The Hexapla of Origen – Guardians of the Sacred Text

Alexandria and the Question of the Septuagint

For nearly three centuries before Origen began the work that would make him famous, the Greek-speaking church had lived by the Septuagint. The legend of the Seventy had given it the prestige of divine inspiration; the careful copyists of the great Christian libraries of Alexandria had preserved it; the apologists had built their case against Jewish polemic on the conviction that the Greek Old Testament was, in substance, the word of God. By the time Origen was born, around 185, that conviction was beginning to come apart at the seams. The Greek manuscripts that circulated under the name of the Seventy differed wildly from one another; Jewish readers, increasingly confident in the Hebrew text they had inherited from their scribes, were pointing to places where the Septuagint said things that the Hebrew simply did not contain. And yet the Hebrew itself was a contested object. The consonantal text was clearly older than any of the Greek translations; it carried no vowels; it could not be read aloud with certainty. Worse, the Greek translators had not given the church a stable single text. Aquila of Sinope, a Jewish proselyte who had revised the Septuagint in the second century into a woodenly literal Greek, was circulating among the synagogues of the Roman East and winning readers from Christian ones. Theodotion’s revision, mid-second century, sat halfway between Aquila’s literalism and the older Septuagint. Symmachus, the latest of the three and a Christian or Ebionite scholar, had produced a Greek translation that read more elegantly than either of them. By the time Origen reached Caesarea, around 230, the question of which Greek version ought to be read in church had become a question of which Greek version ought to be believed.

Origen was uniquely equipped to face that problem. He had been trained in the Catechetical School of Alexandria under Clement, had read widely in Greek philosophy, and had mastered Hebrew at a level unusual for a Christian scholar of his generation. He had also inherited, from the chaotic decades of his life under the Severan dynasty, a habit of treating disagreement as a problem to be solved rather than a position to be defended. He had been ordained in Palestine and condemned in Egypt, and the long dispute over his lay preaching had already forced him to articulate what kind of authority a Christian biblical scholar might claim. When he settled in Caesarea, in the library that would eventually bear the name of his martyr-disciple Pamphilus, he did not write a treatise against the Jews or a defence of the Septuagint. He built a tool.

The tool he built has no real equivalent in the ancient world. It was a critical apparatus of the entire Hebrew Bible, set out in parallel columns, in which every available Greek witness could be compared with the Hebrew that he believed stood behind them all. He called it nothing; the name that stuck, Hexapla, came from later writers and reflects what they saw in the work. Six columns. A sixfold synopsis of the Old Testament, running book by book from Genesis to Malachi, in which the Hebrew, the Greek transliteration, and four different Greek versions stood side by side under the reader’s eye. The work took roughly fifteen years to complete, occupied something close to seven thousand pages, and remained, for its lifetime, the only critical edition of the Hebrew Bible ever attempted.

The Six Columns: A Critical Apparatus for Scripture

No copy of the entire Hexapla has ever been found, and almost nothing is preserved of the original text in its original layout. The reconstruction of its columnar order depends on a small number of early witnesses, none of them complete. The two earliest and most explicit descriptions come from Eusebius of Caesarea, who knew the work at first hand in the library he eventually inherited from Pamphilus, and from Epiphanius of Salamis, who claimed to have used it in Caesarea himself. Both writers agree that the work was columnar and that the columns were arranged in a deliberate order; they disagree, sometimes sharply, on what that order was and how many columns any given book contained. Modern scholarship, beginning with Frederick Field’s monumental 1875 edition of the surviving fragments, has worked from the direct manuscript evidence (mostly palimpsest remains of the Psalter) and the indirect evidence (marginal notes in catena manuscripts and the colophons of the Hexaplaric recension) to reconstruct what Origen actually did.

The consensus reconstruction, which has held since Field’s time and which recent work on the Mercati palimpsest has largely confirmed, places the Hebrew consonantal text in the first column. The Hebrew is the only column for which no manuscript reproduction survives in its original Hebrew letters, and even the direct manuscript witnesses to the Hexapla are partial. The second column, called the Secunda or the Greek-Hebrew, contained the Hebrew text transliterated into Greek letters, with the Massoretic vowel sounds that Origen believed the Hebrew text carried worked into the transliteration. This was not a translation; it was a phonetic transcription. Origen had apparently learned to read Hebrew aloud from Jewish teachers in the previous generation and believed that the pronunciation of his day corresponded, in its vowels, to what he took to be the original reading of the consonantal text. The Secunda is, for that reason, an extraordinarily valuable witness to the pre-Masoretic pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew, and it is one of the most useful pieces of indirect evidence scholars have for the vocalisation of the Hebrew Bible before the Tiberian Masoretes worked out their system in the eighth and ninth centuries.

The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth columns contained four Greek versions, set in the sequence that Origen himself chose. Aquila of Sinope came first, because Aquila was the closest to the Hebrew, a slavishly literal rendering that preserved the Hebrew word order even when it produced unidiomatic Greek. Symmachus came next, because Symmachus, although more recent than either Aquila or Theodotion, was the most Greek in idiom and so offered the contrast Origen wanted. The Septuagint itself came fifth. Theodotion came sixth. That order is not the chronological order of the translations; it is the order of Origen’s argument. Aquila stands next to the Hebrew because Aquila is the version that most respects the Hebrew’s surface. Symmachus stands next to the Septuagint because Symmachus is the version that most resembles the Septuagint in theology, even where it diverges in language. The Septuagint stands at the centre, in the position of authority, because the Septuagint is the version the church reads. Theodotion stands last because Theodotion is the version that, while not the Septuagint, is closest to it and most useful as a check on its accuracy.

For the Psalms, the arrangement was not six but eight or even nine columns. Eusebius reports that Origen discovered, while working on the Hexapla, two further Greek translations that he could not identify. One he found in a jar near Jericho, in circumstances uncannily reminiscent of the Dead Sea discoveries fifteen centuries later. The other he picked up at a stop in Nicopolis in Epirus. He labelled them Quinta and Sexta, the Fifth and Sixth (in his order, after the four named translations), and added them as further columns in the Psalter. A possible seventh translation, the Septima, is reported by Eusebius but its existence is debated; the bulk of modern scholarship treats the Psalter as containing eight columns rather than nine, and treats the Septima as a misreading of the sources.

The Jewish Greek Witnesses: Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion

The three named translations that filled columns three, four, and six are, for the modern student of the Greek Bible, almost as important as the Septuagint itself. Each was the product of a distinct theological and philological programme, and each was read, in its own day, by a recognisable audience. Without the Hexapla, very little of any of them would survive. What we know of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion we know largely because Origen preserved them, because Eusebius and Jerome quoted them, and because the margins of later Greek catena manuscripts preserved their readings.

Aquila of Sinope was, by Origen’s testimony in his commentary on Matthew, a Jewish proselyte who had converted to Judaism rather than to Christianity. His Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, datable on internal evidence to the reign of Hadrian, was designed to be read alongside the Hebrew in synagogue worship. Its purpose was not to translate the Hebrew into natural Greek; it was to give Greek-speaking Jews a text that preserved every letter of the Hebrew, in the same order, with the same particles. Where the Hebrew said asher (which), Aquila said hos. Where the Hebrew said lo (not), Aquila said ou. The result was a Greek that read like a coded cipher of the Hebrew, and that drove Christian readers to distraction for two centuries. But Aquila was also, in a real sense, the earliest known translator to work from a fully consonantal Hebrew text whose vocalisation he had to reconstruct himself; his rendering of the divine name as Kurios, where the Septuagint had Kyrios, was an attempt to mark a distinction that the consonantal text of the Septuagint had obscured. The Hexapla preserves him in the third column precisely because his literalism is useful evidence for what the Hebrew text of his day actually said.

Symmachus is harder to place. Eusebius and Epiphanius disagree about his religion; Epiphanius calls him a Samaritan who converted to Judaism, while other sources treat him as a Christian or an Ebionite. His Greek translation was made late in the second century, well within the lifetime of Christian readers. Where Aquila was slavishly literal, Symmachus tried to produce readable Greek; where the Septuagint paraphrased, Symmachus translated; where the Septuagint gave a theological reading of an anthropomorphic expression, Symmachus tried to give the original. He is the most literary of the three named translators and the most useful to students of New Testament Greek, because he stands at roughly the same distance from the Septuagint as the language of Paul and the synoptic Gospels does, and he represents the kind of Greek that a Christian reader of the second century would have produced if asked to render the Hebrew into the vernacular of the Roman East.

Theodotion sits between the two. His revision is often described as a halfway house between Aquila’s literalism and the older Septuagint’s freedom, and modern scholarship tends to treat him as the earliest of the three, datable to around the turn of the era. Theodotion’s revision is the only one of the three named versions that survives in any considerable quantity, mostly because the early church adopted his rendering of Daniel in place of the Septuagint’s, and his text of Daniel became the standard Christian Greek text of the book from the fourth century onwards. Modern editions of the Greek Daniel are still based on Theodotion’s revision, with the older Septuagint text relegated to the apparatus. The Hexapla’s placement of Theodotion in the sixth column, after the Septuagint, is a deliberate choice. Origen wanted his readers to compare Theodotion with the Septuagint directly, precisely because Theodotion was the version that Christian readers were most likely to have in their hands and most likely to confuse with the Septuagint itself.

The Obelos and the Asterisk: Origen’s Critical Sign-system

The fifth column, the column that contained the Septuagint, was the column that Origen cared most about and the column that needed the most editorial work. The Septuagint was not a single text; it was a tradition, and by the third century it was a tradition that had drifted badly. Origen set himself to bring the Septuagint into alignment with the Hebrew that stood in column one, and to do so in a way that preserved the Septuagint’s distinctive readings wherever they could not be reconciled with the Hebrew. To mark those places, he borrowed the critical signs that the Alexandrian librarians had used to edit Homer. He used the obelisk (a horizontal line, or sometimes a slash) to mark words that were present in the Septuagint but absent from the Hebrew. He used the asterisk to mark words that were present in the Hebrew but absent from the Septuagint. Wherever the Septuagint’s wording could not be reconciled with the Hebrew at all, Origen simply put the Septuagint reading in the margin, with a note explaining the divergence. The result was a Septuagint that no longer read as the Septuagint had read for three centuries, but that did carry the argument that Origen wanted to make: that the Septuagint, rightly read, agreed with the Hebrew, and that the church’s disagreements with the synagogue were disagreements over the Septuagint’s text, not over its theology.

The signs themselves became the most durable legacy of the Hexapla. They did not survive in their original layout, but they did survive in the margin notes of later Greek catena manuscripts, where scribes copied Origen’s Septuagint column with its critical signs and transmitted them alongside the Septuagint text of the codex they were annotating. Modern scholars can therefore reconstruct the Hexaplaric recension of the Septuagint, the Septuagint as Origen edited it, by piecing together those margin notes across a wide range of manuscripts. The task is laborious, and it has occupied a century and a half of patient work since Field’s 1875 edition. The standard modern edition of the Septuagint, the Göttingen Septuaginta edited by Alfred Rahlfs and continued by his students, treats the Hexaplaric recension as one of its three main witnesses to the Old Greek text. Rahlfs’s siglum for the Hexaplaric recension is O’, the letter O and a small prime.

The signs themselves also gave Origen an argumentative resource. The asterisked passages of the Hexaplaric Septuagint, the passages where Origen had added Hebrew material to the Greek, became, in his hands, a defence of the church against two opposite critics. Against the Jews, who accused the church of having a Greek Bible that disagreed with the Hebrew, Origen could point to the obelised passages and say: these are the places where the Septuagint went beyond the Hebrew, and we have marked them as such. Against Christian readers who wanted to claim the Septuagint as inspired in every letter, Origen could point to the asterisks and say: these are the places where the Septuagint fell short of the Hebrew, and we have added the Hebrew material so that the reader can see what was missing. The signs gave Origen a way of holding both positions at once. The signs themselves were preserved, in the margins of later Greek manuscripts, even after the original Hexapla was lost.

Survival and Loss: What Remained and What Disappeared

The Hexapla was never copied in its entirety while the original survived. The work was simply too large, and the resources of any single library, even the great library of Caesarea, were too small to make a complete reproduction feasible. The Psalter was the only book, so far as the evidence shows, that was reproduced in anything like its full columnar form, and even that reproduction survives only in palimpsest fragments. The original Hexapla remained in Caesarea, in the library that Pamphilus had built up and that Eusebius inherited after Pamphilus’s martyrdom in 309. Eusebius mentions the work in several of his writings; he also produced a copy of the fifth column, the edited Septuagint, that circulated widely in the fourth and fifth centuries and that became the basis for the Hexaplaric recension preserved in the margins of later Greek manuscripts.

Jerome visited the library in the 380s, while he was working on his Latin Vulgate translation, and he used the Hexapla directly. His commentary on the Psalms quotes readings from all six columns, and his prefaces to his biblical translations mention the work repeatedly. He also produced a Latin version of the Hexaplaric Psalter that is, in places, the only direct evidence for the text Origen edited. After Jerome, the direct evidence thins rapidly. The library itself appears to have been destroyed sometime in the seventh century, possibly during the Sassanid sack of Caesarea in 614, possibly during the Arab conquest a few years later. By the time Christian readers in the medieval West had any access to the work at all, the original was already lost.

What survives of the Hexapla today survives in three forms. First, in the form of patristic quotation. Eusebius, Epiphanius, Jerome, Rufinus, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and a long line of later Greek and Latin writers all quoted readings from the Hexapla by name. Their quotations, accumulated across more than a thousand years of manuscript transmission, give modern scholars a substantial corpus of Hexaplaric evidence, fragmentary but extensive. Field’s 1875 edition collected all the known quotations into a single volume, and that volume remains the standard starting point for any serious work on the Hexapla’s text. Second, in the form of the Hexaplaric recension itself, preserved in the margins of catena manuscripts and in the colophons that mark certain Septuagint manuscripts as corrected against Origen’s text. The colophons, in particular, are a remarkable witness. Several of them survive in the great uncial manuscripts of the Septuagint, including Codex Marchalianus (Q, in the Vatican Library, sixth century) and the catena manuscript tradition that extends down into the Byzantine period. Third, in the form of three manuscript witnesses that preserve the columnar arrangement itself, in palimpsest form, for the Psalter.

Those three manuscript witnesses are the most precious of the three. The oldest, Cambridge University Library T-S 12. 182, is a sixth- or seventh-century parchment that was found in the Cairo Genizah in the 1890s and that preserves thirteen verses of the Psalms in Origen’s columnar arrangement. The Genizah fragment represents the oldest direct copy of the Hexapla we have. The fragment that has been most worked on, the so-called Mercati palimpsest (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, O. 39 sup., ninth or tenth century), was discovered by him in 1894 and published in his 1958 critical edition. It preserves about 150 verses from the Psalms, in a layout that corresponds directly to Origen’s columnar arrangement, and it is the manuscript that has done most to settle modern debates about how the columns were actually laid out. A third witness, Milan B. 106 sup., preserves only a colophon and a few lines of text but is useful for dating the circulation of the Hexaplaric Psalter. Together, these three manuscripts give modern scholars their only direct evidence of what the Hexapla looked like on the page.

Reconstruction and Modern Scholarship

The reconstruction of the Hexapla’s text has been one of the great patient labours of modern biblical scholarship. Field’s 1875 edition remained the standard reference for a century, and remains the most convenient single-volume collection of Hexaplaric fragments in print. The mid-twentieth century saw the publication of two further major collections. Giovanni Mercati’s 1958 critical edition of the Milan palimpsest made the most important direct witness to the Hexapla available to scholars. The Göttingen Septuaginta, begun by Alfred Rahlfs in 1931 and continued under his successors, integrated the Hexaplaric evidence into its reconstruction of the Old Greek text of the Septuagint. Rahlfs’s siglum for the Hexaplaric recension, the O-prime, has become the standard shorthand reference in Septuagint studies.

Recent decades have seen two further developments. First, the rediscovery and publication of the Cambridge Genizah fragment, in particular the work of Robert Jenkins and his colleagues, has reopened the question of whether the Hexapla’s column for the Psalter contained a Hebrew column at all. Pierre Nautin, in his 1977 study of the Hexapla’s origins, had argued that the work contained only six translations rather than six columns, and that the Hebrew was not separately displayed. Jenkins has argued, on the basis of careful codicological measurement of the Mercati palimpsest, that the original Hexaplaric Psalter did contain a Hebrew column but that later copyists trimmed it off when the parchment was being reused. The argument has been largely accepted in recent scholarship, although it is not yet decisive. Second, the Hexapla Institute, founded in the early 2020s as an online critical edition, has begun to gather the readings of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion into a single searchable database, with a view to producing a critical edition of the Three in their Hexaplaric form. The institute’s published prospectus describes the goal as the reconstruction of the original wording of the Hexapla, with the readings of the Three set in their Hexaplaric context alongside the Hebrew and the Septuagint. That work is still in progress.

The Syro-Hexapla and the Armenian Version

By the early sixth century, the Hexaplaric recension had been taken up by Syriac-speaking Christians and translated into their language. The Syro-Hexapla, as the version is called, was made at the monastery of Enaton, near Alexandria, and was intended to give Syriac-speaking Christians the same corrected Septuagint that Origen had given Greek ones. The translation was made directly from the fifth column of the Hexapla, with Origen’s obeloi and asterisks preserved in the Syriac text as they had been in the Greek. Fragments of the Syro-Hexapla survive in several British Library manuscripts, including Add. 17128 and Add. 14479, both of which preserve considerable portions of the Psalter and parts of Kings and Chronicles. The Syro-Hexapla is the only major translation of the Hexaplaric recension that survives in substantial form, and it is therefore the principal indirect witness to the text of the fifth column for those books where the catena tradition is thin. Where the Greek Hexaplaric recension is well attested, the Syro-Hexapla provides a useful independent check on its readings; where it is not, the Syro-Hexapla is often the only evidence we have at all.

The Armenian Bible, by the early sixth century, has been similarly linked to the Hexaplaric recension. Armenian tradition credited the translation of the Armenian Bible to Mesrop Mashtots and Sahak Partev in the early fifth century, and modern scholarship has generally dated the translation to the period between 410 and 430, after Mashtots’s invention of the Armenian alphabet. The Armenian Old Testament, however, shows signs of having been corrected against a Greek text that contained the Hexaplaric signs, and several modern scholars have argued that the Armenian translators must have had access to either a copy of the Hexaplaric recension or a Greek manuscript that had been influenced by Origen’s signs. The Armenian readings preserved in the Hexaplaric tradition are not as extensive as the Syro-Han’ipalaric ones, but they are significant for the reconstruction of the Greek text in places where the catena evidence is silent.

The Hexapla and the Latin Vulgate

No discussion of the Hexapla’s afterlife is complete without considering its effect on the Latin Vulgate, and through the Vulgate, on every Western translation of the Old Testament that has been made in the last sixteen centuries. Jerome used the Hexapla directly in Caesarea in the 380s, and his commentaries on the Psalms and the Pauline epistles quote readings from all six columns by name. His prefaces to his biblical translations are full of references to the work, and his own Latin version of the Psalter, the so-called Psalterium iuxta HebraHag, is recognisably Hexaplaric in its critical apparatus. When Jerome translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew into Latin, producing what became the Vulgate, he was doing the same kind of textual work that Origen had done in Caesarea a century before him. The Vulgate is not, strictly speaking, a Hexaplaric text, but it is the direct heir of the Hexapla’s programme: the recovery of a Hebrew-based critical text of the Old Testament, set in the vernacular of the Western church.

The Hexapla’s effect on the Western textual tradition is most easily seen in two specific places where Jerome made an editorial choice that depended on the Hexapla’s evidence. The first is in the Psalter, where Jerome’s Latin version reproduces the Hebrew psalters’ distinctive readings in places where the Septuagint had paraphrased. The second is in the Book of Job, where Jerome followed the Hebrew versification against the Greek, producing a text that is shorter than the Septuagint by a complete chapter. In both cases, Jerome was able to make the editorial choice because he had direct access to the Hexapla and because he trusted Origen’s work on the Greek side. Without the Hexapla, the Vulgate would not have been the text it became; without the Vulgate, the Western church would not have had the Latin Bible it relied on for the next thousand years; without that Latin Bible, the Reformation Bibles would have had nothing to translate; without the Reformation Bibles, the English Bible would not have come into existence in the form it did.

The Hexapla’s Standing in the History of Biblical Scholarship

The Hexapla’s importance, for the modern student of the Hebrew Bible, lies in three things. It is the earliest critical edition of any part of the Bible. It is the principal witness to the text of the Septuagint as it stood in the third century. And it is the principal witness to three otherwise lost Greek translations whose value for the history of the Greek Bible, for the pre-Masoretic pronunciation of Hebrew, and for the history of Jewish-Greek textual culture in the Roman East, can hardly be overstated. Without the Hexapla, the Aquila tradition would be barely visible in our evidence; the Theodotionic text of Daniel would be unattested; the Hexaplaric recension of the Septuagint would not exist. With the Hexapla, all three are recoverable in fragmentary but usable form, and the whole of the Greek Bible’s early history becomes legible in a way that it otherwise would not be.

The Hexapla is also, in a way that is easy to miss, a monument. No complete copy was ever made of it; the original was lost by the seventh century; the most direct evidence we have for its text is the erased parchment of three late manuscripts, one of them recovered from a Cairo synagogue storeroom and the other two recovered from the bindings of medieval service books. The work that Origen described, in his letter to Julius Africanus, as his apology for his doubts in the Septuagint’s text, is preserved in fragments and quotations and the work of patient scholars. It is, even so, the most ambitious critical edition of the Bible ever attempted in antiquity, and the closest thing the ancient world produced to the parallel Bibles of the Renaissance and the polyglot Bibles of the early modern period. The Hexapla is, in the most literal sense of the phrase, the foundation of biblical textual criticism.

Origen’s Bible and the Hexapla

The Hexapla is the keystone of a much larger body of biblical work, most of which has been lost. Origen’s library, when he settled in Caesarea, included a complete edition of the Old and New Testaments in six columns of parallel text, plus a vast body of biblical commentaries running to many thousands of pages. He kept a staff of scribes who copied manuscripts for him and a team of stenographers who took his dictation, and he produced over the course of his life what was almost certainly the largest single body of biblical commentary ever written by one person. The Hexapla sat at the centre of that enterprise, and the commentaries sat around it. The commentaries quoted the Hexapla, referred back to it, and used its readings to settle disputed passages. Almost none of that commentary survives intact. The Hexapla sits in the centre of an archive that is mostly gone, and what we have of the Hexapla we have largely because the surviving commentaries and the surviving patristic literature preserved it by name.

Origen was the first Christian scholar to apply the methods of Hellenistic literary criticism to the Bible, and the Hexapla is the most ambitious example of that application. He had been trained in the catechetical school of Alexandria, which by his day had developed sophisticated methods of textual analysis drawn from the work of the Alexandrian Homeric scholars. The Homeric critics had spent three centuries working out a critical apparatus for the text of Homer, distinguishing between disputed readings, marking parallel passages, and identifying interpolations. Origen took those methods and applied them to the Septuagint, with the result that the Hexapla is not just a parallel Bible but a critical edition in the strict sense: a text set out so that its variants can be seen, its relation to other texts can be compared, and its own disputed passages can be marked. The asterisk and the obelos are the closest thing in the ancient world to a footnote, and the Hexapla’s columnar layout is the closest thing to a critical apparatus.

Modern Reassessment

The modern reassessment of the Hexapla’s role in the textual history of the Greek Bible has produced several shifts of emphasis. Where earlier scholarship tended to treat the work as the defining moment in the history of the Septuagint, modern scholarship is more cautious. The Hexapla was one critical edition among several, and the textual situation of the Septuagint in the third century was already complicated before Origen began his work. The Hexaplaric recension is a witness to the Septuagint’s text, not a fixing of it, and the work of reconstructing the original text of the Septuagint has to take account of pre-Hexaplaric evidence as well as Hexaplaric evidence. The Gottingen Septuaginta’s treatment of the Hexaplaric recension as one witness among several, rather than as the standard text, is the working assumption of modern Septuagint studies.

Recent scholarship has also paid more attention to the role of the Hexapla as a piece of Jewish-Greek cultural contact. Origen’s choice to give Aquila the third column, immediately after the Hebrew, was not just an editorial choice; it was a recognition of the fact that Aquila was the version that Jewish readers actually used, and that a critical edition of the Greek Bible which ignored Aquila would not be a critical edition at all. The Hexapla is, in this reading, a meeting point: a place where the Christian scholar came to grips with the Jewish textual tradition by giving it the most prominent position he could. The Hexapla is also, in this reading, a work of inclusion in a stronger sense. Origen’s aim, as he himself described it in his letter to Julius Africanus, was to bring the church and the synagogue to a shared textual basis, so that the Christian reader could know what the Hebrew text actually said. The work is one of the earliest attempts at what we would now call interfaith scholarship, and one of the most ambitious critical editions of any ancient text that survives even in fragments.

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Origen’s Hexapla — The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint, Oxford University Press.
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Jenkins, Robert G. “The Date of the Cairo Genizah MS. of the Hexapla: A Re-examination.” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 49 (1998): 139-156.