The Fingerprint in the Footnotes: How the Writer of Hebrews Read His Bible
What the Old Testament quotations in Hebrews reveal about the man who wrote it.
Hello brothers and sisters,
I want to show you something that has been sitting in plain sight in your Bible your whole life, tucked into the cross-references and the tiny footnotes most of us skate right past.
The letter to the Hebrews quotes the Old Testament constantly. More than almost any other book in the New Testament, it builds its entire argument out of Scripture, stacking quotation on quotation like a master mason laying stone. And here is the thing I want you to see today: when the writer of Hebrews reaches for the Old Testament, he reaches, again and again, for the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, rather than the Hebrew text that stands behind our modern English Old Testaments.
Now, I want to be careful here, because there is a popular way of saying this that overreaches. You will sometimes hear people call the Septuagint “the Bible Jesus read.”
In fact, until very recently I said it myself. I even have a book that used it as its subtitle.
But the honest truth is that we cannot say with any certainty that a Galilean carpenter’s son would have read the Scriptures in Greek in His village synagogue. Especially since most evidence points to the Torah very likely still being read in Hebrew (with an Aramaic paraphrase for the common people) in Galilee in the first century.
What we can say, with no hedging at all, is this: the Septuagint is the Scripture behind the New Testament. When the apostles and evangelists wrote their Gospels and letters in Greek, and quoted the Old Testament to make their case for Christ, they quoted the Greek. The great majority of the Old Testament quotations in the New Testament follow the Septuagint. That is not a contested point. It is simply what the text shows.
And nowhere is it clearer than in Hebrews.
Here is why that matters, and why I have spent a significant chunk of this year on it: The way a person quotes Scripture is a kind of fingerprint. It tells you which Bible sat open on his desk, which tradition shaped his thinking, which words came to his mind when he wanted to prove a point. And the fingerprint all over Hebrews is a Greek one.
Let me show you what I mean. Two examples, briefly, and then I want to tell you where this road has led me.
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Example One: The Angels Who Worship the Son
Early in the letter, the writer is building his great case that the Son is greater than the angels. To clinch it, he quotes a line of Scripture:
“Let all God’s angels worship him.” (Hebrews 1:6)
It is a wonderful proof-text for his purpose. The angels themselves are commanded to worship the Son; therefore the Son is greater than they are. Simple, powerful, done.
But here is where it gets interesting. Go looking for that line in a modern English Old Testament, and you will have trouble finding it. The most likely source is Deuteronomy 32:43, the closing song of Moses. And in the Masoretic Hebrew text, the basis for most of our English Bibles, that “let all God’s angels worship him” line simply is not there. The Hebrew verse is shorter. The sentence the writer of Hebrews quotes appears to be missing from his Old Testament.
So did he invent it? Did he misquote?
No. And this is the part I find genuinely thrilling.
The line is present in the Septuagint. The Greek translators, working well over a century before Christ, had a longer version of Deuteronomy 32:43 that included this call for the divine beings to worship. For a long time, a skeptic might have said the Greek translators simply padded the text, added a flourish that was never in the Hebrew at all.
Deuteronomy 32:43 (NKJV)
“Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people; For He will avenge the blood of His servants, And render vengeance to His adversaries; He will provide atonement for His land and His people.”
Deuteronomy 32:43 (LXX/NETS):
Be glad, O skies, with him, and let all the divine sons do obeisance to him. Be glad, O nations, with his people, and let all the angels of God prevail for him. For he will avenge the blood of his sons and take revenge and repay the enemies with a sentence, and he will repay those who hate, and the Lord shall cleanse the land of his people.
And then, in the caves above the Dead Sea, we found a Hebrew scroll of Deuteronomy. And that scroll, copied centuries before Christ, contains the longer reading. Not word-for-word identical to the Greek, I want to be honest about that. The scroll speaks of the “gods,” or “sons of God,” bowing down, where the Greek that Hebrews quotes says “angels of God.” But the point stands, and it stands firmly: the longer reading is ancient, and it is Hebrew. The line the Masoretic tradition does not preserve was there in a Hebrew text of Deuteronomy centuries before the New Testament was written.
Deuteronomy 32:43 (DSS: 4Q44 Deuteronomyq)
Rejoice, heavens, with his people, and bow down to him, all gods, for he will avenge the blood of his sons. He will take vengeance on his adversaries, And avenge those who hate him, and will make atonement for his land and for his people.
Do you see what that does? It means the Septuagint translators were not making things up. They were working from a genuine, ancient Hebrew text, one that preserved a line the later Masoretic tradition, for whatever reason, did not carry forward. And the writer of Hebrews, reaching for the Greek, reached for the tradition that preserved that line.
This is the heart of what I have come to call the both/and. The Masoretic Text is not wrong. Its careful guardians preserved the Hebrew Scriptures with astonishing fidelity, and I trust them. But the Septuagint is not wrong either. It preserves, here, a reading that the Dead Sea Scrolls have now vindicated as authentically ancient. Neither text is the “real” one and the other a corruption. They are two faithful streams, and each has carried downstream to us something the other did not. Read them together, and you recover more of the fullness of what God gave than either alone can show you.
One thing I’d like to flag for you here is that there is a small scholarly debate about whether Hebrews 1:6 draws on Deuteronomy 32:43 or on Psalm 97:7, since both involve angels and worship. The wording leans toward Deuteronomy, enough that I consider the matter settled, but I mention the alternative so you can weigh it for yourself.
Example Two: The One Who Must Not Shrink Back
Here is a second fingerprint, and this one shapes the whole emotional heart of the letter.
Near the end of his long argument, as he pleads with his frightened readers not to abandon the faith, the writer quotes the prophet Habakkuk:
“My righteous one will live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.” (Hebrews 10:38)
I have written before about the first half of that line, the famous “the righteous shall live by faith,” and about the fascinating question of whose faith is in view. If you want that deeper dive, you can find it in my earlier post on the passage. Today I want to focus on the other half, the part about shrinking back.
Because that “if he shrinks back” clause is doing enormous work in Hebrews. The entire letter is a warning against exactly that, against drifting away, falling back, retreating from Christ into the safety of the old ways. When the writer quotes a prophet who warns against shrinking back, he has found the perfect arrow for his bow.
But turn to Habakkuk in your Hebrew-based English Old Testament, and you will find the verse reads differently. The Masoretic text of Habakkuk 2 speaks of the one whose soul is “puffed up” or “not upright,” a statement about pride, not about retreat. The specific “shrink back” language, and the way the writer of Hebrews arranges the two halves of the quotation, follows the Septuagint’s rendering, not the Hebrew.
Here’s how the NKJV renders it:
Behold the proud, His soul is not upright in him; But the just shall live by his faith.
Now let’s compare that to the Septuagint via the LES translation:
If he draws back, my life does not find pleasure in it, but the righteous one will live by my faith.
Once again, the Greek is his Bible. And once again, the reading he chose is not a corruption to be explained away but a genuine strand of the tradition, one that happens to carry precisely the pastoral force his struggling congregation needed to hear.
The Hebrew gives us a warning against pride. The Greek gives us a warning against retreat. Both are true. Both are the Word of God. And the writer of Hebrews, under the Spirit’s inspiration, reached for the one that fit the wound he was trying to heal.
Why I Care, and What I’ve Made of It
I could give you a dozen more. The “body you have prepared for me” of Hebrews 10:5, which I explored at length here and which is perhaps the most beautiful example of all. The way the writer leans on the Greek of Psalm 8, of Psalm 104, of Proverbs. Fingerprint after fingerprint, and almost every one of them Greek.
And here is where this stops being a matter of footnotes and starts being a matter of a man.
Because if the way a writer quotes Scripture is a fingerprint, then the fingerprint is worth following. It tells us something about who this writer was. He was someone so at home in the Greek Scriptures that he thought in them, argued from them, reached for them by instinct. He was, whoever he was, a Greek-Bible man to his bones.
For most of two thousand years, the church has not known who wrote Hebrews. The letter is unsigned. It opens with no name, in the most polished Greek in the New Testament, and it has kept its secret through seventeen centuries of guessing. Paul, some said. Barnabas, said others. Apollos. Luke. Priscilla. The great Origen threw up his hands and said that only God knows.
I have spent months following the fingerprints, this one and many others, and I have come to believe the evidence points further than most people realize, though never so far as to silence the question entirely. The Septuagint fingerprint is one thread. There are others: the shape of the theology, the rare vocabulary, the polish of the prose, the strange and revealing way the letter ends.
I have gathered all of it into a book, and it released today.
It is called The Unsigned Letter: A Case for Paul and Luke as the Composers of Hebrews. In it I make the cumulative case, patiently and I hope honestly, that Hebrews is the work of two men together: the mind of the apostle Paul and the hand of Luke, the beloved physician who gave us the Gospel and the Acts. I did not arrive at that thesis on my own, and I owe the spark of it to a fellow writer whom I credit fully in the book. But the case, the evidence, the following of the fingerprints all the way down, that has been my labor, and I am glad to finally put it in your hands.
I wrote it the way I write everything here: as a passionate outsider sharing what he has found, generous to the views I disagree with, honest about where the evidence runs thin, and never claiming more certainty than the text allows. You do not need Greek to read it. You need only the same curiosity that made you read this far.
If today’s little journey through the footnotes of Hebrews stirred something in you, I think you will find the book a feast. It is available now, in ebook, print and (soon) AI read audio, and at a price meant to keep it within reach of anyone who wants to come along.
Come and see whose hands held the pen.
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Great article. Thanks for this contribution. Very interesting idea on the Pauline-Lukan composition. Definitely a possibility. Do you think it likely that Hebrews is actually a sermon conducted in Greek rhetorical style?