Hebrew was the language of the Jewish Scripture as it is today.
"Only those immediately connected with the temples knew anything of Hebrew."
Like the folks in the Qumran caves...
"Missals and entire Bibles are used by the congregation.
Missalettes. The only Bibles at a Catholic Mass are personal Bibles.
Hebrew was the language of the Jewish Scripture as it is today.
http://www.fisheaters.com/septuagint.html says that:
"The canon of the Old Testament that Catholics use is based on the text used by Alexandrian Jews, a version known as the "Septuagint" (also called "LXX" or "The Seventy") and which came into being around 280 B.C. as a translation of then existing texts from Hebrew into Greek by 72 Jewish scribes (the Torah was translated first, around 300 B.C., and the rest of Tanach was translated afterward).
It was a standard Jewish version of the Old Testament, used by the writers of the New Testament, as is evidenced by the fact that Old Testament references found in the New Testament refer to the Septuagint over other versions of the Old Testament. Let me reiterate: the then 300+ year old Septuagint version of Scripture was good enough for Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul, etc., which is evident in their referencing it over 300 times (out of 350 Old Testament references!) in their New Testament writings -- and the Septuagint includes 7 books and parts of Esther and Daniel that were removed from Protestant Bibles some 1,500 years after the birth of Christ.
The Septuagint is the Old Testament referred to in the Didache or "Doctrine of the Apostles" (first century Christian writings) and by Origen, Irenaeus of Lyons, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, Justin Martyr, St. Augustine and the vast majority of early Christians who referenced Scripture in their writings. The Epistle of Pope Clement, written in the first century, refers to the Books Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom, analyzed the book of Judith, and quotes sections of the book of Esther that were removed from Protestant Bibles.
"Only those immediately connected with the temples knew anything of Hebrew."
Like the folks in the Qumran caves...
There was a large separation between the language of worship (Hebrew) and the lingua franca (Greek), just as there is now between the Latin of the Church and the vernacular. However, with that said, the scrolls were written in Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew. If Hebrew was the only language used, why include Aramaic and Greek?
Missals and entire Bibles are used by the congregation.
Missalettes. The only Bibles at a Catholic Mass are personal Bibles.
Our parish has both missals and missalettes. I am not aware of any parish that does not have Bibles within the church. Personal Bibles are welcome and often used. Bottom line: the Septuagint was the version of the Old Testament accepted by the very earliest Christians (and, yes, those 7 "extra" books were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls which date between 168 B.C. and A.D. 68, and which by the way, support both the Septuagint and the 6th - 10th c. A.D. Masoretic texts in various ways, but supporting the Septuagint on average. 3 ).