HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint

How did the Jewish Scriptures come to be in Greek? From the second century BC onward a story was told and retold: Ptolemy II Philadelphus, stocking his library at Alexandria, sent to the high priest in Jerusalem for the Law and for translators; seventy-two elders (six from each tribe) came, and rendered the Hebrew into Greek — the version "of the Seventy," the Septuagint (LXX). This page traces how that account grew across time, earliest first. The core was a simple royal commission (the Letter of Aristeas, Josephus); but in Christian hands it acquired a miracle — the translators, shut in separate cells and forbidden to confer, produced word-for-word identical versions, proof that the Holy Spirit had guided them (Irenaeus, the Cohortatio, Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanius, Augustine) — and a skeptical counter-tradition that called the cells a fable (Jerome, Hugh of Saint Victor). Around it gathered a late-antique offshoot: the legend of Simeon the Just, one of the Seventy, who balked at translating Isaiah 7:14's "virgin" and was kept alive three hundred years to see the Christ. (A mirror-image of the whole story circulated in the medieval East, where the seventy were said to have translated the Law the other way — out of Syriac into Hebrew, making Syriac the tongue of revelation and Hebrew a mere translation; that inversion is weighed on the first-language timeline.)

The doctrine matters beyond its own interest because it is the premise of a second one: if the LXX was a divinely-inspired, providentially-guarded translation, then the synagogue's later, divergent Hebrew and its rival Greek versions look like corruption — which is exactly the charge gathered on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture page. The two doctrines share the Septuagint-legend argument (is the legend history, pious fiction, or a memory of real translation choices?); it is weighed there. Two concrete, christologically-neutral instances of that Greek–Hebrew divergence — Goliath's height (where the Septuagint and 4QSamuel^a keep the older, shorter reading) and the slayer of Goliath (where the Septuagint itself carries the corruption) — are weighed on their own pages; together they show the Greek is sometimes the better witness and sometimes the worse — a caution against reading the inspiration legend's superiority into every divergence.

Related doctrines: Scripture's text & canon — see also the biblical canon · the Old Testament canon · rabbinic corruption of the text

Timeline

The witnesses run earliest first, from Aristobulus (c. 150 BC) to al-Makin (c. AD 1273). Two figures who shaped the legend's reception are treated on the companion rabbinic-corruption timeline: the Talmud's own account, and the skeptic Jerome, who called the separate cells a fable.

Aristobulus of Alexandria (c. 150 BC)

The earliest datable mention. Aristobulus, a Hellenistic-Jewish philosopher who dedicated his commentary on the Law to Ptolemy VI Philometor, notes in passing — while arguing that Plato and Pythagoras borrowed from Moses — that "the entire translation of all the contents of our law was made in the time of the king surnamed Philadelphus… which was managed by Demetrius Phalereus," and that partial Greek renderings of the exodus and the Law had circulated even before Demetrius.¹ His version is the barest of all: a royal commission and Demetrius, but no seventy-two elders, no separate cells, no inspiration miracle. By the usual dates he slightly precedes the Letter of Aristeas, though the two are close and scholars dispute which depends on which; either way the Letter is the fuller narrative the tradition inherits. Tellingly, a later writer (Anatolius, quoted by Eusebius) folds Aristobulus himself into the legend, calling him one "chosen among the seventy interpreters… by Ptolemy Philadelphus" — an anachronism of a century that shows the story reaching back to gather up its own sources.²

The Letter of Aristeas (c. 130 BC)

The literary fountainhead. The pseudepigraphal Letter of Aristeas, written in the name of a Greek courtier of Ptolemy II but composed by a Hellenistic Jew, tells the whole story in seed: Demetrius of Phalerum, keeper of the royal library, reports that the Jewish Law is missing and "must be translated," and the king writes to the high priest Eleazar for men to do it.³ Eleazar sends "six elders out of every tribe" — "seventy-two in all" — who complete the work "in seventy-two days, just as if this had been arranged of set purpose."⁴ Read out to the assembled Jews, the translation is acclaimed "so excellent and sacred and accurate" that they "pronounce a curse" on anyone who should alter it "by adding anything or changing… or making any omission" — the text fixed and guarded from the start.⁵ Notably, Aristeas has no separate-cells miracle: his translators confer and compare, reaching a text "by collation" — the inspiration-of-identical-independent-renderings is a later accretion onto this base.

Philo of Alexandria (c. AD 30)

The first inspiration miracle. Philo, the Hellenistic-Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, keeps the royal-commission frame — Ptolemy Philadelphus, admiring the Law, asks the high priest for translators, who "with great care selected the most respectable of the Hebrews"⁶ — but he is the first to make the translators' agreement a marvel: settled in seclusion on Pharos, they "like men inspired, prophesied, not one saying one thing and another another, but every one of them employed the self-same nouns and verbs, as if some unseen prompter had suggested all their language to them," though Greek is "rich in a variety of words."⁷ The Greek and the Hebrew are therefore to be revered "as sisters," and the seventy-two are "not mere interpreters but hierophants and prophets."⁸ Crucially, the inspiration is present but the separate cells are not: Philo's translators work together in "a secret place," not each sealed in his own chamber. The independent-and-identical proof — seventy-two men producing word-for-word identical Greek in separate cells — is added afterward, by Irenaeus and the Cohortatio; Philo supplies the miracle onto which that machinery is later grafted.

Josephus (c. AD 93)

The historian's retelling — a witness to the legend's plainer form. Josephus recounts the origin at length in Antiquities XII and briefly in Against Apion II: Ptolemy II Philadelphus, having "a great desire of knowing our laws," commits the work to Demetrius of Phalerum and the courtiers Andreas and Aristeas.⁹ The high priest sends "six elders out of every tribe" — seventy-two — who finish "in seventy-two days," the version read out to the assembled Jews and approved.¹⁰ He follows the Letter of Aristeas openly, naming "Aristeus" and referring the reader to "that book… which he wrote on this very occasion."¹⁰ Writing a generation after Philo, he reproduces only Aristeas's frame: no separate cells, no miracle of identical independent renderings — the translators work together "where the laws were translated." His value is that of an early, datable reader of Aristeas, and what he found there had no cells and no marvel.

Justin Martyr (c. AD 155)

The first Christian retelling — still bare. Justin, in the First Apology, gives the legend stripped to its bones: Ptolemy, stocking his library, "heard… of these prophets, and sent to Herod, who was at that time king of the Jews," for "the books of the prophets," received them in Hebrew, and had "men be commissioned to translate them into the Greek language," where they "remained… until now."¹¹ There is no Demetrius, no Eleazar (whom he garbles into "Herod"), no seventy-two, no separate cells, and no inspiration miracle — the marvel of independently-identical renderings enters only with Irenaeus a generation later. Justin's two changes are instead of aim: he widens the scope from the Law to "the prophets," because his interest is the prophecies of Christ, now publicly on record in Greek for the pagan reader to check. (He knows the fuller form — in his later Dialogue with Trypho he leans on "your seventy elders that were with Ptolemy" — so the Apology's plainness is telling, not ignorant.)

Irenaeus (c. AD 189)

The hinge. Irenaeus is the first Christian writer to give the legend its full inspiration-miracle form. Keeping the royal-commission frame — "Ptolemy the son of Lagus… made request to the people of Jerusalem, that they should have their Scriptures translated" — he adds the decisive new element: Ptolemy, "fearing lest they might perchance, by taking counsel together, conceal the truth… separated them from each other, and commanded them all to write the same translation," and when the independent drafts proved identical "in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end," even "the Gentiles present perceived that the Scriptures had been interpreted by the inspiration of God."¹² Philo had the marvel of unanimity, but his translators worked together; Irenaeus adds the isolation that turns unanimity into proof. He braces it with a second wonder — God once "inspired Esdras the priest… to recast all the words of the former prophets" after the Scriptures "had been corrupted" in the captivity¹³ — and he tells the whole story for a polemical end: to defend the Septuagint's "virgin" of Isaiah 7:14 against the Jewish proselytes Aquila and Theodotion, who rendered it "young woman." The physical "little cells" on Pharos are not yet here (they enter with the Cohortatio); the machinery that produces them is. Two details already drift: he counts "seventy" elders, not seventy-two, and assigns the work to Ptolemy I rather than Philadelphus.

Tertullian (c. AD 197)

The Latin West's first telling — and a step back to the plain form. Tertullian, in Apology 18, retells the origin to persuade pagan readers that the Christian Scriptures are ancient and publicly verifiable: Ptolemy Philadelphus, "at the suggestion of Demetrius Phalereus… applied to the Jews for their writings," and was given "seventy-two interpreters… The same account is given by Aristæus."¹⁴ After Irenaeus had built the inspiration-miracle, Tertullian drops it entirely — no separate cells, no marvel of identical renderings, just the royal-commission frame of Aristeas, whom he cites by name. He restores the precise seventy-two that Irenaeus had rounded to seventy, and corrects the king to Philadelphus (against Irenaeus's Ptolemy I). His distinctive note is evidential rather than miraculous: the proof is on public display — the libraries of Ptolemy "at the temple of Serapis," holding "the identical Hebrew originals," read aloud by the Jews "every Sabbath," so any pagan may go and check.¹⁵ The legend here serves antiquity-and-availability, the same apologetic use Justin made of it, not the corruption charge.

Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 200)

Inspiration kept, the cells dropped. Clement, in the Stromata, retells the origin to argue that the Greek philosophers borrowed from Moses, and reports the translation as itself inspired: the people of Jerusalem "selected… seventy elders, versed in the Scriptures, and skilled in the Greek dialect," who, "each having severally translated each prophetic book," found their drafts on being "compared together" to "agree both in meaning and expression" — for "it was not alien to the inspiration of God, who gave the prophecy, also to produce the translation, and make it as it were Greek prophecy."¹⁶ Like Irenaeus he affirms the inspiration and braces it with the same Esdras parallel — the Scriptures "having perished in the captivity of Nebuchadnezzar," Esdras, "inspired," "restored again the whole of the ancient Scriptures." But the machinery differs: where Irenaeus had sealed the elders apart so their unforeseeable agreement would prove the miracle, Clement's translators reach their agreement by comparison, working as Philo's had, together — no separate cells. Against Tertullian, who had just dropped the miracle entirely, Clement restores it; the inspiration line does not climb steadily. Two details track Irenaeus rather than Aristeas: he counts "seventy" elders, not seventy-two, and is openly unsure of the king, naming "Ptolemy the son of Lagos, or, according to others… Philadelphus." He widens the scope to "the law and… the prophets," and closes by citing Aristobulus by name.

The Cohortatio ad Graecos (c. AD 260)

The cells made physical — and the first eyewitness claim. The Cohortatio ad Graecos (Hortatory Address to the Greeks), an apology for the faith addressed to pagan readers and transmitted under Justin Martyr's name but written by a later, unknown hand, gives Irenaeus's separate-cells miracle its fullest concrete form: Ptolemy housed the seventy translators in "as many little cots as there were translators," seven stadia off on the island of Pharos, each man working alone and kept from "communication with one another, in order that the accuracy of the translation might be discernible even by their agreement"; when the drafts matched word for word, the king believed "the translation had been written by divine power."¹⁷ Where Irenaeus said only that the king "separated them" and Clement dropped the isolation entirely, here the separation becomes architecture — a row of individual cells, one per translator, guarded into silence. The author then does what no earlier teller had: he stakes the whole story on autopsy — "we ourselves having been in Alexandria, saw the remains of the little cots at the Pharos still preserved" — and names Philo and Josephus as his authorities,¹⁸ though neither of those named sources has the separate cells at all. The legend is here at its most vivid — no longer merely told but claimed to be "still preserved" and seen. (The work is usually cited as Pseudo-Justin; its date is disputed, ranging from the mid-third to the fourth century, and is given here by the conventional earlier reckoning.)

Eusebius of Caesarea (c. AD 313)

The compiler — the legend gathered, and given a providential frame. Eusebius, the first Church historian, mostly collects the story's sources and sets them in order rather than adding to it. In the Chronicon he notes in passing that the text "we use was translated by seventy Hebrew men… in complete harmony during the reign of Ptolemaeus Philadelphus, and placed… in the library at Alexandria."¹⁹ In the Praeparatio Evangelica he prefaces a full transcription of the Letter of Aristeas with a new theological reading: the translation was God's own doing — "God put it into the mind of King Ptolemy" to have the prophecies of Christ "accurately translated, and set up in public libraries" before He came, so the Jews could not afterward have "hidden away" the oracles "for their jealousy of us."²⁰ And in the Church History he reproduces Irenaeus's separate-cells miracle verbatim — the translators "separated… from one another," their independent drafts agreeing "in the same words… from beginning to end," so "the heathen perceived that the Scriptures had been translated by the inspiration of God."²¹ He keeps Irenaeus's round "seventy," adds no new physical detail to the cells, and (through Anatolius) even repeats the anachronism that folds Aristobulus himself back "among the seventy interpreters." His own contribution is the frame: the inspiration miracle is now an act of divine providence for the Gentile mission — the very premise that, turned against the synagogue's later Hebrew, becomes the corruption charge he presses elsewhere on the chronology of Genesis.

Cyril of Jerusalem (c. AD 350)

The fullest classical form — and the Holy Ghost named. Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, folds the origin story into the catechism itself: instructing baptismal candidates which Scriptures the Church receives, he tells them how the Greek came to be. He restores the precise Aristean frame the earlier Christian tellers had blurred — Ptolemy Philadelphus, Demetrius the librarian, "Eleazar … High Priest" (whom Justin had garbled into "Herod"), "six interpreters from each of the twelve tribes" finishing "in seventy-two days" — and keeps the physical separate chambers the Cohortatio had built, "assigning to each … his separate chamber in the island called Pharos," so that the drafts "agreed not only in the sense but even in words."²² What is new is the explicit pneumatology: where Philo had only an "unseen prompter" and Irenaeus "the inspiration of God," Cyril states it doctrinally — the work "was no word-craft, nor contrivance of human devices: but the translation of the Divine Scriptures, spoken by the Holy Ghost, was of the Holy Ghost accomplished." The miracle is here both physically detailed and fixed as catechesis, something a candidate for baptism is taught to believe. He also gives the king's isolation a motive — Ptolemy separates the elders "to make experiment whether the books were Divine or not" — but claims no eyewitness ruins, reporting the cells as received history rather than (with the Cohortatio) visible remains.

Epiphanius of Salamis (c. AD 392)

The cells re-paired, the seventy-two named, the divergences defended. Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, gives the legend its most elaborate antique form in his Treatise on Weights and Measures. He keeps the full Aristean frame and the physical cells but rebuilds the architecture: where the Cohortatio and Cyril sealed each man alone with the whole Scripture, Epiphanius makes "thirty-six cells… formed… into pairs," shuts the translators "two by two," and gives "to every pair one book" — Genesis to one pair, Exodus to the next, and so on — yet keeps the proof intact, the copies agreeing so that the work was the gift "of the Holy Spirit."²³ He is the first to explain the seventy-vs-seventy-two drift (after Moses's seventy elders, two added so six came evenly from each tribe) and the first to set down the whole roster by name, "as Aristeas has transmitted it." His most consequential move reverses the legend's logic: where the earlier tellers proved inspiration by the translators' identity with the Hebrew, Epiphanius openly concedes the Greek differs — they "added a word" and "made an omission" — and turns the difference itself into the miracle, for the additions mend a Hebrew that without them is "lame" (his demonstration from Psalm 140), "well added… for the advantage of the peoples about to be called to the faith."²⁴ The inspired-Septuagint premise here built is the one the same treatise's notice on Aquila turns against the synagogue's rival Greek.

Philastrius of Brescia (c. AD 397)

The cells made a test of orthodoxy. Philastrius, bishop of Brescia, folds the origin legend into the first Latin catalogue of heresies, the Diversarum Hereseon Liber (Book of Diverse Heresies), and relays the separate-cells miracle in its strong form: Ptolemy, "wanting to find out whether what the Jews read was of divine authorship," "ordered that each of them be secluded in a cell," took "the versions of all of them every day," and "found that the versions of all of them agreed completely," lodging a copy "in the temple."²⁵ He keeps the plain Irenaean isolation — one man per cell, no Cohortatio cots on Pharos, no paired chambers — and, like Augustine after him, grounds the isolation in the king's wish to test whether the books were divine. His distinctive move is not to the machinery but to its use: he is the first to make the legend a disciplinary weapon. On the strength of the cells he brands as heretics those "who like the Jews spit out the translation of the Seventy-Two… and prefer to use the text of a certain Aquila, a man of Pontus," so that against a text vouched for by the miracle a rival Greek is not merely a worse rendering but an impiety. In the years before Rufinus turned the same cells into a legal title against Jerome, Philastrius is the Latin West's earliest witness to the legend doing polemical work — the strong-form believer standing, with Rufinus, against the skeptic Jerome whom this timeline stages as the fable's other voice. The heresy-charge itself, and the Aquila-versus-Septuagint dispute it belongs to, are weighed on the companion corruption timeline; here Philastrius counts as a witness to the origin legend's strong form, alive and load-bearing in the late-fourth-century West.

Rufinus of Aquileia (c. AD 401)

The legend made a weapon. Rufinus, the monk and translator of Aquileia, is the first on this timeline not to retell the origin but to argue from it. In his Apology against his estranged friend Jerome — who was then translating the Old Testament afresh from the Hebrew — he treats the inspired-cells miracle as settled fact and turns it into a legal title: "The seventy translators, each in their separate cells, produced a version couched in consonant and identical words, under the inspiration, as we cannot doubt, of the Holy Spirit; and this version must certainly be of more authority with us than a translation made by a single man," charging that Jerome had "dared to make havoc of the divine record handed down to the Churches by the Apostles."²⁶ He keeps the cells in the plain Irenaean form — sealed isolation plus the Holy Spirit, no new physical detail — but for the first time the legend does work rather than being told. And he draws the inference outright: because the Septuagint is the Spirit-given text, Jerome's revision from the Hebrew is not recovery but corruption — "our law has been amended, or at least changed… things which undergo change at the hand of man cannot possibly be divine… Now therefore after four hundred years the truth of the law comes forth for us, it has been bought with money from the Synagogue."²⁷ Where Jerome calls the separate cells a fable, Rufinus makes them the standing premise of the dispute — the exact point at which the origin legend fuses with the corruption charge.

John Chrysostom (c. AD 407)

The legend from the pulpit — the miracle dropped, the providence kept. John Chrysostom, the Antiochene preacher and later archbishop of Constantinople, recounts the origin in his fourth Homily on Genesis, reassuring his hearers of the Greek text: "a few years before the birth of Jesus Christ, King Ptolemy, curious to gather a rich library," "brought some Jews from Jerusalem to translate into Greek," so that "by a particular disposition of Providence… all peoples were able to profit from our holy books" — and he marvels that "this design was conceived by an idolatrous prince… far from following the religion of the Jews."²⁸ For the through-line this timeline traces, Chrysostom carries neither the separate cells nor the marvel of identical independent renderings: his is the plainer royal-commission form of Tertullian and Josephus, given the providential frame Eusebius had set on it — the inspiration is of the occasion (God moved the pagan king), not of the translating. Preaching in the very years Rufinus and Augustine were making the cells the legend's load-bearing center, Chrysostom does without them. The same pre-Christian provenance does heavier work elsewhere in his preaching, where it grounds the dating charge against the later Jewish translators. (A later Byzantine tradition — Kedrenos, c. 1050 — wrongly credited Chrysostom's lost "Hexaemeron" with the Simeon-the-Just legend; the ascription is spurious, as Bolland showed, and his genuine Homily on Genesis has no Simeon.)

Augustine of Hippo (c. AD 425)

The legend in the Latin West's authoritative voice — and pressed further. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, retells the origin in The City of God with the full Aristean frame restored — Ptolemy Philadelphus (distinguished from "the son of Lagus"), Eleazar the high priest, "seventy-two, out of each of the twelve tribes six men," the version "now by custom called the Septuagint" — and keeps the separate-cells proof in its plainer form: the elders sat "each one apart (for so it pleased Ptolemy to test their fidelity)" yet "differed from each other in no word… but, as if the translators had been one, so what all had translated was one, because in very deed the one Spirit had been in them all," the gift given "that the authority of these Scriptures might be commended not as human but divine… for the benefit of the nations."²⁹ He adds no physical detail to the cells — no cots on Pharos, no paired chambers — and prefaces even the isolation with "it is reported," a soberer telling like Tertullian's. His decisive move comes in the chapter following: because "the same Spirit who was in the prophets… was also in the seventy men when they translated them," where the Greek differs from the Hebrew both readings are to be received as inspired — "thus showing that both were prophets."³⁰ It is the same reversal Epiphanius had made in the East, now the Latin West's charter for the Septuagint's authority — and the premise that, turned against the synagogue's later Hebrew, becomes the corruption charge.

Cyril of Alexandria (c. AD 444)

The scope widened from the Law to the Prophets. Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, refers to the origin of the Greek Scriptures in his apology Against Julian, and his contribution to the legend's growth is not a new miracle but a quiet expansion of what the Seventy are said to have done: he writes as though the seventy-two translated not only the Pentateuch — all the Letter of Aristeas claims for them — but "the holy prophets" as well, folding the whole Greek Old Testament into the one inspired translation.³¹ It is the scope-creep Justin ("the books of the prophets") and Clement ("the law and… the prophets") had already begun, now settled into the unspoken assumption that "the Seventy" produced the entire Greek Bible. His Ptolemy writes to Eleazar for "all the books of Moses and of the holy prophets" (πάντα τὰ βιβλία Μωσέως τε καὶ τῶν ἁγίων προφητῶν); he adds no new cell-detail and no fresh inspiration formula, so his witness is to the legend's reach, not its machinery.

Zacharias of Mitylene (c. AD 518)

The legend in Syriac — bare, and drawn straight from Eusebius. The Syriac Chronicle transmitted under the name of Zacharias of Mitylene reports the origin in one sentence that names its source — "as the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea declares" — and reproduces a Eusebian date ("two hundred and eighty years and more before the birth of our Lord"): Ptolemy Philadelphus freed the Jewish captives, "sent offerings to Jerusalem," and "assembled seventy men learned in the law" to render the Holy Scriptures "from the Hebrew tongue into Greek."³² For the through-line this timeline traces, Zacharias carries neither the separate cells nor the marvel of identical independent renderings: he keeps Eusebius's round "seventy" (not the seventy-two of Aristeas), garbles the high priest into "Izra‘el" (as Justin had written "Herod"), and tells only the plain royal commission of Tertullian's and Josephus's form. What he adds is theological gloss, not narrative: he compresses Eusebius's providential frame — the translation prepared "for the calling of the nations" — and gives it a sixth-century conciliar edge, the king "moved by God… that they might be true worshippers of the glorious Trinity through the ministration of the Spirit." The inspiration is of the occasion (God moved Ptolemy), not of the translating; the wonder at the desk is absent. (The source is the late-antique Syriac compilation conventionally called Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor — Book 12 is the compiler's own continuation, not Zacharias's lost history; dated here at his floruit, c. 518.)

Isidore of Seville (c. AD 636)

The legend folded into an encyclopedia. Isidore, bishop of Seville and the great compiler of late-antique Latin learning, gives the origin of the Greek Scriptures two terse paragraphs in his Etymologies, the most-copied schoolbook of the medieval West. Under "libraries" he sets Ptolemy Philadelphus emulating Pisistratus and gathering "seventy thousand books" at Alexandria; under "translators" he reports that the king, "requesting the Scriptures of the Old Testament from the high priest Eleazar, took care to have them translated… by seventy translators," each "separated in his own cell," who rendered everything "through the Holy Spirit" so that no copy "differed from the rest even in the order of words."³³ Both the separate cells and the inspiration claim are present, but in the most reduced form on this timeline: the round "seventy" of Eusebius and Clement (not the seventy-two of Aristeas), one cell apiece (no Cohortatio cots on Pharos, no paired chambers), no eyewitness ruins, and — uniquely for this encyclopedist of numbers, who counts the books, the translators, and the cells alike at seventy — no count of days. He restores the high priest Eleazar by name (where the Syriac Zacharias had garbled him into "Izra‘el") and names Ptolemy correctly: in substance Augustine's form, reduced to seventy and fixed as a reference-shelf fact the Latin Middle Ages would copy for six centuries.

Eustathius of Tarihan (c. AD 750)

The developed form alive in the Syriac East. Eustathius of Tarihan, an East Syriac writer of the see of Tirhan on the Tigris, opens his biblical Commentaries with the legend in full: "the seventy elders whom Ptolemy, the king of Egypt sent for… that they might translate… the books of the prophets from Hebrew into Greek," housed in "small lodgings corresponding to the number of them, not in Alexandria, but at… seventy stadia, so that each one… should complete his translation by himself alone," with attendants set to "prevent them from talking with one another" — so that, the drafts agreeing "through the conformity of their words," the king "believed that the translation had been made by the power of God."³⁴ Both the separate cells and the inspiration miracle are here in their strong Irenaean form — two centuries deeper into the East than Zacharias, whose bare Eusebian abridgment had dropped them. His distinctive notes are the widened scope ("the books of the prophets," continuing the drift of Justin and Cyril of Alexandria), a generalized "seventy stadia" echo of the Cohortatio's Pharos, and the round "seventy" (not the seventy-two of Aristeas), with neither Demetrius nor Eleazar named — the frame pared to king, cells, identical drafts, and divine power, set as the preface to a working commentary. ⚠ This block is cited from the verbatim translation printed by the Wassersteins; not yet collated against the critical edition, L. Abramowski & A. E. Goodman, A Nestorian Collection of Christological Texts (Cambridge, 1972), which prints the Syriac and an English translation (vol. 2, pp. 39–41) under the author's name, Shahdost of Tirhan (the manuscript names him “Eustathios”). The c. 750 date is the collection's rather than securely the author's.

Ishodad of Merv (c. AD 850)

The legend pared back to a bare commission. Ishodad of Merv, bishop of Ḥedatta and the great East Syriac biblical commentator, opens his Commentaries with the origin of the Greek Old Testament in a single sentence: the version "was made under the patronage of Ptolemy Philadelphus… on the island of Pharos near Alexandria by seventy-two elders of the Jews, who were very well versed in the Hebrew and the Greek languages from their youth."³⁵ For the through-line this timeline traces, Ishodad carries neither the separate cells nor the inspiration miracle: the marvel Eustathius had told whole a century before is simply gone, leaving the plain royal commission of Aristeas and Tertullian. His one descriptive note runs the opposite way from the inspiration tradition — he grounds the translators' reliability not in the Holy Spirit (as Cyril of Jerusalem had) but in their human competence, men "very well versed in the Hebrew and the Greek languages from their youth," the most naturalistic notice on this timeline and a fit one for the first East Syriac writer to cite the Septuagint and the rival Greek versions (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion) as a working text critic. He restores Aristeas's precise "seventy-two" against the round seventy his fellow Syriac Eustathius had kept, names Pharos and Philadelphus correctly, and widens the scope to the whole "Greek version of the Old Testament." ⚠ This block is cited from the verbatim translation printed by the Wassersteins; the underlying Syriac has not been independently collated against a critical edition.

Moses bar Kepha (c. AD 903)

The cells restored, the Spirit left unspoken. Moses bar Kepha, bishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church, retells the origin in his Hexaemeron Commentary: Ptolemy Philadelphus, "who loved wisdom and collected many books," sends to the Hebrews for the Old Testament and "summoned seventy two men… who knew the Hebrew and the Greek languages very well," then "assigned each of them a separate cell to live in, in order to see whether they agreed with each other or not," and "all of them agreed… very exactly."³⁶ For the through-line this timeline traces, bar Kepha carries the cells but not the explicit miracle: he restores the separate-cells test that his fellow East Syriac Ishodad had dropped a half-century before — the isolation in its original Irenaean function, sealing each man apart so the agreement would prove itself — and the test succeeds, yet where Eustathius had drawn the conclusion outright ("made by the power of God"), bar Kepha stops at the agreement and leaves the inference unspoken. Within the East Syriac chain the legend thus oscillates — full in Eustathius (c. 750), bare in Ishodad (c. 850), half here: cells without the named Spirit. He keeps Aristeas's precise seventy-two and names Philadelphus, but drops Demetrius, Eleazar, Pharos, and the count of days. The inspiration verdict he draws elsewhere — in a note appended to this same survey, the LXX's antiquity becomes the ground for the corruption charge against the later Jewish versions, so that bar Kepha is in the Syriac East what Rufinus was in the Latin West: the writer in whom origin legend and corruption charge meet in one hand. ⚠ This block rests on the verbatim translation printed by the Wassersteins; the underlying Syriac of the Hexaemeron has not been independently collated against a critical edition.

Eutychius of Alexandria (c. AD 938)

The legend in Melkite Arabic, told local to the Serapeum. Eutychius (Sa‘id ibn Bitriq), Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, sets the origin into the regnal chronology of his Arabic world-history, the Annals: a Ptolemy he miscalls "al-Iksandrus… the conquerer of Ur," in "his twentieth year of reign," "ordered seventy Jews taken from… [Jerusalem]… ordering them to translate the Torah and the Books of Prophets from Hebrew to Greek, placing each of them in a dwelling, isolated from the others," and the versions came out "identical, with no discrepancy," which he then "sealed… with his own seal and placed… in the temple of an idol called Sirābiyūn."³⁷ For the through-line this timeline traces, Eutychius carries the cells in their full isolation form — each translator sealed apart "to see what was the interpretation of each of them," the agreement proving itself — but, like the Syriac bar Kepha just before him and the Arabic al-Makīn after, stops at the demonstrated agreement and never names the Holy Spirit. His distinctive note is the resting-place: the sealed copies are laid up "in the temple of an idol called Sirābiyūn" — the Serapeum of Alexandria, the same pagan-temple deposit Tertullian and John Chrysostom had recorded, fitting in the mouth of an Alexandrian patriarch writing his city's own history. The frame otherwise shows its late Arabic provenance: the round "seventy" (not Aristeas's seventy-two), the scope widened to "the Torah and the Books of Prophets," and the king's name garbled to "al-Iskandar / Ghalib Ur" — the same double-name muddle the Coptic-Arabic Ibn al-Rāhib and al-Makīn would carry. He appends the offshoot Simeon-the-Just legend — one of the Seventy kept alive "three hundred and fifty years" to hold the Christ-child — weighed on the Simeon-the-Just argument. ⚠ This block is cited from Roger Pearse's verbatim translation (and the parallel printed by the Wassersteins); the underlying Arabic has not been independently collated against a critical edition.

Agapius of Hierapolis (c. AD 942)

The origin legend in its fullest Arabic narrative. Agapius of Hierapolis (Maḥbūb ibn Qusṭanṭīn), the Melkite bishop of Manbij — the Greek Hierapolis and Syriac Mabbug — set the origin into the world-history he wrote in Arabic, the Kitāb al-‘Unwān (Universal History), a few years after his fellow Melkite Eutychius. His Ptolemy Philadelphus, "who reigned over Egypt 38 years," first "freed from the captivity the people who were in his kingdom, 130,000, including 30,000 Jews," then sent to Jerusalem for the sacred books and, told they were in Hebrew, asked for translators; the Jews "agreed to send six people from each of their tribes, their number being of 72 men." Received "in a very hospitable way," the seventy-two were "divided into thirty-six groups," each group given "a man who prevented them from meeting" until "the Torah and all the books of the Prophets were entirely finished"; and from the finished work Ptolemy "obtained thirty-six copies in Greek… and sent a certain number of them to Rome, Ephesus and Byzantium," with gifts "for their chief Eleazar, the high priest."³⁸ For the through-line this timeline traces, Agapius carries the separation in its group form — the thirty-six paired cells of Epiphanius, an attendant set over each pair to keep them from conferring — but, like the Arabic Eutychius just before him and the Syriac bar Kepha, he rests the proof on the demonstrated agreement and never names the Holy Spirit. His distinctive detail is the distribution: no other witness on this timeline scatters the finished copies abroad, "to Rome, Ephesus and Byzantium" — a tenth-century Arabic embellishment that turns the single Serapeum deposit of Tertullian and Eutychius into an imperial publication. Like Eutychius he appends the offshoot Simeon-the-Just legend, weighed on the Simeon-the-Just argument. His fuller detail page — where the same chronicle turns this inspired-Septuagint premise against the synagogue's Hebrew in the post-Resurrection corruption charge — sits on the companion corruption timeline. ⚠ This block is cited from the published English of the Kitāb al-‘Unwān (rendered from Vasiliev's Patrologia Orientalis edition); the underlying Arabic has not been independently collated against a critical edition.

Hugh of Saint Victor (c. AD 1141)

The legend told whole, then disowned. Hugh of Saint Victor, the Paris schoolman whose De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris served as an introduction to the study of the Bible, gives the origin story in its full inspiration form — Ptolemy Philadelphus had the Old Testament rendered into Greek "by seventy translators, whom he received from Eleazar the High Priest," split into "individual cells" so that, "as some say," none could deceive the king, yet "they translated everything by the Holy Spirit in such a way that nothing was to be found in one codex which was not to be found in the others" — and then, in the same breath, withdraws it: "But Jerome says that no credence should be given to this matter."³⁹ He is the first witness on this timeline who is himself a skeptic of the cells, and he is so by quoting Jerome, whose verdict the Latin West had by his day accepted; the strong Irenaean form Rufinus once threw at Jerome as a weapon is here recorded as a quarrel settled the other way. He is also unusually candid about the Septuagint's deficiency: the version was later found to lack things "the authority both of Christ himself and of the apostles" had announced were in it, so "others undertook to translate… from the Hebrew" — Jerome's logic, the divergence a defect to be corrected against the Hebrew rather than (with Augustine and Epiphanius) a second inspired witness. With Hugh the skeptical counter-tradition, long a minority report answered by the inspiration-defenders, becomes the medieval schoolroom's default, and the inspired-Septuagint premise on which the corruption charge rests is quietly let go.

Michael the Syrian (c. AD 1199)

The Epiphanian paired cells restored, in chronicle dress. Michael the Great ("the Syrian"), patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church and author of the largest medieval Syriac universal history, sets the origin into his Chronicle as a dated annal: in "the 5th year of his reign… the king Ptolemy Philadelphus sent to find the High Priest of the Jews, Eleazar," who sent "men who knew Hebrew and Greek, to the number of seventy two," whom the king "established… on the island of Pharos" in "thirty six cells – one for every pair," warning them "not to change anything"; the thirty-six copies, "when they were compared with each other… were as though they had been translated by a single person."⁴⁰ For the through-line this timeline traces, Michael carries the cells in their distinctive Epiphanian paired form — "thirty six cells — one for every pair" — absent from the timeline since Epiphanius himself eight centuries before, almost certainly reaching him through the Syriac transmission of Epiphanius's Weights and Measures; but he diverges from Epiphanius on the work, having "each pair" translate "all the books" (thirty-six full copies compared) where Epiphanius gave one book per pair. He keeps the marvel of identical drafts ("as though… by a single person") yet, like his fellow Syriac bar Kepha, stops at the agreement and never names the Holy Spirit — the late Syriac chronicle tradition transmitting the machinery of the miracle while muting its pneumatology. As a compiler with the older sources to hand, he restores Aristeas's precise seventy-two, Eleazar, Pharos, and the seventy-two days against the pared-down Syriac witnesses just before him (Eustathius, Ishodad), giving the legend its last full antique shape on this timeline — and telling the cells whole in the East one generation after Hugh of Saint Victor had begun to let them go in the Latin schools. The annal is verifiable in the critical edition itself — Chabot's Chronique de Michel le Syrien, French translation at tome I, pp. 115–118 (Syriac in tome IV), freely available online — which corroborates the Wassersteins' English.

Solomon of Basra (c. AD 1222)

The legend pared back to a king-list entry. Solomon, bishop of Basra in the Church of the East, folds the origin of the Greek Scriptures into the chronological king-list of his Book of the Bee, a Syriac compendium of sacred history, reduced almost to a chronicler's note: "Ptolemy Philadelphus, 38 years. In his third year the fifth millennium ended. This (king) asked the captive Jews who were in Egypt, and seventy old men translated the Scriptures for him, from Hebrew into Greek, in the island of Pharos. In return for this he set them free, and gave back to them also the vessels of their temple."⁴¹ For the through-line this timeline traces, Solomon carries neither the separate cells nor the inspiration miracle: one generation after his fellow Syriac Michael the Great told the cells whole in their Epiphanian paired form, the legend contracts again to the plain royal commission of Aristeas and Tertullian — and of his near-contemporary Ishodad, whose one-sentence notice his resembles. As a chronicler like Michael he pins the event to a world-chronology synchronism ("in his third year the fifth millennium ended") and closes by listing the translators under the twelve tribes; but where Michael restored the full machinery, Solomon keeps only the irreducible core. He counts the round "seventy" of the Eusebian and Syriac line (not the seventy-two of Aristeas, though the roster he appends descends from the seventy-two tradition), names Pharos and Philadelphus, drops Demetrius and Eleazar, and adds one concrete detail none of the others carry — the king "gave back to them also the vessels of their temple," the restoration of the sacred vessels coupled to the freeing of the captives. The Septuagint legend in its barest chronicle form, just before the thirteenth-century Arabic notices that close the tradition.

Ibn al-Rahib (c. AD 1257)

The legend in Coptic-Arabic dress — old discrepancies tidied, biblical worthies gathered in. Ibn al-Rāhib, the Coptic Egyptian encyclopedist of Old Cairo, gives the origin a single sentence in the historical section of his Kitāb al-Tawārīkh (Book of Histories): "Batlamiyus, called also al-Iskandarus… summoned seventy two elders of the elders of the Children of Israel. And two of them died on the way, so that there remained (only) seventy. They interpreted for him the book of the Torah and the prophets; and among them was El’azar, whom Antiyakhus slew when he did not bow down to his idol; and also among their number was Sam’an al-kahin who carried our lord in his arms."⁴² For the through-line this timeline traces, Ibn al-Rāhib carries neither the separate cells nor the inspiration miracle — the bare royal commission of Aristeas and the Arabic notices, no isolation and no Holy Spirit. But he does two things no earlier witness here had done. First, he reconciles the long-running "seventy" / "seventy-two" count by an incident rather than a symbol: where Epiphanius had explained the two extra by Moses's seventy elders plus two for tribal evenness, Ibn al-Rāhib has seventy-two summoned and "two of them died on the way," so the round seventy are what remain to begin the work. Second, he gathers two famous biblical figures into the band of translators — El’azar, the high priest of Aristeas now merged with the aged martyr of 2 Maccabees 6 (slain by Antiochus IV for refusing the idol-meat, a century out of place but a characteristic gathering-up, like Aristobulus drawn back "among the seventy interpreters"); and Sam’an al-kahin, the Simeon of Luke 2 who "carried our lord in his arms" and sang the Nunc Dimittis, here made one of the Seventy — the compressed seed of the Simeon-the-Just legend (a translator kept alive three hundred and fifty years to see the Christ he had rendered in prophecy), told in full by his reader al-Makin (c. 1273). He widens the scope past the Law to "the Torah and the prophets," names neither Demetrius nor Pharos nor the days, and gives the king the curious double name "Batlamiyus, called also al-Iskandarus." The thirteenth-century Arabic form keeps the marvel out and lets the hagiography in. ⚠ This block is cited from the verbatim translation printed by the Wassersteins; the underlying Arabic of the Kitāb al-Tawārīkh (critical edition: S. Q. Mu‘awwaḍ [Samuel Moawad], part 1, Cairo, 2016) has not been independently collated here — and is not the anonymous Chronicon Orientale long misattributed to Ibn al-Rāhib.

al-Makin Ibn al-‘Amid (c. AD 1273)

The Simeon-the-Just legend told whole, and the separate-place test restored. al-Makīn Ibn al-‘Amīd, the Coptic-Egyptian historian whose universal chronicle drew openly on Ibn al-Rāhib a generation before, gives the origin a fuller notice than any of the thirteenth-century Arabic chain: Ptolemy "Batlamiyus… Philadelphus… a lover of wisdom… sent to Jerusalem and summoned 72 elders… among them Sam’an the priest… ordered them to interpret the Torah and the books of the prophets… And he placed each of them in a place on his own. And when that was done he ordered that the versions be compared and they were seen to be identical, and he sealed them with his seal," then "freed for them the prisoners."⁴³ For the through-line this timeline traces, al-Makīn restores what his source Ibn al-Rāhib had dropped — the separate places and the agreement-test (each elder set "in a place on his own," the versions "compared… and they were seen to be identical") — though, like the Syriac bar Kepha and Michael, he stops at the demonstrated agreement and never names the Holy Spirit, adding only the chronicler’s detail of the royal seal on the matched copies. His chief contribution is to tell whole the Simeon-the-Just legend Ibn al-Rāhib had given in a single clause: Sam’ān al-kahin, grieving over "the prophecies… about the appearance of the lord Messiah" he translates, prays for length of days, lives "350 years, until the Masih was born," takes the Child "on his arms" in the Temple, sings the Nunc Dimittis ("Now, O Lord, release thy servant in peace, for my eyes have seen thy salvation"), "and he died at once" — the translator of the messianic prophecies kept alive to behold their fulfilment, the motif binding the origin legend to the proof-text it serves (the fuller Coptic redactions sharpen it to Isaiah 7:14’s "virgin," not yet named here). He keeps the Eleazar-martyr conflation, adding the age "90 years," widens the scope to "the Torah and the books of the prophets," and sets a rival 70-elder version from the Hebrew Josippon beside his own seventy-two — the last new witness on this timeline. ⚠ This block is cited from the verbatim translation printed by the Wassersteins; the underlying Arabic of this passage is effectively unpublished — Erpenius's 1625 edition covers only the Islamic half, and M. Diez's 2023 critical edition of part 1 stops before the Ptolemaic period — so it has not been independently collated here.

Arguments

The central sub-claim — whether the inspiration legend (the divinely-guided, independently-identical translation, and the "changes" the seventy-two are said to have made) is history, pious fiction, or a memory of real translation choices — cuts across this timeline and the Rabbinic Corruption timeline alike. It is weighed under that doctrine, where it is grouped in the "corruption charge" group. A late-antique offshoot of the legend — the story of Simeon the Just, kept alive to see the Christ whose "virgin" he had hesitated to render at Isaiah 7:14 — is weighed here, the hagiographic mirror of the Aquila charge on the corruption side.

The Septuagint legend: were the seventy-two divinely moved to change the text? (assessment: plausible)

The Septuagint-legend argument weighs the tradition this whole timeline traces — that the seventy-two translators were divinely moved to change specific passages for Ptolemy (the Tractate Megillah list, paralleled in the Letter of Aristeas frame). The interpretation is plausible at its kernel, not as the inspired history it is told as: a real subset of the listed "changes" are genuine, identifiable Septuagint translation choices (Genesis 2:2's "sixth day"; the euphemism for the hare at Leviticus 11:6), but the inspiration-miracle frame (separate cells, divinely-prompted unanimity) is a demonstrable later accretion — absent from the earliest source, Aristeas, and grown across centuries, exactly the growth this timeline charts — and the list is a fluid midrashic tradition several of whose items appear in no extant Septuagint. The argument lives on the rabbinic-corruption side, where the inspired-LXX premise turns the synagogue's divergent Hebrew into apparent corruption.⁴⁴

The Simeon-the-Just legend: did one of the Seventy balk at Isaiah 7:14's "virgin"? (assessment: weak)

The Simeon-the-Just argument weighs the late-antique offshoot of this origin legend told whole by al-Makīn (and in seed by Ibn al-Rāhib): that one of the seventy-two translators, Simeon the Just — identified with the Simeon of Luke 2 — grieved over the messianic prophecies he was rendering, and at Isaiah 7:14's "virgin" (in the sharpest, Coptic-Synaxarium form) was tempted to write "girl," for which he was kept alive three hundred and fifty years until he held the Christ in the Temple. Beyond the Arabic chain a Syriac branch carries the story earliest and latest — already in its Isaiah-7:14 form in the seven-fold list of Simeon-identifications preserved by Moses bar Kepha (d. 903) and Dionysius bar Salibi (d. 1171), then welded to the "father of Ben Sira" guess by Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) — with only a thin, guarded Byzantine echo in Euthymius Zigabenus (c. 1120), while the eighth-century George of the Arabs (d. 724) marks its dated floor, canvassing who the Gospel Simeon was and knowing no translator-form at all. These are witnesses to the Luke-2:25 offshoot, not to the origin account this timeline charts, and so are weighed on the argument rather than given a place among the witnesses above. As an argument that the Septuagint preserved an authentic "virgin" against a Jewish softening, the interpretation is weak. It is the hagiographic mirror of the Aquila charge, and a genuine witness to how deeply the Isaiah 7:14 anxiety had saturated the Christian East — but as evidence it is a late (tenth-century and after), demonstrably legendary conflation of three Simeons bridged by an impossible 350-year lifespan, it adds nothing to the philological question of 'almah, and it locates the temptation to soften "virgin" inside the translators' own work, conceding that Isaiah 7:14 is a question of how to render the unchanged Hebrew, not of tampering with the Hebrew text — the same finding the Aquila-revision argument reaches. The legend is cultural memory, not proof.⁴⁵

Did the New Testament authors quote the Septuagint? (assessment: sound)

The NT-quotes-the-Septuagint argument weighs the substantive scholarly claim behind a common apologetic move — that Christ and the New Testament writers used the Greek Septuagint as their Old Testament. At its core the interpretation is sound: the Septuagint was the working Bible of the Greek-speaking apostolic Church, and a real block of the New Testament's explicit quotations follows the Greek precisely where it diverges from the Hebrew (Jesus' own "in vain do they worship me" at Mark 7:7, Psalm 8:2's "praise" at Matthew 21:16, Psalm 40:6's "a body you prepared for me" at Hebrews 10:5, Amos 5:26's "Rephan" at Acts 7:43, and Isaiah 7:14's "virgin" at Matthew 1:23). Two overreaches are flagged: the popular tally "340 of 386 quotations are from the Septuagint" (G. Archer & G. C. Chirichigno's complete survey) is rhetorically inflated — about 268 of that 340 are passages where the Hebrew and Greek simply agree, so they show no preference at all, and the probative subset that follows the Greek against the Hebrew outweighs the reverse only about two to one; and "follows the Greek against the Hebrew" is not always "preferred a translation to the original," since the Septuagint sometimes preserves an older Hebrew reading the Masoretic line later lost — the caution the Goliath's-height and slayer-of-Goliath cases hold open. Kept to its core the claim is solid; stretched to its headline number, or to the further thesis that Septuagint word-usage governs the meaning of every disputed New-Testament term, it overreaches.⁴⁶

Sources