HistoricalChristian.Faith

Ibn al-Rahib on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 1257 · Kitāb al-Tawārīkh (Book of Histories) · Wikipedia
Summary: The legend in Coptic-Arabic dress, with two old problems quietly solved and two biblical figures folded in. Ibn al-Rāhib — the Coptic Egyptian encyclopedist Abū Shākir ibn Buṭrus al-Rāhib — gives the origin of the Greek Scriptures a single sentence in the historical section of his Kitāb al-Tawārīkh: “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.”¹ For the through-line this timeline traces, Ibn al-Rāhib carries neither the separate cells nor the inspiration miracle — the bare royal commission of the Arabic notices — but he does two things no earlier witness here had done: he reconciles the long-running “seventy” / “seventy-two” count by having two of the seventy-two die on the road, and he gathers two famous biblical figures into the band of translators — the martyr Eleazar of 2 Maccabees and Simeon of the Nunc Dimittis.

Claims & evidence

The notice in the chronicle

Ibn al-Rāhib is a chronologist by trade — the bulk of the Kitāb al-Tawārīkh is calendrical and astronomical, the historical matter compressed into its closing chapters — and the Septuagint enters as one annotated entry among the Ptolemaic kings, not as a story to be expounded. Like his fellow chroniclers Solomon of Basra and Michael the Syrian he gives it in the register of the king-list, pinned to a reign:

“Batlamiyus, called also al-Iskandarus; and it was he who 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 (Ar. fassaru) for him the book of the Torah (Ar. tawrat) and the prophets; and among them was El’azar, whom Antiyakhus slew when he did not bow down to his idol (Ar. li-wathanihi); and also among their number was Sam’an al-kahin who carried our lord (Ar. sayyidana) in his arms.”¹

The frame is pared to king and translators: no Demetrius the librarian, no high priest sending the men from Jerusalem, no Pharos, no count of days. He widens the scope past the Law to “the Torah and the prophets” — the same drift that runs through Justin, Clement, Cyril of Alexandria, and the Syriac chain — and gives the king a curious double name, “Batlamiyus, called also al-Iskandarus,” the Ptolemy of Alexandria run together with Alexander.

Two die on the road — seventy-two summoned, seventy arriving

His one structural innovation solves a problem the tradition had carried since the second century. The Letter of Aristeas had “seventy-two” (six from each of the twelve tribes); but from Irenaeus onward many tellers rounded the number to “seventy,” and the two figures coexisted uneasily down the whole timeline — the version named for “the Seventy” yet staffed, on the roster, by seventy-two. Epiphanius had reconciled them typologically: Moses took seventy elders up the mountain, and two were added for evenness among the tribes. Ibn al-Rāhib reconciles them narratively instead: seventy-two are summoned, “two of them died on the way, so that there remained (only) seventy” — attrition on the road from Jerusalem turning the Aristean seventy-two into the round seventy by the time the work begins. It is a small, characteristically chronicler’s touch — tidying a discrepancy with an incident rather than a symbol — and it appears here for the first time on this timeline.

Eleazar the martyr folded in

Ibn al-Rāhib names one translator: “El’azar, whom Antiyakhus slew when he did not bow down to his idol.” The name is an old one in the legend — in Aristeas and the fuller classical tellers Eleazar is the high priest at Jerusalem who sends the translators — but here he has become one of the Seventy and been merged with a different biblical Eleazar entirely: the aged scribe of 2 Maccabees 6, martyred under Antiochus IV Epiphanes for refusing to eat or to feign eating the forbidden meat. The conflation is chronologically impossible — Ptolemy II reigned in the third century BC, Antiochus IV persecuted in the second — but it is the kind of gathering-up the legend had always done (Aristobulus drawn back “among the seventy interpreters,” the Simeon of Luke pulled in below): the translation becomes a meeting-place for the worthies of the Greek-Jewish past, the high priest’s name attaching to the most famous martyr who bore it.

Simeon of the Nunc Dimittis among the translators — the Simeon-the-Just legend in seed

The last clause is the most consequential: “among their number was Sam’an al-kahin who carried our lord in his arms.” Sam’an al-kahin — Simeon the priest — is the Simeon of Luke 2:25–35, the just and devout man to whom it was revealed “that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord’s Christ,” who took the infant Jesus up in his arms in the Temple and sang the Nunc Dimittis. Ibn al-Rāhib makes him one of the seventy-two translators — the compressed seed of a whole Eastern-Christian legend in which one of the Seventy, balking at rendering the “virgin” of Isaiah 7:14, is kept alive some three hundred and fifty years until he holds the promised Child and is released. Ibn al-Rāhib gives only the identification; his near-contemporary and reader al-Makin (Jirjis al-Makin Ibn al-‘Amid, c. 1273), who drew heavily on the Kitāb al-Tawārīkh, spells out the full story — Sam’an grieving over the messianic prophecies he translates, praying for length of days, living 350 years, taking the Christ in his arms in the Temple and dying at once with the words of the Nunc Dimittis. The motif binds the origin legend to the messianic proof-text it everywhere serves: the very translator of the prophecies lives to see them fulfilled.

Cells and miracle both absent

For the question this timeline follows — whether each witness carries the separate-cells device and the miracle of independently-identical drafts — Ibn al-Rāhib carries neither. There is no isolation, no agreement-test, no language of the Holy Spirit; the elders simply “interpreted for him the book of the Torah and the prophets.” In this he stands with the bare-commission tellers — Aristeas, Tertullian, Ishodad of Merv, Solomon of Basra — rather than the cells-and-Spirit form of Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanius, or the Syriac bar Kepha and Michael. The thirteenth-century Arabic notices that close the tradition keep the marvel out and let the hagiographical accretions in: not separate cells and inspired unanimity, but the martyr and the Christ-bearer gathered into the band.

Notes

• The work. The Kitāb al-Tawārīkh (Book of Histories) is the most famous work of Abū Shākir ibn Buṭrus al-Rāhib, a vast calendrical-historical encyclopedia in fifty-one chapters: the first forty-seven on chronology and astronomy, the last few on world history, Islamic history, and the patriarchs of Alexandria. The Septuagint notice falls in the world-history matter. The work is precisely dated by its own multi-calendar colophon to 655 of the Hijra / 973 of the Martyrs / 1257 of the Christian era (the conventional “c. 1260” rounds this).
• Who he was. Ibn al-Rāhib (Nushū’ al-Khilāfa Abū Shākir ibn Buṭrus al-Rāhib, c. 1205 – c. 1295) was a Coptic polymath and encyclopedist of Old Cairo, from a prominent family of Coptic notables and a deacon of the Church of the Virgin known as al-Mu‘allaqah (the Hanging Church). He stands near the end of the golden age of Copto-Arabic Christian literature; his contemporary al-Makin Ibn al-‘Amid (c. 1273) drew heavily on his chronicle, and through al-Makin the great Muslim historians (Ibn Khaldūn, al-Maqrīzī, al-Qalqashandī) cite him.
• Cells and inspiration: both absent. No separate cells, no agreement-test, no Holy Spirit — the bare royal commission. On this timeline he stands with the bare-commission tellers, against the cells-and-miracle form told whole by Michael a generation before.
• What he adds. The reconciliation of seventy / seventy-two by the death of two translators on the road; the scope widened to “the Torah and the prophets”; Eleazar the high priest merged with the 2 Maccabees martyr; and Simeon of Luke 2 (“Sam’an al-kahin who carried our lord in his arms”) folded into the band — the Simeon-the-Just legend in compressed seed, told in full by al-Makin (c. 1273).
• Text and provenance. ⚠ This block is cited from the verbatim English translation printed by Abraham & David J. Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint (Cambridge, 2006); the underlying Arabic of the Kitāb al-Tawārīkh — critically edited by S. Q. Mu‘awwaḍ (Samuel Moawad), Kitāb al-Tawārīkh, part 1 (Cairo, 2016), with source-studies by Adel Sidarus — has not been independently collated here. (The anonymous Chronicon Orientale, ed. L. Cheikho in CSCO, is a separate work long misattributed to “Peter ibn al-Rāhib” and should not be taken for the Kitāb al-Tawārīkh itself.)

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