“Blessed is the man” — Μακάριος ἀνήρ — the same word that opens the Beatitudes. The Old Testament’s songbook in the Greek the early Church prayed and the New Testament quotes. Read Psalm 1 in the Septuagint, word by word.
Psalm 1 is live as a word-depth beta: all six verses of the Septuagint’s opening psalm in the original Koine Greek, every word glossed with its sense (and its New Testament resonances) and the flowing English beside it. Blessed is the man, the tree planted by the streams of water, the chaff the wind drives away, and the two ways that end the psalm. The Greek Psalter grows from here.
❦ Read Psalm 1 in the SeptuagintA taste of the format — open the reader above to read all of The Psalms (Septuagint) word by word.
The Old Testament’s book of songs, in the Greek that the New Testament quotes and the early Church prayed. You are reading the actual Septuagint Greek of Psalm 1, word by word — the gateway of the whole Psalter.
The Septuagint was made in Alexandria and elsewhere, mostly in the third and second centuries BC, when Greek had become the common language of the Jewish diaspora. It is the oldest translation of the Hebrew Bible, and for the writers of the New Testament it was simply Scripture. This Psalm follows the 1899 Cambridge edition of Henry Barclay Swete, whose text rests on the great Codex Vaticanus, checked here against an independent public-domain transcription. The modern copyrighted edition of Rahlfs is deliberately not used.
Two words in these six verses carry an enormous amount of what came after. “Blessed,” makarios, is the word Jesus repeats nine times to open the Sermon on the Mount — Psalm 1 is where the Bible’s “blessed is the one who…” begins. And “the Lord,” kyrios, is the Septuagint’s reverent substitute for the divine Name that Jews would not pronounce; because the Greek Scriptures called God kyrios, the New Testament could turn around and call Jesus by the same word, and mean it.
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