On the Acts of the Apostles

The book of Acts quotes the Old Testament 40 times, with the majority coming from Exodus and Psalms. I was possessed with curiosity about the quotes. They are quotes, yet the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and sometimes the quotes didn't translate to be the same as they looked in my Old Testament. Are the quotes paraphrases, an on-the spot translation from Hebrew, or are they direct quotes from the Septuagint? To understand this, we must first define our terms.

The Septuagint is the oldest translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek. It was named "seventy" and referred to as LXX because of the seventy-two men who translated it. It was translated between the third and first century B.C., which meant that it would have been largely known by the time the New Testament begins.

The Masoretic Text is the Hebrew Old Testament we have most available, and generally the most accurate. It was made in approximately the tenth century A.D., and most significantly added vowel markings. The Masoretes did a wonderful job copying and preserving these, so that we have a complete testament in one document. They stayed true to the ancient Hebrew manuscripts, as far as we can tell, so we use that text as the definitive Hebrew Old Testament, used to translate most of our English Old Testaments. The Masoretic text was therefore not available to them, but an almost identical text, minus the vowels, would have been what they studied.

The Septuagint and Masoretic Text differ quite a bit. Sometimes it makes no real difference, but sometimes they diverge significantly in wording, though not, in Acts, in meaning. Whenever they diverge (ten of the forty times in Acts) Luke goes with the Septuagint. Some of these differences are slight, like in Acts 7:14 the Septuagint had the number 75, but the Masoretes had 70. Luke used 75, but it really should make no difference.

I found that all of the differences in Acts are minor enough not to really matter, but it is still good to know where they came from.