HistoricalChristian.Faith

Michael the Syrian on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 1199 (patriarch 1166–1199) · Chronicle, Book V, ch. 6 · Wikipedia
Summary: 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 of the Greek Scriptures 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.”¹ 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, and he keeps the marvel of identical drafts (“as though… by a single person”) — but, like his fellow Syriac bar Kepha, he stops at the agreement and never names the Holy Spirit. He restores Aristeas’s precise seventy-two, Eleazar, Pharos, and the seventy-two days against the pared-down Syriac witnesses just before him.

Claims & evidence

The legend as a dated chronicle entry

Unlike the commentators and catechists earlier on this timeline, Michael is a chronicler: he sets the translation into a universal history reaching from creation to his own day, and gives it the apparatus of an annal — a regnal year, an Olympiad, a Seleucid and an indiction date — in the manner of the chronographic tradition he draws on (above all Eusebius’s Chronicon):

“Ptolemy of Alexandria gave freedom to the Jews who were captive in Egypt and sent offerings to the High Priest Eleazar. In the 5th year of his reign, which is the 33rd of Seleucus, in the CXXVth Olympiad, the first year of Antiochus Soter, in the 10th indiction, the king Ptolemy Philadelphus sent to find the High Priest of the Jews, Eleazar, who sent him all the books of the Hebrews and men who knew Hebrew and Greek, to the number of seventy two. The king established them on the island of Pharos; he had built for them thirty six cells – one for every pair – and warned them not to change anything. They translated the books in seventy two days. Each pair translated all the books, and there were thirty six copies; when they were compared with each other, they were as though they had been translated by a single person. The king placed these copies in the library, in his library in Alexandria. From that comes the version which is known everywhere under the name of Septuagint. Here are the names of the seventy two men who translated the books…”¹

The historian’s frame shows in three features the commentators lack: the precise dating-synchronisms; the freeing of the captives and the offerings to Eleazar at the head, the diplomatic-historical setting of the Letter of Aristeas; and the closing turn to the roster, “Here are the names of the seventy two men,” which (like Epiphanius) Michael then lists out. He treats the legend not as edifying doctrine but as a datable event to be placed and sourced.

The paired cells — Epiphanius’s architecture, restored after eight centuries

Michael’s distinctive contribution to the through-line is the form of the cells. The earlier tellers had built the isolation in several shapes — the Cohortatio and Cyril sealed each man alone with the whole Scripture; Isidore and the Syriac chain that follows kept “each in his own cell” or dropped the cells altogether. Only Epiphanius (c. 392) had made them paired — “thirty-six cells… formed… into pairs,” the translators shut up “two by two.” That paired architecture vanishes from this timeline for eight hundred years and reappears here: Michael’s “thirty six cells – one for every pair” is Epiphanius’s count and pairing exactly — almost certainly reaching him through the Syriac transmission of Epiphanius’s Weights and Measures, which his sources mined.

But Michael diverges from Epiphanius on what each pair did. Epiphanius assigned one book to each pair — Genesis to the first, Exodus to the next — so the thirty-six cells together produced one Bible. Michael instead has “each pair” translate “all the books,” yielding “thirty six copies” of the whole, which are then “compared with each other.” He has fused Epiphanius’s cell-count and pairing with the standard separate-cells proof, in which every cell renders the entire Scripture so that the independent agreement of complete copies is the marvel. The result is a third architecture, on this timeline unique to him: thirty-six paired cells, thirty-six full Bibles, one identical text.

The marvel kept, the Spirit unnamed

Michael keeps the inspiration result but withholds the inspiration language. The thirty-six copies, “when they were compared with each other… were as though they had been translated by a single person” — the independent-and-identical proof in full, the very wonder Irenaeus made the heart of the legend. Yet where Irenaeus drew the conclusion (“interpreted by the inspiration of God”), Cyril named the Holy Ghost, and Augustine spoke of “the one Spirit… in them all,” Michael stops at the simile: the copies are as if one man’s work, and he does not say the Spirit made them so. In this he tracks his fellow Syriac bar Kepha (c. 903), who likewise reported the cells and the exact agreement but left the inference unspoken — the late Syriac chronicle tradition transmitting the machinery of the miracle while muting its pneumatology. The fidelity injunction that does the theological work elsewhere appears instead as the king’s plain command — he “warned them not to change anything,” a faint echo of the Aristean curse against alteration.

The classical frame restored against the Syriac witnesses before him

Coming after the pared-down Syriac chain — Eustathius’s round “seventy” with no high priest named, Ishodad’s bare one-sentence commission, bar Kepha’s cells without Pharos or Eleazar — Michael restores the full classical detail. He has the precise seventy-two (not the round seventy of Eustathius and the Eusebian line), names Eleazar the high priest, sets the work on Pharos, counts the seventy-two days, and adds the roster, all features of the developed Aristean-plus-Epiphanian form. As a compiler with access to the older sources his predecessors had abridged, he gives the legend on this timeline its last full antique shape before the briefer Arabic notices (Ibn al-Rahib, al-Makin) that close the tradition.

Notes

• The work. Michael’s Chronicle (Syriac Maktbānūt zabnē) is the largest surviving medieval Syriac universal history, running from creation to AD 1195 and preserving long extracts from earlier chronicles now lost. The Septuagint notice stands in Book V, in the chronographic sequence on the Ptolemies, framed as a dated annal — which is why it carries the regnal, Olympiad, Seleucid, and indiction synchronisms that the commentary-and-catechesis tellers omit.
• The frame details. Michael keeps the precise seventy-two translators and seventy-two days, names Eleazar the high priest and Ptolemy Philadelphus correctly, sets the cells on Pharos, and gives the roster of names; he frames the whole as a freeing of the Jewish captives with offerings sent to Eleazar. He drops Demetrius the librarian, whom the fuller tellers from Aristeas to Cyril keep.
• Who he was. Michael I, called “the Great” and “the Syrian,” was patriarch of Antioch of the Syriac Orthodox (Jacobite) Church from 1166 until his death in 1199. His Chronicle is the standard late witness to the Syriac historical tradition, and on this timeline it places the origin legend in the Syriac East one generation after Hugh of Saint Victor had begun to doubt it in the Latin schools — the East still telling the cells whole where the West was letting them go.
• 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), translating the passage of Michael’s Chronicle (Book V, ch. 6) edited by JB. Chabot, Chronique de Michel le Syrien (Paris, 1899–1910). ⚠ This block is cited from the verbatim translation printed by the Wassersteins; the underlying Syriac (Chabot’s edition; the Matti Moosa English translation of 2014) has not been independently collated against a critical edition.

Sources