HistoricalChristian.Faith

Eutychius of Alexandria on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 938 (Sa‘id ibn Bitriq, 877–940) · Annals (Naẓm al-Jawhar / Kitāb al-Ta’rīkh), ch. 7 · Wikipedia
Summary: The Alexandrian origin-legend in Arabic dress. Eutychius (Sa‘id ibn Bitriq), Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, retells the legend in his world-chronicle the Annals: a Ptolemy he miscalls "al-Iskandar" summons seventy Jews from Jerusalem, seals each translator alone in a separate dwelling, finds the versions "identical, with no discrepancy," and deposits them in the pagan temple of Serapis — the classic separate-cells miracle, told local to the city whose Serapeum Tertullian and John Chrysostom had already named. He appends the offshoot legend of Simeon the Just, one of the Seventy, kept alive 350 years to hold the Christ-child whose prophecies he had balked at translating.

Claims & evidence

The origin legend — separate dwellings, identical versions, sealed in the Serapis temple

Eutychius gives the legend in the strong isolation form, set into the regnal chronology of his Annals:

"After him ruled Ptolemy, called al-Iksandrus, and nicknamed “the conquerer of Ur” for twenty-seven years. (In another text it is said: “for twenty-one years.”) In his twentieth year of reign he ordered seventy Jews taken from Ūrashīm and brought them to Alexandria, 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, to see what was the interpretation of each of them. When they finished translating the books, he saw their interpretations. The versions were identical, with no discrepancy. He then gathered the books together, sealed them with his own seal and placed them in the temple of an idol called Sirābiyūn."¹

For the through-line this timeline traces — whether each teller carries the separate cells and the inspiration claim — Eutychius carries the cells but, like his near-contemporary Syriac and Arabic chroniclers, stops short of naming the Holy Spirit. The isolation is fully present and in its original Irenaean function: each translator is "placed… in a dwelling, isolated from the others, to see what was the interpretation of each of them," and the proof succeeds — "the versions were identical, with no discrepancy." But the verdict is left implicit; where Cyril of Jerusalem and Augustine had pronounced the agreement the work of the Holy Ghost, Eutychius reports the matched versions as fact and moves on, like the Syriac bar Kepha and the later Arabic al-Makīn, who also stop at the demonstrated agreement. His distinctive note is the deposit: the sealed copies are laid up "in the temple of an idol called Sirābiyūn" — the Serapeum of Alexandria, the same pagan-temple resting-place Tertullian ("at the temple of Serapis") and John Chrysostom ("the temple of Serapis") had recorded, fitting in the mouth of an Alexandrian patriarch writing the city's own history.

The count, the scope, and the king

The frame carries the marks of a late, distant retelling. Eutychius gives the round "seventy" (not the Aristean seventy-two), widens the scope past the Law to "the Torah and the Books of Prophets," and — most strikingly — garbles the king's name, calling Ptolemy "al-Iksandrus" (Alexander) and "the conquerer of Ur," conflating the dynasty's founder-conqueror with the book-collecting Philadelphus of the legend. The parallel translation printed by the Wassersteins makes the confusion plainer still: "a Ptolemy named Alexander (Arabic: al-Iskandar), and he was also called Ghalib Ur."² He names neither Demetrius nor Eleazar nor Pharos, and gives no count of days — the legend reduced to king, seventy translators, separate dwellings, identical versions, and the Serapis deposit. The same double-name muddle (Batlamiyus, called also al-Iskandarus) recurs a generation later in the Coptic-Arabic Ibn al-Rāhib and al-Makīn, marking it a fixed feature of the Arabic-Christian branch of the tradition.

A coda: Simeon the Just among the Seventy, kept alive to see the Christ (c. 938)

Directly after the origin notice Eutychius appends the offshoot legend of Simeon the Just — the tale that the aged Simeon of Luke 2, who took the infant Christ and sang the Nunc Dimittis, had himself been one of Ptolemy's translators, kept alive for centuries after balking at the messianic prophecies he was rendering:

"Among the Seventy was a man named Simeon the Just, who took Christ our Lord [into his arms] in the temple. This Simeon, in explaining the Torah and translating the Prophets from Hebrew into Greek, found in every letter that he was transcribing, a prophecy about Christ our Lord, and in his heart he tried not to admit it by saying, ‘This is not possible!’ God therefore delayed his death, and he lived three hundred and fifty years until he saw Christ our Lord. When he saw Him he said: ‘Now send your servant out in peace, O Lord, according to your word, for our eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for the benefit of all peoples.’"³

Eutychius is one of the legend's earliest datable witnesses, with the Syriac Moses bar Kepha (d. 903) just before him and the Melkite-Arabic Agapius of Hierapolis (c. 942) just after. His form has the multi-century lifespan (here "three hundred and fifty years") and the Nunc Dimittis, but pins the doubt to the messianic prophecies "in general" rather than to Isaiah 7:14's "virgin" by name — the explicit Isaiah-7:14 shape is already present in the Syriac bar Kepha, while the sharpest dramatization (the written "girl," the rebuking angel) belongs to the later Coptic Synaxarium. Whether the legend can bear the weight put on it — as evidence that the Septuagint preserved an authentic "virgin" against a Jewish softening — is weighed on the Simeon-the-Just argument (assessment: weak), not re-argued here.

Notes

• Who he was. Sa‘id ibn Bitriq (877–940), known in Greek as Eutychius, was a physician of Fustat (Old Cairo) who became Melkite (Chalcedonian) patriarch of Alexandria in 933. His Arabic world-chronicle, the Naẓm al-Jawhar ("String of Pearls"), conventionally the Annals, runs from the creation to his own day and is one of the earliest Christian histories composed in Arabic — which is why its Septuagint notice carries the Arabic-Christian colour (the round seventy, the al-Iskandar/Ghalib-Ur king-name, the Serapis deposit) later shared by the Coptic-Arabic chroniclers.
• Why he sits on this timeline. The body of Eutychius's notice is straight origin-legend — the separate dwellings, the identical versions, the Serapis deposit — so it belongs with the origin-miracle witnesses here, beside bar Kepha and the Coptic-Arabic chain. His contemporary Agapius, whose telling foregrounds the providential anti-Jewish framing, is placed instead on the rabbinic-corruption timeline; the two Melkite-Arabic chroniclers thus split by emphasis.
• Text and provenance. The English of the origin notice and the Simeon coda is quoted verbatim from Roger Pearse's translation of the Arabic of Annals ch. 7. The parallel rendering printed by Abraham & David J. Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint (Cambridge, 2006), confirms the substance (and makes the "Ghalib Ur" king-name explicit). The underlying Arabic has not been independently collated against a critical edition here.

Sources