HistoricalChristian.Faith

Tractate Megillah on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture

Dates: c. 200 (tannaitic tradition; redacted in the Babylonian Talmud c. 500) · Wikipedia
Summary: The Jewish witness from the other side of the controversy. Where the Christian writers charge that the rabbis cut and altered the Hebrew to deny Christ, the rabbinic tradition preserved in b. Megillah 9a frankly admits that the Greek diverges from the Hebrew — and attributes the divergence not to corruption but to the seventy-two translators themselves, who, translating for Ptolemy, were divinely moved to change about fifteen specific passages. The same phenomenon the Christians read as malicious tampering with the Hebrew, the rabbis read as a sanctioned, providential editing of the Greek. It is also the Jewish parallel to the Letter of Aristeas legend, and the seed of the "Septuagint legend" argument.

Claims & evidence

Ptolemy isolates seventy-two elders, who are divinely moved to one mind

"The sages allowed to write in Greek only the Pentateuch, but not anything else. And this was also allowed only because of what occurred with Ptolemy the king, as follows: 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…"

— The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Megillah, ch. 1 (Megillah 9a), jewishvirtuallibrary.org. The frame is the same miracle the Christians invoked for the Seventy's authority — each elder sealed in a separate chamber, yet all producing one identical text by divine prompting. But here the miracle guarantees the changes: God "sent into the heart of each of them a counsel," and the agreed deviations from the Hebrew are the fruit of that counsel, not corruptions of it.

The list of deliberate changes the translators made

"Instead of `In the beginning God created the world,' they wrote, `God created the world in the beginning'; instead of Gen. i. 26 they wrote, `I will make a man in an image'; instead of Gen. ii. 2 they wrote, `And God finished on the sixth day, and rested on the seventh day'; instead of Gen. v. 2 they wrote, `created him'; instead of Gen. xi. 7 they wrote, `Let me go down'; [xviii. 12]: `And Sarah laughed among her relatives'; instead of xlix. 6, `In their anger they slew an ox, and their self-will lamed a fattened ox.' And instead of Ex. iv. 20, `Set them on a porter (man-carrier)'; instead of ibid. xii. 40, `Dwelt in Egypt and in other lands'; and ibid. xxiv. as ibid., `Against the respectable men of Israel.' Instead of Num. xvi. 15, `Not one precious thing I took away'; and instead of Deut. iv. 19 they wrote, `assigned to light for all nations'; instead of ibid. xvii. 3, `which I have not commanded to worship'; 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), jewishvirtuallibrary.org. The list is theologically pointed in a way that mirrors the Christian suspicion while reversing its direction. Several changes pre-empt anti-Jewish or polytheistic misreadings of the Hebrew: "God created the world in the beginning" (lest "In the beginning" be read as a separate creator named Bereshit); "I will make a man in an image" (singular, against "let us make man" being read as plural gods); "assigned to light for all nations" at Deut 4:19 (lest God be said to have apportioned the heavenly bodies for the nations to worship). The last, Lev 11:6, is openly diplomatic: the hare (Hebrew arnevet) is renamed "the beast that has small feet" because the king's wife was named Arnebeth and the elders would not have her appear among the unclean animals.

Notes

• It cuts the opposite way from the Christian charge. The patristic accusation (Justin onward) is that the rabbis altered the Hebrew after AD 70 to strip out the messianic readings the older Greek still preserved. This rabbinic tradition locates the alteration in the Greek and credits it to the original translators under divine guidance — divergence by sanctioned editing, not by either side's corruption. As a Jewish source candidly cataloguing translator-changes, it is the counter-witness to the corruption thesis from within Judaism itself.
• Parallel to the Letter of Aristeas. The seventy-two elders, the separate chambers, the miraculous unanimity — this is the rabbinic cousin of the Hellenistic-Jewish Letter of Aristeas account of the LXX's origin, and (with the Aristeas legend) the seed of the Septuagint-legend argument: whether the listed "changes" are pious legend, real translation choices, or later harmonization. None of the fifteen, notably, is a christological proof-text; they are anti-anthropomorphic, anti-polytheistic, and court-diplomatic adjustments.
• Dating. The passage is a baraita — tannaitic material conventionally placed c. 200 (the Mishnaic horizon) — embedded in the Babylonian Talmud, whose redaction is c. 500. It is slotted on the timeline by the earlier date, as a witness to the tradition rather than to the date of its final redaction.