Do we really need to know Hebrew to understand the Bible better?

The Old and the New Testaments were both written by Jews. Many times people have asked me because I have studied Theology if I speak Hebrew. As we all know, the New Testament canon we have today consist of 27 books, and it was written in Greek, and we also, really did not have the full canon until about 367 AD. To make a long story short, the reason for the New Testament is because of the resurrection of Jesus, and it was written by believers after His ascension. Now, those believers such as Paul and the Apostolic Church Fathers quoted from the Old Testament when they wrote in the New Testament. However, the Old Testament which they used was written in Greek, and it was the Septuagint.

The Septuagint was written about 300 years before Jesus was on Earth. Many Hellenistic Jews around the empire had began to lose the Hebrew language; therefore, this became a translation for them and others who spoke Greek. The Septuagint's name came from the Latin "septuaginta interpretum" which means the "translation of the seventy interpreters." The Septuagint was translated by about 70 Jewish Scholars. Normally the Roman numeral LXX (seventy) is used as an abbreviation. Now, the original question was do we really need to know Hebrew to understand the Bible better?

I will leave this up to you to answer. The Septuagint (the Old Testament), which was written in Greek, was around for 300 years before Jesus. I said that the Apostolic Fathers and Paul used it as reference when quoting in the New Testament. The early Christian Church used the Septuagint as their source for the Old Testament. If you spoke Greek, both the New and the Old Testament were there as a source from the beginning, and for 2000 years now. So, what do you think, do we really need to know Hebrew to understand the Bible better? Well, that would probably be entirely up to you because the Masoretic Texts are written in Hebrew; however, the seventy scholars that translated the Septuagint into Greek did a fantastic job. By the way, I have an interesting note; the Hebrew canon was not closed until the first century.

References:

http://ecmarsh.com/lxx/

http://www.ccel.org/bible/brenton/