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"After the death of the Pope, St. Jerome who had been the Pope's secretary, settled in Bethlehem, where he produced a new version of the Psalms, translated from the Hexaplar revision of the Septuagint. But from 390 to 405 A.D., St. Jerome translated anew all 39 books in the Hebrew Bible, including a further, third, version of the Psalms, which survives in a very few Vulgate manuscripts. This new translation of the Psalms was labelled by him as "iuxta Hebraeos" (i.e. "close to the Hebrews", "immediately following the Hebrews"), but it was not ultimately used in the Vulgate. The translations of the other 38 books were used, however, and so the Vulgate is usually credited to have been the first translation of the Old Testament into Latin directly from the Hebrew Tanakh, rather than the Greek Septuagint."

"Saint Jerome's extensive use of exegetical material written in Greek, on the other hand, as well as his use of the Aquiline and Theodotiontic texts of the Hexapla, along with the somewhat paraphrastic style in which he translated makes it difficult to determine exactly how direct the conversion of Hebrew to Latin was. In his prologues, Jerome described those books or portions of books in the Septuagint that were not found in the Hebrew as being non-canonical: he called them apocrypha, but they are found in all complete manuscripts and editions of the Vulgate."

"Of the Old Testament texts not found in the Hebrew, St. Jerome translated Tobit and Judith anew from the Aramaic; and from the Greek, the additions to Esther from the Septuagint, and the additions to Daniel from Theodotion. The others, Baruch, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees, 3 Esdras and 4 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasses, Psalm 151, and Laodiceans retain in Vulgate manuscripts their Old Latin renderings. Their style is still markedly distinguishable from St. Jerome's. In the Vulgate text, St. Jerome's translations from the Greek of the additions to Esther and Daniel are combined with his separate translations of these books from the Hebrew."