Intertextuality studies connections between texts, often beginning with their similarities. Shared language, parallel structures, and repeated images are the core material of the discipline. Some of the most useful intertextual insights come from asking why texts differ, rather than only how they are alike.
Several ancient literary traditions retell, translate, or reimagine the same biblical narratives, and each one makes choices about what to keep, what to change, and what to add. These choices reflect the theological commitments, cultural contexts, and interpretive priorities of the communities that produced them. The differences between these traditions and what most English readers assume is "the" biblical text are themselves a form of intertextuality worth careful attention.
The Masoretic Text as the Modern Standard
Most English translations of the Bible are based on the Masoretic Text (MT), a Hebrew tradition standardized by Jewish scribes between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries CE. Because it underlies most modern Bibles, readers often treat it as the original or default form of the text. This assumption obscures a more complicated history.[1]
Before the Masoretic tradition was fixed, multiple Hebrew text forms circulated simultaneously. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed what researchers had long suspected: the Septuagint (the Greek translation produced in the third and second centuries BCE) sometimes preserves readings from a Hebrew text that differed from what would eventually become the Masoretic tradition. The same is true of the Samaritan Pentateuch. These are not competing versions of a single original but rather witnesses to a period when the biblical text existed in several parallel forms, none of which had yet achieved exclusive authority.
Comparing the Masoretic Text with the Greek Septuagint translation and other traditions reveals the literary and theological choices that shaped how communities preserved and transmitted their sacred texts.
The Septuagint: Translation as Interpretation
The Septuagint is often described as a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, but that label understates what actually happened. The translators made choices that sometimes reflect a different Hebrew source text, sometimes reflect the translator's own theological understanding, and sometimes reflect the needs of a Greek-speaking Jewish audience.[2]
Even at the level of individual word choices, these decisions carry weight. A verb chosen to describe divine creation, a phrase used to render a Hebrew idiom, or a term selected to describe the pre-creation state can shift the theological implications of a passage in ways that are invisible to readers of a single translation. These are not mistakes but interpretive choices shaped by the translators' own intellectual and cultural environment.
At the level of whole books, the differences grow larger. The Septuagint version of Jeremiah is roughly one-eighth shorter than the Masoretic version and arranges the oracles against the nations in a completely different location. The Greek Daniel includes additions like the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men. The Greek Esther includes over a hundred verses not found in the Hebrew, including explicit references to God that the Hebrew version does not contain.[3]
In each case, the question is not which version is "right." The question is what the differences reveal about how these communities read, understood, and valued the texts they inherited.
The Targums: Translation as Commentary
The Aramaic Targums push interpretive translation further still. Produced for synagogue audiences who spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew, the Targums range from the relatively literal Targum Onkelos to the expansive Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, which inserts elaborate narrative additions directly into the biblical text. Where the Septuagint translators generally aimed to represent their source (however interpretively), the Targum traditions openly embed commentary, theological clarification, and narrative expansion into the translation itself.[4]
The Targums frequently introduce mediating language between God and the world, using expressions such as Memra ("Word") or Shekinah ("Presence") where the Hebrew text speaks of God acting directly. They connect passages to other parts of the biblical tradition through interpretive additions, making explicit the links that the Hebrew text only implies. In narrative passages, they sometimes add entire scenes, dialogues, and backstories that reflect theological traditions circulating in their communities.[5]
These additions express theological beliefs about God's relationship with the world, how the patriarchs should be understood, and how the biblical text connects to the community's broader religious life. Each departure from the Hebrew source reveals the interpretive world of the community that produced it.
Rewritten Bible: Retelling as Theology
The so-called "Rewritten Bible" genre, texts like Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, and parts of Pseudo-Philo, takes the process of interpretive retelling even further. Rather than presenting themselves as translations, these texts retell biblical narratives in their own voice, freely rearranging, expanding, and omitting material to serve their own literary and theological purposes.[6]
Jubilees, written in the second century BCE, retells the narrative of Genesis and the first part of Exodus within a framework of jubilee periods (units of forty-nine years). The retelling, however, is not neutral. The author imposes a precise chronological framework on events that Genesis narrates without specific dates, names characters that Genesis leaves anonymous, and inserts legal pronouncements that read like quotations from heavenly law. Each of these changes reflects a specific set of concerns: that the Torah's calendrical and legal system was operative from the very beginning of human history, not introduced later at Sinai.
The better question about Rewritten Bible texts is always why the author rewrites what he does. Every omission, addition, and rearrangement is a response to something in the source text, a perceived gap, an apparent contradiction, or a theological opportunity. The differences between these retellings and their source material show how the authors interpreted their sources.[7]
What Textual Differences Reveal
The habit of reading biblical texts in a single, standardized translation makes it easy to forget that these texts have always existed in multiple forms. The Masoretic Text is one tradition among several, and its dominance in modern Bibles is the result of historical processes, not inherent superiority. Attending to the differences between traditions, rather than smoothing them over, reveals the interpretive history that shaped how these texts were read for centuries before any modern translation existed.