HistoricalChristian.Faith

Moses bar Kepha on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 903 (d. 903) · Hexaemeron Commentary · Wikipedia
Summary: The cells restored, the Spirit left unspoken. Moses bar Kepha (Mushe bar Kipho, c. 813–903), bishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church, retells the origin in his Hexaemeron Commentary: Ptolemy Philadelphus, a lover of wisdom collecting books, sends to the Hebrews for the Old Testament and summons "seventy two men… who knew the Hebrew and the Greek languages very well," then assigns "each of them a separate cell… in order to see whether they agreed with each other or not," and "all of them agreed… very exactly." He brings the separate cells back — gone in his fellow East Syriac Ishodad a half-century before — and keeps the precise seventy-two, but stops at the agreement: he reports the cells-test and the perfect match without pronouncing, as Eustathius had, that the work was "made by the power of God." The inspiration verdict he draws instead in a separate note, where the LXX's antiquity becomes the ground for the corruption charge against the later Jewish versions. He is also, in his Book of Homilies, the earliest dated witness to a striking offshoot of the legend — that the Simeon of Luke 2 who took the infant Christ had himself been one of the seventy-two, kept alive after balking at the "virgin" of Isaiah 7:14 — treated below and weighed on the Simeon-the-Just argument. ⚠ This witness is cited from the verbatim translation printed by the Wassersteins; the underlying Syriac of the Hexaemeron has not been independently collated against a critical edition.

Claims & evidence

The legend retold — cells restored, the agreement reported as fact

Bar Kepha opens his account of the Greek versions with the origin story in the strong separate-cells form:

"This translation by the Seventy arose in the following manner: Ptolemy the king of Egypt who was called Philadelphus loved wisdom and collected many books from many places. And he sent to the Hebrews as well and had the books of the Old Testament brought from them. And he summoned seventy two men of the Hebrews who knew the Hebrew and the Greek languages very well. And he had the Old Testament translated, and they translated it from Hebrew into Greek. He assigned each of them a separate cell to live in, in order to see whether they agreed with each other or not (in their translations). And it turned out that all of them agreed with each other very exactly."¹

For the through-line this timeline traces — whether each teller carries the separate cells and the inspiration claim — bar Kepha carries the cells but not the explicit miracle. The isolation is fully present, and present in its original function: Ptolemy seals each translator apart "in order to see whether they agreed… or not," exactly the test Irenaeus devised and the Cohortatio made architectural. And the test succeeds — "all of them agreed… very exactly." But where Eustathius of Tarihan a century and a half earlier had drawn the conclusion in so many words — the king "believed that the translation had been made by the power of God" — bar Kepha stops at the agreement and leaves the inference unstated. The machinery of the proof is here; the verdict is implied, not pronounced.

The cells back after Ishodad dropped them

Within the East Syriac chain the legend visibly oscillates. Eustathius of Tarihan (c. 750) told it whole — cells, isolation, and "the power of God." Ishodad of Merv (c. 850) pared it back to a bare commission, the cells gone, the result grounded in the translators' human competence. Bar Kepha (c. 903) restores the cells — "a separate cell to live in" for each man — and with them the agreement-proof, but shares with Ishodad the naturalistic note that the translators "knew the Hebrew and the Greek languages very well." So in three Syriac tellings across a century and a half the wonder is told full, then bare, then half: cells without the named Spirit. The pattern confirms that the legend's growth was never a steady climb but a thing each writer cut to his purpose, the same unevenness Tertullian and Clement had shown in the West seven centuries before.

The count, the scope, and the king

The frame is precise where it counts. The number is the exact "seventy-two," restoring Aristeas's figure (which Ishodad also kept) against the round "seventy" of Eusebius and the Syriac Zacharias. The king is named correctly — "Ptolemy… called Philadelphus" — and given the familiar library-builder motive ("loved wisdom and collected many books"). The scope is the whole "Old Testament," the widening from Pentateuch to the entire Greek Bible long since settled into the tradition by Justin, Clement, and Cyril of Alexandria. What bar Kepha drops are the secondary ornaments — no Demetrius, no Eleazar, no Pharos, no count of days, no roster of names — the legend reduced to king, motive, seventy-two, cells, and exact agreement.

A second notice: Simeon among the Seventy, and the Isaiah 7:14 doubt (c. 903)

Bar Kepha is also the earliest dated witness to an offshoot of the origin legend that the wider East would carry for centuries: 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 seventy-two translators, and that, balking at the "virgin" of Isaiah 7:14 as he rendered it, he was kept alive until he could hold the promised Child. It comes not in the Hexaemeron but in his Book of Homilies: appended to a homily "On the Circumcision of Christ," and introduced "from the commentary on Luke" — that is, drawn from his now-lost Luke commentary — bar Kepha gives a list of seven rival identifications of the Gospel Simeon. The fifth is the translator legend, already in developed form:

"Others say that he was one of the 72 translators; and when he was rendering the book of Isaiah from Hebrew into Greek at the command of Ptolemy in Egypt, he doubted and said, 'A virgin cannot conceive and give birth,' and he was bound 272 years until Christ."²

The same seven-fold list reappears a quarter-millennium later in the Luke commentary of Dionysius bar Salibi (d. 1171), with the lifespan given as 278 years — so the menu of identifications, the translator-option among them, was a fixed piece of Syriac Luke-exegesis well before it surfaced among the Coptic-Arabic chroniclers. Two things are worth marking. First, the story is offered as one option among seven, not as established fact: the Syriac tradition had no settled answer to who Simeon was. Second — and this is what matters for the Simeon-the-Just argument — the explicitly Isaiah-7:14 shape of the legend, the translator stumbling over the "virgin," is already here at c. 903, in Syriac, a generation before the Coptic-Arabic chain's earliest member and far in advance of the Coptic Synaxarium long thought to have first sharpened the doubt onto that verse. What the Synaxarium adds is only the dramatization — the written "girl," the rebuking angel — not the Isaiah-7:14 core.

Notes

• The same author on the other timeline. Bar Kepha appears twice in this project. Here he is a witness to the origin legend — the inspired-translation backdrop. On the Rabbinic Corruption timeline he draws the payoff: in a note appended to this same survey of the Greek versions he ranks the Septuagint the best — because the New Testament quotes it and (citing Philoxenus of Mabbug) because it was made "long before the appearance of Our Lord," so "the Jews had neither reason nor pretext… to corrupt the text; but in the other translations the relevant passages were corrupted through the envy of the Jews." The legend retold here is precisely the premise that note turns into a weapon. Bar Kepha is thus, in the Syriac East, what Rufinus was in the Latin West: the writer in whom the origin legend and the corruption charge meet in one hand.
• Who he was. Moses bar Kepha was a monk and then bishop (taking the name Severus) of Beth-Raman, Beth-Kiyonaya, and Mosul, and among the most prolific Syriac Orthodox authors of his century — commentaries on much of the Old and New Testaments, the Hexaemeron from which this passage comes, and treatises on Paradise, the soul, and the liturgy. His habit of compiling and reframing earlier Syriac and Greek sources is exactly what makes him useful here: he gathers the legend and the corruption argument into one systematized survey.
• 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 relevant passage of bar Kepha's Hexaemeron Commentary. There is no critical edition of the Syriac (the Hexaemeron survives in manuscript, chiefly BnF Syr. 241); the standard published rendering is L. Schlimme, Der Hexaemeronkommentar des Moses bar Kepha (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1977), 2 vols. (German translation and study). Neither the manuscript nor Schlimme's German has been collated against the Wassersteins' English here, so the quotation is sourced to the Wassersteins' verbatim translation. ⚠ Not independently collated against the Syriac.

Sources