, which covered the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Although the usage is imprecise, “Septuagint” (and the abbreviation “LXX”) is a convenient term generally used to refer to any or all of the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, as well as several other Jewish religious books written in Greek (Tov, Textual Criticism, 135). Sometimes the term “Old Greek” (OG) is used to describe the “oldest recoverable form of the Greek text of a particular book” (McLay, Septuagint in New Testament Research, 7), while “Septuagint” is used to refer to a collection of books.