There are questions that appear innocent but conceal a philological trap of considerable proportions. "How do you say 'anointed' in Greek?" is one of them. Those who ask it — often in theological discussion forums, in Hebrew Roots of Christianity communities, or in apologetic debates — usually expect a single answer, taking for granted that the textual history of Greek-speaking Judaism is uniform and without fissures. The reality, however, is considerably richer, and considerably more careful, than any hasty answer could suggest.
The term χριστός, used in the Septuagint (LXX) to translate the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (mashiach), derives from the verb χρίω, which in classical Greek denoted an anointing of a sacred or ceremonial character, but with a broad semantic range not exclusively Levitical (cf. Codex Sinaiticus, folio 88). The problem lies in the fact that χρίω and its nominal derivative χριστός are terms that Hellenistic koine absorbed with a semantic charge progressively removed from the ritual specificity of שֶׁמֶן הַמִּשְׁחָה (shemen ha-mishchah), the sacred oil whose formula and conditions of use are rigorously codified in Exodus 30:22–33. In other words, χριστός in the LXX is a Hellenising translational choice that abstracts and generalises where the Hebrew text is precise and technical. Over the centuries, that abstraction acquired very concrete doctrinal connotations, entirely foreign to the conceptual universe of the Torah.
Faced with this situation, the Constantinople Pentateuch — a genuine expression of Greek-speaking Sephardic Judaism, printed in Istanbul in 1547 — made a translational decision of full philological awareness. At Leviticus 4:3, where the Hebrew reads כֹּהֵן הַמָּשִׁיחַ, the Yevanic text — that is, Judeo-Greek written in Hebrew characters — records: או אלימינוש — ὁ ἀλειμμένος.
The term chosen is the perfect passive participle of ἀλείφω, a verb that throughout the Greek tradition, from Homer to late Greek, specifically denotes anointing with oil in its material, bodily, and ritual sense. This is no casual choice: it is a hermeneutical decision that anchors the translation in the original Levitical matrix, resisting any theological drift foreign to that tradition.
The distinction between the two verbs — χρίω and ἀλείφω — is not trivial. While χρίω tended to specialise toward sacred-ceremonial use in later Greek literature and was adopted en masse by the Alexandrian translation of the Seventy, ἀλείφω always retained a more concrete, practice-anchored sense: the action of rubbing or applying oil to a surface or body. This semantic concreteness is precisely what makes ἀλειμμένος a more faithful translation of the Hebrew text's intent, which describes a specific ritual act within the sacrificial system of the Mishkan, rather than an abstract theological category.
This is, moreover, no isolated or arbitrary choice on the part of the Constantinople Pentateuch. The preference for ἀλειμμένος over χριστός forms part of a long-standing Jewish translational strategy, documented from the second century CE and consciously oriented toward preserving the semantic specificity of the Hebrew against the christological drift χριστός had acquired in ecclesiastical usage. The most forceful testimony comes from Aquila of Sinope, a Jewish proselyte whose Greek version of the Tanakh — celebrated by the masters of rabbinic tradition precisely for its scrupulous adherence to that tradition, and simultaneously condemned and reviled by the Church Fathers as an attempt to "obviate christological interpretations through a literal and often etymologising translation" (Reider 1917: 60) — systematically uses ἠλειμμένος in passages of high messianic voltage.
Patristic hostility toward this translational decision is documented in explicit terms. His first biographer accuses him of having attacked the interpretation of the Seventy, not employing correct reasoning but seeking to distort certain of the sayings, so that he might publish otherwise what is testified concerning Christ in the Scriptures. Euthymius, alluding to his conversion to Judaism after having been baptised, pronounces that this man, enraged against Christians, perverted many things. Theodoret describes his translational practice as κακουργία — wickedness, malice. The virulence of these condemnations contrasts revealingly with the more nuanced verdict of Jerome, who, having long collated Aquila's version against the Hebrew volumes, confesses that he does so lest the synagogue should have changed something out of hatred for Christ — and admits, to a friendly mind, that he finds more things there that serve to strengthen the faith than he expected. This implicit acknowledgment of Aquila's philological fidelity — even from a Church Father — underscores that his choice of ἠλειμμένος was not a dogmatic "perversion," but a lexicographically more precise translation, more firmly anchored in classical Greek.
At Daniel 9:26, where the Hebrew reads יִכָּרֵת מָשִׁיחַ (yikkaret mashiach, "the anointed one shall be cut off"), Aquila translates: ἐξολοθρευθήσεται ἠλειμμένος καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν αὐτῷ ("the anointed one shall be utterly destroyed, and there is nothing left for him"), while his contemporary Symmachus opts for: ἐκκοπήσεται χριστός καὶ οὐχ ὑπάρξει αὐτῷ ("the anointed one shall be cut off, and he shall not exist"). The lexical difference is not accidental: it reflects two divergent hermeneutical policies before the same Hebrew text. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Demonstratio Evangelica (8.2.90), preserves both readings and contrasts them, showing that by the fourth century these variants were well known and theologically significant. Aquila's choice becomes still more revealing when one observes his general translational practice: at Leviticus 8:10 and parallel passages, he consistently renders the Hebrew verb מָשַׁח (mashach, "to anoint") with ἀλείφειν, and the noun מִשְׁחָה (mishchah, "anointing") with ἄλειμμα — confirming that his rejection of χριστός is not an isolated anomaly but a systematic decision spanning the entire semantic field of the root √משׁח.
This phenomenon did not go unnoticed in antiquity. Lactantius, in his Divinae Institutiones (IV.7.5–7), offers philological analysis of remarkable acuity: the ancient Greeks, he observes, said χρίεσθαι for anointing — what is now called ἀλείφεσθαι — as Homer's verse indicates, where the handmaids washed and anointed the guests with oil (Odyssey IV.49); for this reason, he says, the Christians call him Christus, that is, anointed, who in Hebrew is called Messiah — whence in certain Greek scriptures, badly translated from the Hebrew, one finds ἠλειμμένος written, from the verb ἀλείφεσθαι. Lactantius's observation is threefold in its significance: first, it confirms that ἀλείφω was perceived as the older and more genuine Greek term for the physical act of anointing with oil, attested since Homer; second, it acknowledges that χρίω had progressively displaced ἀλείφω in common usage, acquiring a cultic specialisation the Homeric term did not originally possess; third — and most significant for our argument — it records explicitly that certain Jewish translators deliberately opted for ἠλειμμένος instead of χριστός, a choice Lactantius tendentiously dismisses as a "mistranslation" (male interpretatae), when in reality it is a philologically more precise translation, more firmly anchored in the archaic and classical Greek lexical register.
Even the Alexandrian Septuagint, despite its general preference for χριστός, was not entirely uniform in this practice. At Numbers 3:3, translating הַכֹּהֲנִים הַמְּשֻׁחִים (ha-kohanim ha-memushachim, "the anointed priests"), it employs τοὺς ἱερεῖς τοὺς ἠλειμμένους, showing that the root ἀλείφω was by no means foreign to Jewish cultic vocabulary in Greek, and that in contexts of lesser theological weight the Alexandrian translators themselves resorted to it without conflict.
Still more revealing is the case of Isaiah 11:5, a passage belonging to one of the prophet's most important messianic chapters — the one describing the shoot that shall spring from the stump of Jesse. Gregory of Nyssa, in his Testimonia adversus Judaeos (PG 46.208), cites this verse in its Septuagintal form as reading that he shall be girded with righteousness about his loins, and anointed with truth about his sides — ἀλήθειαν ἠλειμμένος τὰς πλευρὰς αὐτοῦ. The Codex Sinaiticus, however — one of the oldest uncial manuscripts of the Septuagint, fourth century — presents a significantly different reading: girded with truth about his sides, καὶ ἀληθεία εἰλημμένος τὰς πλευράς, substituting the participle of λαμβάνω for that of ἀλείφω. The phonetic proximity between ἠλειμμένος and εἰλημμένος renders this variant especially suspect: it is not a deep conceptual divergence between two exegetical traditions, but a surgical lexical substitution that radically alters the semantic field of the text — from ritual anointing to mere physical girding — without substantially altering the verse's syntactic structure. This textual manipulation, documentable by comparing the fourth-century patristic testimony against the great uncial codices of the same period, betrays an editorial intervention of christological orientation: removing ἠλειμμένος from a crucial messianic passage was convenient for preventing Jewish readers from arguing — as they in fact did, by means of Aquila's version and other translations — that the Septuagint itself distinguished between the terminology of Levitical anointing (ἀλείφω) and the consolidated Christian use of χριστός. The existence of this textual variant does not weaken but rather reinforces the argument: it evidences that the use of ἠλειμμένος in the early Septuagint was frequent enough, and uncomfortable enough, to justify its systematic correction in certain manuscripts of ecclesiastical circulation.
This lexical oscillation within the LXX itself betrays an unresolved tension between fidelity to the material concreteness of the act of anointing and the progressive crystallisation of χριστός as a technical term with increasingly abstract resonances. The choice of the Constantinople Pentateuch, then, does not innovate: it restores and consecrates a lexicographic practice attested since Aquila, ratified by the Septuagint's own occasional usage, and consciously maintained in the textual tradition of Sephardic Judaism as semantic resistance against a doctrinal drift foreign to the Levitical matrix of the Torah.
Morphologically, ἀλειμμένος is a perfect passive participle expressing a permanent resultant state: one upon whom the anointing has fallen, and who remains in that priestly condition. This aspectual dimension of the Greek perfect reproduces with notable fidelity the Semitic value of the construct state כֹּהֵן הַמָּשִׁיחַ, where the anointing is neither a punctual event nor a transitory quality, but a sustained cultic status, conferred by the application of the שֶׁמֶן הַמִּשְׁחָה and permanently inscribed upon the person of the priest.
Thus, the philologically correct answer — and the genuinely kosher one within the tradition of Greek-speaking Judaism — is that "anointed" in the Greek of the Jewish community is ἀλειμμένος, אלימינוש in its Yevanic form, and not the term the Alexandrian translation popularised, with doctrinal consequences well known and entirely foreign to the conceptual universe of the Torah.
The next time someone asks this question, it is worth answering with the text in hand.
