How did the Septuagint influence the organization of the Christian Old Testament?

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Hebrew Bible Portion of the Aleppo Codex, a manuscript of the Hebrew Bible written in the Hebrew language in the 10th century ce; in the Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

The Septuagint significantly shaped the structure of the Christian Old Testament by departing from the traditional three-part Hebrew canon—the Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim.1

Under Christian influence, the Septuagint reorganized these texts into four distinct categories: law, history, poetry, and prophets. This arrangement integrated additional books—known as apocryphal or deuterocanonical—by inserting them into these categories where they were deemed appropriate.1

This four-part classification established a precedent that persists in most modern Western Bible translations. While the structure remains largely consistent, Protestant versions typically either omit the Apocrypha or group those texts separately rather than integrating them into the main body of the Old Testament.1