HistoricalChristian.Faith

Ishodad of Merv on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 850 · Commentaries (Introduction)
Summary: The legend pared back to a bare commission. Ishodad of Merv — bishop of Ḥedatta and the great East Syriac (Church of the East) 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." He keeps the precise seventy-two of Aristeas and names both Pharos and Philadelphus, but carries neither the separate cells nor the inspiration miracle — and, against the whole inspired-translation tradition, grounds the result in the translators' human competence rather than the Holy Spirit. ⚠ This witness is cited from the verbatim translation printed by the Wassersteins; the underlying Syriac of the commentary's introduction has not been independently collated against a critical edition.

Claims & evidence

A one-sentence commission — seventy-two, Pharos, Philadelphus, and no miracle

The introduction to Ishodad's biblical Commentaries disposes of the origin story in a single clause:

"The first (Greek version of the Old Testament) was made under the patronage of Ptolemy Philadelphus king of Egypt 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."¹

For the through-line this timeline traces — whether each teller carries the separate cells and the inspiration claim — Ishodad carries neither. There are no individual cots, no sealed isolation, no identical drafts adduced as proof of the Spirit's guidance. The marvel that Irenaeus built, the Cohortatio made physical, and Eustathius of Tarihan still told whole a century before him is simply absent. What remains is the plain royal commission of Aristeas, Josephus, and Tertullian — a king, a place, a number of translators, a finished version.

The agreement grounded in competence, not the Spirit

His one descriptive flourish runs the opposite way from the inspiration tradition. Where Philo made the elders "like men inspired" with "some unseen prompter" behind their words, and Cyril of Jerusalem said the work was "spoken by the Holy Ghost," Ishodad accounts for the translators' reliability by their qualifications: they were "very well versed in the Hebrew and the Greek languages from their youth." The fidelity of the version rests on human expertise, not a divine miracle. It is the most naturalistic notice on this timeline — closer to a modern editor's headnote than to the wonder of the cells — and it fits the man: Ishodad was, within the Church of the East, the first to draw his biblical citations from the Septuagint and the later Greek versions (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion), so his interest in the Greek's origin is that of a working text critic, for whom the relevant facts are who translated, from what, and how well.

The scope and the count

Two further details place him. The scope is the whole "Greek version of the Old Testament," not the Law alone — the same widening from Pentateuch to the entire Greek Bible that Justin, Clement, Cyril of Alexandria, and Eustathius had been settling into the tradition. The count is the precise "seventy-two," restoring Aristeas's figure against the round "seventy" that Eusebius, Clement, Isidore, Zacharias, and his fellow Syriac Eustathius had kept — so the bare form and the exact number coexist, the legend stripped of its miracle but precise in its frame.

Notes

• Who he is. Ishodad (Išoʿdad) of Merv, bishop of Ḥedatta (Hadatha) on the Tigris near Mosul, flourished about AD 850 under the Abbasid Caliphate and was among the most influential biblical commentators of the Church of the East. His Commentaries cover most of the Old and New Testaments and draw heavily on the earlier Antiochene tradition (Theodore of Mopsuestia above all). Notably, he was the first in the East Syriac church to cite the Septuagint and the later Greek versions — Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion — alongside the Syriac Peshitta, which is why a text-critical headnote on the Greek's origin stands at the front of his work.
• Where the East Syriac chain stands. He belongs to the long Syriac and Arabic transmission of the legend running from Zacharias of Mitylene (the bare Eusebian form, c. 518) through Eustathius of Tarihan (the full inspiration-cells form, c. 750), Ishodad here, Moses bar Kepha, and the Arabic chroniclers down to the thirteenth century. Against Eustathius's developed form a hundred years earlier, Ishodad's notice is a contraction — the cells and the miracle gone again — showing that within one regional tradition the legend was told now full, now bare, according to the teller's purpose: Eustathius prefacing a devotional commentary needed the wonder, Ishodad the text critic needed only the facts.
• Text and provenance. The English is quoted verbatim as printed in Abraham & David J. Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today (Cambridge, 2006), which translates the general introduction prefixed to Ishodad's Old Testament commentary. The critical edition of that text is C. van den Eynde (with J.-M. Vosté), Commentaire d'Išoʿdad de Merv sur l'Ancien Testament, I. Genèse — Syriac in CSCO 126 (Scr. Syri 67), French translation in CSCO 156 (Scr. Syri 75), Louvain 1950/1955. (M. D. Gibson's The Commentaries of Isho'dad of Merv, Horae Semiticae, 1911–16, covers only the New Testament and does not carry this Septuagint-origin headnote, so it is not the source here.) Van den Eynde's edition is available only through controlled library lending, so the underlying Syriac has not been independently collated for this page; the text is sourced to the Wassersteins' verbatim translation. ⚠ Not yet checked against van den Eynde's critical text.

Sources