The last decade of the twentieth century saw an historic event. In 1993, The OrthodoxStudyBible: New Testament and Psalms was released as the first English Bible with study materialreflecting the ancient faith of the Eastern Orthodox Church.St. Athanasius Academy, which had organized this effort, began receiving requests for thecompletion of the Old Testament—a monumental task which involved not only preparation ofthe study notes and outlines, but also the presentation of an acceptable Old Testament text.Though the Orthodox Church has never officially committed itself to a single text and list ofOld Testament books, it has traditionally used the Greek Old Testament of the Septuagint(LXX). However, in Orthodoxy’s 200-year history in North America, no English translation ofthe LXX has ever been produced by the Church.The contributors used the Alfred Rahlfs edition of the Greek text as the basis for theEnglish translation. To this base they brought two additional major sources. The first is theBrenton text, a British translation of the Greek Old Testament, published in 1851. Theavailability of this work, and the respect accorded it, made it an obvious choice as a sourcedocument. Secondly, Thomas Nelson Publishers granted use of the Old Testament text of theNew King James Version in the places where the English translation of the LXX would matchthat of the Masoretic (Hebrew) text. The development team at St. Athanasius Academycarefully studied these sources, along with other documents, to produce an English OldTestament text suitable for the project.The organization of the Old Testament books, that is, their canonical order, was taken fromThe Old Testament According to the Seventy, published with the approval of the Holy Synodof the Church of Greece. The first edition was released in June, 1928. The Old Testament textpresented in this volume does not claim to be a new or superior translation. The goal was toproduce a text to meet the Bible-reading needs of English-speaking Orthodox Christians.In some Old Testament books, including the Psalms, the numbering of chapters, andsometimes individual verses is different in the LXX version from the English translation ofthe Hebrew text (such as the New King James Version and New Revised Standard Version).To help the reader, the LXX psalm number appears first, followed by the alternate number inparentheses, such as Psalm 50 (51).In addition to the difference in the numbering of the Psalms, the books of Jeremiah andMalachi show differences in the chapter and verse numbering when comparing TheOrthodoxStudy Bible alongside English translations based on the Hebrew Old Testamenttext. The following shows how the Hebrew and LXX texts compare in the books of Jeremiahand Malachi.