What is the meaning of “Pentateuch”?

What is the meaning of “Pentateuch”?              by Dr. Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg

We have learned that the word “Pentecost” is Greek for the Fiftieth (Day), i.e., the day of the Jewish Festival of Weeks, the fiftieth day after the holiday of Passover.  The word for “five” in Greek is pente, as in pent-agon, which is also the first part of the Greek title for the Five Books of Moses, the “Pentateuch”:  penta- + teuchos, which is a “scroll”, as you can see in the image of the ancient Samaritan Pentateuch.  To this day, Jews always read the Five Books of Moses in the synagogue from a parchment scroll, which has been hand-written in special ink by a certified scribe.

But why do we use a Greek word for the Hebrew Bible? 

The Hebrew Bible was translated, supposedly by Seventy Jewish Sages, from Hebrew into Greek in Alexandria, Egypt, at the beginning of the 3rd c. BC.  The large Jewish community was Greek-speaking, along with the city’s Greek inhabitants, and most people also spoke demotic Egyptian. This translation of the bible was read aloud to the public in the synagogue, indicating that at least some of the Jews in the diaspora knew Greek better than Hebrew or Aramaic! 

The Greek version of the Hebrew Bible is called the “Septuagint”, which, to makes things even more complicated, is a Latin translation of the Greek word for 70; hence you may often see it written as LXX = 70, which was supposedly the number of translators working on the project in the court of the Hellenistic ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy Philadelphus.

When the writers of the New Testament quote from the Bible, they are generally relying upon this Greek version, a direct translation of the Hebrew which, by the time of Jesus, included not just the Five Books of Moses, but also the Prophets, Psalms, Proverbs, etc., in several editions and versions. Acquaintance with the language of the Septuagint brings you directly into the world of the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean, by means of not only the language but also the theology, which shaped the expression of the New Testament. 

In fact, the Septuagint is not just a straight translation of the Hebrew text as we know it now, but is a witness to alternative, older Hebrew texts which have disappeared; also, as we know, every translation is also an interpretation.