Happy International Septuagint Day everyone! In 2006, the IOSCS declared February 8 to be International Septuagint Day, a day to celebrate the Septuagint and encourage its study, based on the following rational:
The date was chosen because, as Robert Kraft noted, it is “the one date we know of from late antiquity on which LXX/OG/Aquila received special attention.” Emperor Justinian’s Novella 146 permitted the Jews of the Roman Empire to read the Scriptures in their synagogues in Greek, Latin, or “any other tongue which in any district allows the hearers better to understand the text”. Specifically, “We make this proviso that those who use
Greek shall use the text of the seventy interpreters...”
This novella (see English translation) was published on the eighth day of February in the year 553 CE.So celebrate the work of the Seventy and all of the other Greek translators of the Hebrew Scriptures today (and really everyday ;-)).
