HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Septuagint legend: were the seventy-two divinely moved to change the text?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: plausible — at its kernel, not as the inspired history it is told as. The rabbinic and Hellenistic-Jewish tradition that the seventy-two translators were divinely moved to change specific passages preserves a genuine memory: a real subset of the listed "changes" are identifiable, deliberate Septuagint translation choices that diverge from the proto-Masoretic Hebrew (Gen 2:2's "sixth day"; the euphemism for the hare at Lev 11:6; the anti-anthropomorphic touches) — so the divergences are the translators' doing, not corruption of the Hebrew. But it is not sober history: the inspiration-miracle frame (separate cells, divinely-prompted unanimity) is a demonstrable later accretion, absent from the earliest source, and the list is a fluid midrashic tradition several of whose "changes" appear in no extant Septuagint · borne by the Tractate Megillah tradition and the Letter of Aristeas

Related arguments: the corruption charge — see also the master corruption charge · the Aquila revision · the reverse charge · the tikkune soferim · the text-apparatus. Shared with the Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint, where the growth of the legend is the doctrine itself — see also, on that companion doctrine, the Simeon-the-Just legend, the Septuagint-origin offshoot of this one, in which a single translator's doubt over Isaiah 7:14's "virgin" dramatizes the same premise.

This argument is the premise the corruption charge depends on: an inspired, providentially-guarded Greek Bible whose divergences from the Hebrew are sanctioned changes is what makes the synagogue's divergent Hebrew look like tampering.

The claim

"It happened to Ptolemy the king that he took seventy-two elders from Jerusalem, and placed them in seventy-two separate chambers, and did not inform them to what purpose he had brought them. And afterward he entered to each of them, and said to them: Translate me the Torah of Moses from memory. And the Holy One, blessed be He, sent into the heart of each of them a counsel, and they all agreed to have one mind, and changed as follows: Instead of `In the beginning God created the world,' they wrote, `God created the world in the beginning'… and instead of Lev. xi. 6, `the hare,' which is expressed in the Bible `Arnebeth,' as Ptolemy's wife was named so they wrote, `and the beast that has small feet.'"

— The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Megillah, ch. 1 (Megillah 9a; the tradition tannaitic, c. 200, redacted c. 500), jewishvirtuallibrary.org.¹ The same story, minus the list and the miracle, is the fountainhead account of the Letter of Aristeas (c. 130 BC): Ptolemy II sends to Jerusalem for the Law and for translators, seventy-two elders come and render it, and the version is acclaimed and a curse pronounced on anyone who would alter it.² The question this argument weighs is the status of the whole — the miracle and the list of deliberate "changes" alike: is it pious legend, a memory of real translation choices, or later harmonization? The interpretation it serves is that the Septuagint's divergences from the Hebrew are the translators' deliberate (and, in the telling, divinely sanctioned) work — not, as the master corruption charge holds, a malicious rabbinic mutilation of the Hebrew.

Who advances it

The legend is told from both sides of the later polemic. Its Jewish forms run from the Letter of Aristeas (c. 130 BC) and Philo (Life of Moses II, 1st c. AD) through the rabbinic tradition — b. Megillah 9a and its parallels in the Mekhilta, the Jerusalem Talmud (y. Megillah 1:9, 71d), Massekhet Soferim, and the Tanhuma — which alone carry the list of "changes." Its Christian forms grow the inspiration-miracle (Irenaeus, the Cohortatio ad Graecos, Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanius, Augustine) into the doctrine traced on the companion page, the Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint. On this side of the controversy the legend underwrites the corruption charge (an inspired LXX makes the divergent Hebrew look corrupt); the dissent is Jerome, who called the separate cells a thing built "with his lying." The modern critical assessment is anchored in Emanuel Tov's study of the rabbinic "alterations," Giuseppe Veltri's monograph on the tradition, and Abraham & David J. Wasserstein's The Legend of the Septuagint.³

The evidence for

A real subset of the listed "changes" are genuine, identifiable Septuagint readings. The tradition is not pure invention: where it can be checked against the extant Greek, several of its items are exactly right. At Genesis 2:2 the Septuagint really does read that God finished his works "on the sixth day" (not the seventh of the Masoretic Text), a divergence shared with the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Peshitta — the rabbinic note records a reading that is actually there. At Leviticus 11:6 the Greek really does avoid the ordinary word for the hare (lagōs), rendering it dasypous ("rough-foot") — a euphemism the rabbis explain by the royal house (in the Talmud, Ptolemy's wife "Arnebeth"; in the historical sense, the Lagid dynasty's own name Lagos), and again a real feature of the text. Several of the anti-anthropomorphic and anti-polytheistic touches the list describes likewise reflect genuine Septuagint tendencies. So the tradition preserves a true memory: the seventy-two did make deliberate renderings that diverge from the proto-Masoretic Hebrew, candidly catalogued by the Jewish tradition itself.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The kernel just described is sound, and it is the part that matters for both doctrines: the Septuagint and the proto-Masoretic Hebrew diverge, a number of those divergences are demonstrably the translators' deliberate choices (Gen 2:2; Lev 11:6; the theological softenings), and the Jewish tradition openly attributes the divergence to the translators — not to a later rabbinic mutilation of the Hebrew. That is the modern text-critical reading too: divergence by translation, not by corruption.

What is legend, and what is later construction.

1. The inspiration-miracle frame is a demonstrable accretion. The earliest witness, the Letter of Aristeas, has no separate cells and no miracle: its translators sit together, "compare," and reach an agreed text "by collation." Philo (1st c. AD) is the first to add the motif of inspired, independently-identical wording; the dramatic detail of the separate sealed chambers appears only in the later retellings — the rabbinic Megillah and the Christian chain (Irenaeus onward). The "seventy-two shut in seventy-two cells, each moved by God to the same words" is therefore a thing that grew across centuries onto a plain royal-commission story, exactly the growth documented on the Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint page — and Jerome already saw it, deriding "the seventy cells at Alexandria… whose author no one knows."⁵

2. The list is a fluid midrashic tradition, not a fixed historical record. The parallel rabbinic versions do not agree on which changes were made or even how many: the count and the contents differ from b. Megillah to the Mekhilta to y. Megillah to Soferim to the Tanhuma. A transcript of an actual event would not drift this way; the variation is the signature of a literary tradition elaborated and re-elaborated over time — the conclusion of Tov's and Veltri's studies alike.⁶

3. Several of the listed "changes" are in no extant Septuagint at all. Where the genuine items (Gen 2:2, Lev 11:6) match the Greek, others flatly do not. The list says the translators wrote "God created the world in the beginning" to forestall reading Bereshit ("In the beginning") as the name of a creator — but the actual Septuagint of Genesis 1:1 keeps the Hebrew word order ("In the beginning God made…"). It says they wrote "I will make a man in an image" (singular) against the plural of Genesis 1:26 — but the Septuagint keeps the plural, "Let us make man." It says "Let me go down" (singular) for Genesis 11:7 — but the Septuagint there is plural too. For these, the tradition describes an apologetic change the Greek text never received: this half of the list is what the rabbis thought the translators should have done to block heretical misreadings, not what they did. The list is part real memory, part theological construction.⁷

4. And not one of the changes is a christological proof-text. The deviations the tradition catalogues are anti-anthropomorphic ("God finished on the sixth day"), anti-polytheistic ("I will make a man in an image"), and court-diplomatic (the hare) — defending Jewish monotheism before a Greek king, centuries before there was a Christian reading to deny. So the legend, far from supplying the corruption charge its premise, actually cuts against it: here the Jewish tradition itself locates the divergence in the translators' deliberate choices and treats it as sanctioned, not as a malicious mutilation of the Hebrew to be hidden.⁸

Assessment

Plausible — at its kernel, not as the inspired history it is told as. What should be trusted is the documentary core: a genuine subset of the "changes" the seventy-two are said to have made are real, identifiable Septuagint translation choices that diverge from the proto-Masoretic Hebrew (Genesis 2:2's "sixth day"; the euphemism for the hare at Leviticus 11:6; the anti-anthropomorphic renderings), so the tradition preserves a true memory that the divergence is the translators' deliberate work, not a later corruption of the Hebrew — the sound counter-witness the rabbinic-corruption timeline leans on. What must be flagged is everything the kernel is wrapped in. The inspiration-miracle — the seventy-two sealed in separate cells, each moved by God to the identical word — is a demonstrable later accretion, absent from the earliest source (Aristeas) and grown over centuries, as the companion doctrine, the Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint, traces in full. The list of "changes" is a fluid midrashic tradition whose count and contents drift across the rabbinic parallels, and several of its items (Genesis 1:1, 1:26, 11:7) describe an apologetic change the extant Greek never received — theological construction, not transcript. So the legend is plausible at its core and legendary at its frame; and because not one of its changes touches a messianic proof-text, it tells against the corruption charge it is so often enlisted to support. (This argument is grouped with the master corruption charge under the "Related arguments — the corruption charge" group on the rabbinic-corruption summary, which also groups the Aquila-revision argument.)

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