In the last article I told you that the Apostles quote the Greek Old Testament, and that in many places their argument only works in the Greek. I want to show you the clearest example I know of. If you only ever look at one of these, look at this one, because you can verify the whole thing yourself in about four minutes.

Open Hebrews 10. Here is verse 5:

Therefore, when He entered into the world, He said: "Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me."

(Hebrews 10:5)
Theologians Bible

Stop and see what is happening. The author of Hebrews is putting words in the mouth of Christ at the moment of the Incarnation. Christ entering the world says to the Father, "a body You have prepared for Me." That is the argument of the whole chapter. The old sacrifices did not please God. A body did. And that body is offered once, and it is enough.

Now, where is he quoting from?

The psalm

He is quoting the Psalter. Open Psalm 39, verse 7:

Sacrifice and offering you would not; but a body have you prepared me: whole burnt offering and sacrifice for sin you did not require.

(Psalm 39:7)
Theologians Bible

And the very next verse:

Then I said, Behold, I come: in the volume of the book it is written concerning me,

(Psalm 39:8)
Theologians Bible

Remember the numbering. This is Psalm 39 in the Septuagint. In your English Bible it is Psalm 40. If you went looking under 39 in a Protestant Bible and got confused, read the article on Psalm numbering and then come back.

Now look at the Greek

This is where it becomes undeniable. Look at the Greek line under Hebrews 10:5:

Θυσίαν καὶ προσφορὰν οὐκ ἠθέλησας, σῶμα δὲ κατηρτίσω μοι

Now look at the Greek line under Psalm 39:7:

Θυσίαν καὶ προσφορὰν οὐκ ἠθέλησας, σῶμα δὲ κατηρτίσω μοι

Read those twice. They are not similar. They are not close. They are the same words in the same order, letter for letter. The author of Hebrews opened the Greek Psalter, found Psalm 39, and copied it.

Here is the problem

Go find Psalm 40:6 in a Hebrew based English Old Testament. You will not find "a body you have prepared for me." You will find something about ears. "My ears you have opened," or "ears you have dug for me," depending on the translation.

Ears. Not a body.

So think about what that means for the argument in Hebrews. The entire chapter turns on Christ receiving a body in which to offer Himself. If the psalm says ears, the author of Hebrews has no argument. The verse he is standing on does not exist in the Hebrew form of the text.

But he is not making it up, and he is not being sloppy. He is quoting the Greek Old Testament exactly, and the Greek Old Testament says σῶμα. Body.

What this actually proves

I want to be careful here, because I do not want to overstate it.

This does not prove the Hebrew is corrupt. Textual history is older and stranger than any of us, and there are reasonable accounts of how the two readings relate. I am not going to pretend to settle that in an article.

What it does prove is simpler and much harder to argue with. The author of Hebrews, writing Scripture under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, treated the Septuagint as Scripture. He quoted it as authoritative. He built a doctrinal argument about the Incarnation on a reading found there and not in the other tradition. And the Church received the letter he wrote into the canon.

So if you tell me the Septuagint is a loose translation not to be relied on, you have a problem, and the problem is not with me. The problem is that the New Testament itself relies on it. You cannot hold Hebrews in one hand and dismiss the text it quotes with the other.

What the Fathers do with it

The Fathers did not stumble over this. They preached it. The body prepared for Christ is one of the great themes of patristic writing on the Incarnation, and the line from the Psalter is read as a prophecy of the Word taking flesh.

St. Athanasius the Great gave us the sentence that sums the whole thing up. God became what we are so that we may become what He is. The body prepared in Psalm 39 is where that begins. Not a metaphor. A body.

Read what the Fathers say on the passage in the Church Fathers section, and read the full works in the Fathers Library.

Do it yourself right now

This takes four minutes and it is worth more than reading ten articles about it.

You will have done real textual work. Not taking my word for it. Not taking a video's word for it. Looking at the text.

That is what the tools on this site are for. Everything else is commentary.