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For most of human history, hardly anyone read the Bible. They heard it. Scrolls were rare and costly, few people could read at all, and so the Scriptures lived mainly in the air – spoken aloud in homes and synagogues, read out to gathered congregations, carried from one person to the next by voice rather than by page. The silent, solitary reading we think of as normal today is, in the long story of the faith, a fairly recent arrival.

That is worth pausing on, because it means the Word of God was shaped to be listened to. And when we recover even a little of that older way of meeting Scripture – letting it be read to us rather than only scanning it with our eyes – something quietly changes in how it reaches us.

Walk into any bookshop with a Bible section, or scroll through any Bible app, and you face a small wall of choices. KJV. NIV. NKJV. ESV. NLT. Amplified. For someone who simply wants to read the Word of God, the variety can feel less like a gift and more like a hurdle. Which one is right? Which one is true?

The good news is that the differences between the major translations are not a matter of one being faithful and the others being false. Nearly all of the well-known English Bibles are the careful work of teams of scholars who took the task with great seriousness. The differences come from a single, very human question that every translator must answer.

If you have ever wondered why the New Testament sometimes quotes the Old Testament in words that do not quite match the Old Testament passage it points to, you have stumbled onto one of the most fascinating doors in all of Scripture. Walk through it and you find the Septuagint – the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that the earliest Christians, and Jesus himself, knew and used.

For most readers the word is unfamiliar, and the abbreviation LXX looks like a typo. But the Septuagint shaped how the gospel was first preached, how the apostles wrote their letters, and how the very first generation of believers heard the promises of God. It is worth getting to know.