What are your thoughts on the Charles Thomson Translation of the Septuagint, and the reliability of the Masoretic text of the Old Testament?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1993.

I notice that both the first and second editions of Charles Thomson\'s Translation of the Septuagint by C. A. Muses were produced in the 1950s, when Paul Kahle\'s theories of the textual development of the Septuagint were still in the ascendancy.

The subsequent publication of the leather scroll of the Minor Prophets, which was discovered in the Judaean desert at Nahal Hever, proved to present the text of the Septuagint, as revised by Palestinian rabbis somewhere between 50 BC and 50 AD. It shows that substantial parts of the so-called Septuagint, particularly in the historical books, were not the original translation, but a revision of that translation done by the aforementioned rabbis. It also shows that Paul Kahle's theories were not correct. Dr Muses could not, of course, have known of this more recent material when he published his revised version of Thomson's Translation; but all subsequent work, my own included, has confirmed the interpretation that Dominique Barthélemy put upon the evidence of the Greek manuscript of the Minor Prophets.

As a believer in the divine inspiration and authority of the Old Testament, I rejoice at the way God has vindicated the substantial reliability of the Masoretic and the proto-Masoretic text of the Old Testament. It is true that in places what we nowadays call the 'Old Greek'—as distinct from later revisions of the Septuagint—has preserved a better text than that which we now have in the Masoretic text; but it would be a mistake of the first order to suppose that the Septuagint is everywhere, or even substantially, a better text than the Masoretic.

Let me give you an example. The Old Greek translation of the book of Job is one-sixth shorter than that of the Hebrew, which we have translated in the KJV. It is only in later revisions of the Old Greek that the missing one-sixth was supplied, and supplied by the Christian scholar Origen in his famous Hexapla edition. Again, there are many places in the Septuagint where either the translators or subsequent revisers have not been content with translating the straight Biblical text, but have inserted into it rabbinic interpretations; and sometimes those interpretations are both foolish and wrong.

To quote one small example, the Septuagint of Exodus says at one place, but not consistently everywhere, that the gate of the tabernacle was twenty cubits high, whereas in actual fact the dimension given in the Masoretic text refers to the width of the gate, and not to its height. To say that the gate was twenty cubits high, and thus double the height of the tabernacle building itself, is of course absurd; it is an interpretation based on the convoluted principles of exegesis that became common in later centuries among the rabbis.

This whole question of the original text of the Old Testament is, of course, an extremely complicated one, and to demonstrate it adequately would need a whole book.

My general advice to you would be to use Thomson's Translation with great caution, lest in citing it you should unwittingly call into question the authority of the original inspired Hebrew text.

With warmest greetings in the Lord,