It wasn't a septuagint

In 2007, one Hayeon Kim earned his PhD by demonstrating the five translators of the Five Books, the Pentateuch. He then migrated off to being a pastor, as one does; getting around to publication just a few years ago. Emanuel Tov has endorsed this. Tov has earned some credibility over his decades-long career.

Jews don't like the Greek translation, historically. R. Tovia Singer calls the Psalter a "hoax". Serious Biblical scholars many Jewish (yo, "Tov"?) would rule Singer as out of line. But the Alexandrine Jewish diaspora, in fact, did get overexcited about part of it, namely the Greek Torah. That whole "Septuagint" / 72 / LXX meme came out of there. One might compare this to a targum: a harmony for the plebs in translation. But it's worse: the Samaritans' Torah was similarly expanded, fixed-up, whatever. A targum or midrash can tweak this or that - maybe they even should - but a Jew demands the Hebrew baseline stay where it is. This was not done by the Samaritans, and most agree it was not done by whoever passed a similar Bible-2.0 to the Graecophones. A rabbi would be in his rights to say that tweaking the base text for tendentious purpose is cheating. Philo didn't help by touting the translators as prophets.

If a cheat, the LXX - better, the V - Vorlage remains a very early cheat, sometimes holding onto readings where the masoretes would go on to cheat... or simply sometimes misspell some things. We're all human, even Jews. This is why we are still talking about this translation.

The consensus - if Tov be that consensus - on the five translators seems to be that they started off sharing some basic vocabulary, and then branched off. Whatever was done to bring the translations back into line, was left to future copyists. There's no real consensus on the order in which they did the work; den Hartog thinks Leviticus and Numbers were secondary, but Tov leaves this without comment to a footnote. Den Hartog also thought Deuteronomy was secondary but that seems overstated, which Tov was too polite to note.

The real problem hits in Exodus. For some reason Exodus 35-40 is shorter in Greek, excepting the usual little harmonies... and excepting Exodus 38, which has Bezalel do some metalwork. But why? and why wouldn't this Greek or protoGreek splice in a lot more content earlier, where more people would care (yo, the Exodus?).