HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Letter of Aristeas on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. 130 BC (narrating events set under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, r. 285–246 BC) · Wikipedia
Summary: The fountainhead of every later account. The Letter of Aristeas is a pseudepigraphal work — cast as a memoir by "Aristeas," a Greek official at the court of Ptolemy II, but written by a Hellenistic Jew of Alexandria perhaps a century after the events it describes. It supplies the narrative skeleton the whole tradition inherits: the royal library, Demetrius of Phalerum's proposal to add the Jewish Law, Ptolemy's embassy to the high priest Eleazar, the seventy-two elders (six from each of the twelve tribes), the translation completed in seventy-two days, the public reading, and the curse pronounced against any alteration. One thing it conspicuously lacks is the later miracle: Aristeas's translators consult and compare their work — they are not shut in separate cells to produce independently identical versions. That detail is a Christian-era accretion.

Claims & evidence

The commission: the Law is "absent from the library" and "must be translated"

"I am told that the laws of the Jews are worth transcribing and deserve a place in your library." "What is to prevent you from doing this?" replied the king… "They need to be translated," answered Demetrius…

"The books of the law of the Jews (with some few others) are absent from the library. They are written in the Hebrew characters and language… If it please you, O king, a letter shall be written to the High Priest in Jerusalem, asking him to send six elders out of every tribe — men who have lived the noblest life and are most skilled in their law — that we may find out the points in which the majority of them are in agreement, and so having obtained an accurate translation may place it in a conspicuous place…"

— The Letter of Aristeas, trans. R. H. Charles, source. The frame is a librarian's: Demetrius of Phalerum, keeper of Ptolemy's library at Alexandria, wants the collection complete, and the Jewish Law — divine, "full of wisdom and free from all blemish" — is missing and in need of an accurate Greek rendering. The translation is, at this stage, a scholarly and civic project, not yet a prophetic event.

Seventy-two elders, six from each tribe, finishing in seventy-two days

"In the presence of all the people I selected six elders from each tribe, good men and true, and I have sent them to you with a copy of our law."

"They were seventy-two in all. Such was the answer which Eleazar and his friends gave to the king's letter… And it so chanced that the work of translation was completed in seventy-two days, just as if this had been arranged of set purpose."

— The Letter of Aristeas, source. The numbers — twelve tribes × six, and the seventy-two days — are the durable core of the legend, though later writers round "seventy-two" to "seventy" (whence Septuaginta) and vary the days. The detail that the translators were sent by the high priest with an authorized Hebrew copy is what later gives the version its claim to fidelity.

The text fixed by a curse: nothing to be added, changed, or omitted

"… since so excellent and sacred and accurate a translation had been made, it was only right that it should remain as it was and no alteration should be made in it. And when the whole company expressed their approval, they bade them pronounce a curse in accordance with their custom upon any one who should make any alteration either by adding anything or changing in any way whatever any of the words which had been written or making any omission. This was a very wise precaution to ensure that the book might be preserved for all the future time unchanged."

— The Letter of Aristeas, source. The closing scene declares the Greek text authoritative and inviolable from the moment of its completion. This is the seed that, transplanted into Christian polemic, becomes a weapon: if the LXX was sealed against change by the translators' own curse, then a synagogue text that diverges from it can be cast as the altered one — the logic of the Rabbinic Corruption charge.

Notes

No separate-cells miracle yet. In Aristeas the translators work together, comparing their renderings to "find out the points in which the majority… are in agreement"; the agreement is achieved by collation, not by a supernatural coincidence of independently-sealed scribes. The famous miracle — seventy-two men in seventy-two cells producing word-for-word identical Greek — first appears in Philo (who says they wrote "as if under inspiration… the self-same nouns and verbs") and is hardened into the cells-and-all marvel by Irenaeus, the Cohortatio ad Graecos, Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanius, and Augustine. The legend visibly grew; Aristeas is the baseline against which that growth is measured.
Pseudepigraphal and apologetic. Though it purports to be a contemporary Greek eyewitness, the Letter is the work of an Alexandrian Jew (commonly dated c. 130 BC) writing to commend the Greek Torah and Jewish law to a Hellenistic audience — its "Aristeas" admires Jewish wisdom from the outside on purpose. Its dramatic date is the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC); its composition is considerably later, which is why it can already idealize the event.
It translates only the Law. Aristeas describes the rendering of the Pentateuch alone — as the rabbinic tradition also remembered ("The sages allowed to write in Greek only the Pentateuch"). Later Christian writers progressively extend "the Seventy" to cover the Prophets and the whole Old Testament, an expansion Cyril of Alexandria already shows.