The Historical Validation of Translation

In the Old Testament
The impetus for translating the Bible is almost as old as the Bible itself. In even as early a time as that of Nehemiah, translation of the Scriptures became necessary for the people of God, and the Bible itself records that Ezra the scribe, with many assistants, "read in the book, in the law of God, interpreting and giving the sense, so that [the people] understood the reading" (Neh. 8:8). We know that part of this "interpreting and giving the sense" was rendering the words of Scripture from Hebrew into Aramaic, the language of the returned exiles; hence, the Bible itself validates its need for translation.

In the New Testament
Later, after the Old Testament canon had been written and the Jews had dispersed throughout the Mediterranean lands, the first complete translation of the Hebrew Scriptures was executed by Jewish scholars in Greek between the mid-third and late second century BC. For the most part, Old Testament quotations contained in the New Testament are drawn from this translation, called the Septuagint, and by this again the Bible validates the need for its own translation.

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