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A message to the Believer….
There comes a point where every believer must stop taking their Bible at face value and start asking themselves a dangerous question: has what I’ve been told really been handed down from God untouched, or has it been filtered, manipulated, and re-framed through human hands? That question is not born of doubt toward God—it is born of deep reverence for His word and a refusal to let man’s fingerprints dictate divine truth. For centuries, believers have been told that “the Bible” they hold is an unbroken chain from Sinai to their living room table. But the historical, linguistic, and textual evidence tells a different story—one of competing manuscripts, intentional changes, cultural biases, and theological agendas. This is not speculation. This is fact, carved into the surviving witnesses of the Scriptures themselves. It demands that the believer wake up to the reality that Scripture, as transmitted through man, has been touched, altered, trimmed, lengthened, and sometimes rearranged. If God’s word is perfect, then the responsibility to strip away man’s interference and return to its source is nothing short of urgent.
When we place the Hebrew Bible, as preserved in the Masoretic Text, alongside the Greek Septuagint, what emerges is not a perfect mirror image but a battlefield of differences. To analyze them properly, we begin with the only responsible method—working from the HALOT, the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, because it gives us the unvarnished lexical reality of the Hebrew without doctrinal bias. We cross-check it with the oldest Hebrew witnesses like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then we examine the Septuagint’s Greek through the same academic rigor, using BDAG for definitions when necessary. This is the only way to remove the smudges left by man’s narrative and see what the text actually says.
Take Genesis 37:3. In the Masoretic Hebrew, Joseph’s famous garment is called a kuttonet passim—a phrase that HALOT admits is ambiguous. It could mean a long-sleeved tunic, a striped garment, an embroidered robe, or even a piece of fine material. The text itself doesn’t lock it down. But in the Septuagint, the translators chose the phrase chitōna poikilon—a multicolored, ornamented tunic. This is no longer a range of possibilities; it is one specific visual, chosen for the reader. Here, the LXX didn’t just translate—they interpreted. The ambiguity of the Hebrew has been narrowed, and the meaning has been steered. Already, in the first example, we see that what you are told a verse means depends on which tradition you are reading.
Or consider Esther, a book in which the Masoretic Hebrew never once mentions God by name. The narrative is politically and personally dramatic, but God’s presence is implied rather than explicit. In the Septuagint, the picture is entirely different. It contains six major additions, including long, fervent prayers to God by Mordecai and Esther, and explicit references to His power and intervention. In other words, the Hebrew preserves a story of human courage with God working silently in the background; the Greek preserves a story of divine-human partnership where God’s name and activity are on full display. This is not just about a few changed words—it’s about the entire theological tone of the book.
The genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 illustrate how even numbers are not immune to divergence. The Masoretic ages from Adam to Abraham yield a timeline of roughly 1,948 years. The Septuagint’s numbers are consistently higher—often by exactly one hundred years for each patriarch—and it inserts an extra name, Cainan, into the post-flood lineage. The result is an expanded timeline of around 3,334 years, adding roughly 1,300 years to biblical history. This isn’t a rounding error. It changes the entire dating of creation, the flood, the Tower of Babel, and the age of ancient civilizations according to Scripture. Which one is “the inspired” version—the shorter Hebrew or the longer Greek?
Even narrative flow shifts between the two traditions. In the Masoretic version of the David and Goliath story, David is already known to Saul in chapter 16 as his harp player and armor-bearer, yet in chapter 17, after David has played for him and been offered his armor, Saul turns to Abner and asks, “Whose son is this youth?” The Septuagint removes the duplication and the contradiction by omitting this second, redundant introduction. Is the Hebrew preserving two source traditions awkwardly stitched together? Or is the Greek “smoothing” the text? Either way, the versions are not the same, and the difference forces us to ask questions most have been trained not to ask.
Sometimes, the differences are not subtle at all, as in 2 Chronicles 22:2 versus 2 Kings 8:26. The Masoretic Chronicles says Ahaziah was 42 years old when he became king, while Kings says he was 22. If the 42 is correct, he would have been older than his own father—an absurdity. The Septuagint reads 22 in both places, preserving internal consistency. Here we have a plain numeric contradiction in the Hebrew and a coherent reading in the Greek. This isn’t theological interpretation; it’s raw historical data.
The New Testament itself aligns more closely with the Septuagint in key passages. Hebrews 10:5 quotes Psalm 40:6 as “A body you prepared for me” (Septuagint), whereas the Masoretic reads “My ears you have opened.” The Greek phrasing supports the argument for the incarnation of the Messiah; the Hebrew speaks metaphorically of obedience. Likewise, Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 using the Septuagint’s “virgin” (parthenos), while the Masoretic says “young woman” (ʿalmāh). In both cases, the apostolic writers chose the Greek rendering that aligned with their theological purpose, not the wording of the Hebrew tradition preserved in the MT.
Other differences involve entire sections of Scripture. The Masoretic Daniel lacks the Prayer of Azariah, the Song of the Three Youths, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon—all present in the Septuagint. The Masoretic Job is one-sixth longer than the LXX, while the Septuagint Jeremiah is about fifteen percent shorter than the MT and orders its oracles differently. The Septuagint also contains entire books the MT omits—Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, among others. These were part of the Scriptures used by early Christians and Second Temple Jews but were later labeled “Apocrypha” by men who claimed the right to decide what was and wasn’t God’s word.
This is where Origen’s work becomes pivotal. In the third century, he compiled the Hexapla, placing the Hebrew, a Hebrew transliteration, and multiple Greek versions side-by-side. He found places where the Hebrew had material missing in the Greek, and places where the Greek had much more than the Hebrew. In Job alone, he noted entire blocks of verses that existed in one tradition and not the other. His conclusion was simple: the Hebrew and Greek were based on different Hebrew source texts. Even in his time, the idea of “the Hebrew Bible” as one fixed text was a myth.
When you consider the twelve tribes of Israel, this shouldn’t be surprising. Just as Native American tribes shared a cultural identity but developed distinct dialects and oral traditions, so too the tribes of Israel would have had variations in language and textual preservation. The Hebrew of Moses’ day was not a frozen museum piece; it was a living language in the hands of diverse communities. The Septuagint translators in Alexandria worked from their tradition, the rabbis in Jerusalem from theirs. Both were “Hebrew,” but they were not identical.
And yet, despite knowing this, the narrative that we have “the” Bible today continues unchallenged in most pulpits. The concept of canon—a man-made category determining what counts as God’s word—is presented as if it were divinely decreed. Books are labeled “Apocrypha” as if man has the right to declare them unworthy of God. To read the history is to see control at work: man’s tainted fingerprints, driven by bias, prejudice, bigotry, fear, suppression, shame, and guilt manipulation. These are not the marks of God; they are the marks of human power structures using God’s name to enforce their decisions.
This is why the believer must take up the work of deciphering their Bible. It is not enough to assume the translation in your hand represents the pure voice of God. It demands scrutiny, analysis, questioning, digging, inquiry, investigation, self-cultivation, supervision, discernment, seeing the obvious, and resisting indoctrination. The English New Testament, in particular, must be interrogated for the same human influences that have marked the Old Testament’s transmission. This is not an act of rebellion against God; it is an act of loyalty to Him.
The stakes could not be higher. If the word of God is perfect, then every added layer of human bias is an imperfection that must be stripped away. The differences between the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint are not just academic curiosities—they are windows into the reality that Scripture’s transmission has always been mediated by human hands. Some hands have been faithful; others have not. But the responsibility to separate the two lies with you, the reader, the believer, the seeker of truth. No one will do it for you. And those who tell you not to look are often the very ones who benefit from your ignorance.
So I say again: when the word of God is in man’s hands, it must be weighed, tested, and examined against every witness available. The God who spoke it is perfect. The men who copied, translated, and canonized it were not.
