Most casual readers of the Bible never stop to ask what text their teachers are actually using. Few congregants consider the language behind the English they read. If they read Scripture at all, they read it in translation. But the Bible was not originally written in English; it was composed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. As a result, much nuance and depth are lost in translation. Translators often favor straightforward messages of salvation or grace, while the more technical, historical, and cultural layers embedded in the original texts are set aside.
The Old Testament and the Septuagint
In the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC, Jews living in Alexandria, Egypt, translated the Old Testament into Greek. That translation is known as the Septuagint, or LXX — from the tradition that seventy scholars worked independently to produce it. The LXX remains important for its historical significance.
There is a complication with Daniel, however. The Septuagint version of Daniel that most readers can access today is not the original Old Greek translation. It is a later revision made in the 2nd century AD by Theodotion.
The original Old Greek Daniel did survive, but only barely. We know it today primarily from Codex Chisianus and Papyrus 967. That earlier version is highly paraphrastic. It contains interpretive expansions, simplifications, and at times allegorical or midrashic renderings — additions that served a theological purpose for its Alexandrian audience but made the text less literal.
Because of this, the early Church set it aside. As Jerome noted, Theodotion’s revision was much closer to the Hebrew-Aramaic text that would become the Masoretic Text, and it virtually replaced the Old Greek Daniel in all later manuscripts of the Septuagint.
This matters for prophetic interpretation. Some passages in Daniel are intentionally sealed. As Daniel 12:10 states, “the wicked will not understand.” Without attention to the original intent and to which Greek text one is reading, it is easy to misinterpret or oversimplify. Translators also inevitably bring presuppositions to the task, rendering verses as they believe they should read — biases that later scholarship and new manuscript evidence, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, can expose.