R.C. Sproul

not some spiritual realm that's outside the measurable views of the histories we know.

All right, well, let me talk briefly now about the meaning of the terms that we encounter in the Bible.

In the Old Testament, the word that is translated by the English word covenant is the word berit.

And we run into a little bit of problem when we come into the New Testament because, remember, the Old Testament is written in Hebrew and the New Testament is written in Greek.

Now we also have the Septuagint.

which was produced by exilic Jews during the dispersion, or the diaspora, when the Jews at that time during the Hellenization process of the conquest of Alexander the Great had the subjugated nations and peoples speaking Greek.

That's why the Jews were speaking Greek or writing in Greek in New Testament times.

Well, during the time of the writing of the Septuagint, lest the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews be lost to the Jewish people who were now speaking Greek, a team of seventy scholars, Jewish scholars, came together and translated

the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.

And that's a very important event in the history of Judeo-Christianity because there we begin to see how the Old Testament concepts were rendered into the Greek language, a language that was not native to the people of the Old Covenant.

And yet the New Testament is now written in Greek.

And so having the Septuagint is almost like having a translating, code-breaking thing

because we can compare how the Jews translated their own Scriptures into Greek and then compared with how the New Testament writers used the same language.

It's very important etymologically and so on.

But in any case, one of the problems that the Jews who produced the Septuagint struggled with at the time of this translation is what Greek word can we use to render the Hebrew berit

into the Greek language because the problem was there wasn't any word that really matched the Hebrew term berit that is now translated by the English word covenant.

Well, there were a couple of words that sort of competed, and the word that won the day was the Greek word diatheka.

which is how the Septuagint translates berit and how, for the most part, the etheka is used in the New Testament to translate the Hebrew concept of covenant.

And this is where we get some of that confusion between Old Covenant and Old Testament, New Covenant and New Testament, because the primary word for testament

seems to be at least, the word diatheka.