When was the Old Testament Completed???

Around 400 B.C. all the books of the Old Testament had been completed. By 300 B.C. the Jews who dwelt in Egypt, in the city of Alexandria, had begun to translate the Bible from Hebrew to Greek. The five books of Moses were finished around 270 B.C., and then the remaining books of the Old Testament were translated in the subsequent one hundred fifty years. This became the earliest translation of the Hebrew Bible. According to the Letter of Aristeas, this translation was done by seventy-two scholars, all of whom were experts both in Hebrew and in Greek; hence, it was called the Septuagint, which is the earliest translation of the Bible. Later when the Roman Empire unified the areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, some began to translate the Bible into Latin, but their translations were in a crude vernacular style and contained many absurdities. In A.D. 384 the church father Jerome undertook the revision of the Latin New Testament; his work of retranslating was completed in A.D. 388. The Latin translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew was finished by A.D. 404. This version was later called the Vulgate, which itself is a Latin word, meaning “made common.” Hence, it is also known as the Latin “common” version and is still being used by the Roman Catholic Church today.