HistoricalChristian.Faith

Solomon of Basra on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 1222 · Book of the Bee, ch. 52 · Wikipedia
Summary: The legend pared back to a king-list entry. Solomon, bishop of Basra in the Church of the East, sets the origin of the Greek Scriptures into the chronological king-list of his Book of the Bee — a Syriac compendium of sacred history — reduced almost to a chronicler’s note: “Ptolemy Philadelphus, 38 years. In his third year the fifth millennium ended. This (king) asked the captive Jews who were in Egypt, and seventy old men translated the Scriptures for him, from Hebrew into Greek, in the island of Pharos. In return for this he set them free, and gave back to them also the vessels of their temple.”¹ For the through-line this timeline traces, Solomon carries neither the separate cells nor the inspiration miracle: one generation after his fellow Syriac Michael the Great told the cells whole in their Epiphanian paired form, the legend contracts again to the plain royal commission of Aristeas and Tertullian. He keeps the round “seventy” of the Eusebian and Syriac line (not the seventy-two of Aristeas), names Pharos and Philadelphus, and adds a concrete detail of his own — the return of “the vessels of their temple” — before listing the translators by the twelve tribes.

Claims & evidence

The legend as a king-list entry

Like his fellow Syriac chronicler Michael the Great, Solomon is a compiler rather than a commentator or catechist, and the form shapes the telling. The notice stands not in a preface to Scripture (as in Ishodad or bar Kepha) nor in a doctrinal exposition (as in Cyril of Jerusalem or Augustine), but inside a running king-list — the reigns of the Greek kings of Egypt, each with its tally of years — pinned to a world-chronology synchronism:

“Ptolemy the son of Lag, 40 years. Ptolemy Philadelphus, 38 years. In his third year the fifth millennium ended. This (king) asked the captive Jews who were in Egypt, and seventy old men translated the Scriptures for him, from Hebrew into Greek, in the island of Pharos. In return for this he set them free, and gave back to them also the vessels of their temple. Their names are these…”¹

The dating-by-millennium (“in his third year the fifth millennium ended”) is the chronicler’s own frame, the kind of annus mundi synchronism Michael gave as a regnal-Olympiad-Seleucid annal — the Septuagint’s origin treated as a datable event to be placed in the sweep of history rather than a miracle to be expounded. The notice then turns, as Michael’s did, to the roster: “Their names are these,” followed by the list of translators arranged under the twelve tribes.

Cells and miracle both gone — the legend at its barest

Solomon’s contribution to the through-line is negative and striking. Just before him on this timeline, Michael the Syrian (c. 1199) had restored the legend’s fullest antique machinery — Epiphanius’s thirty-six paired cells, the seventy-two days, the marvel of identical copies “as though… translated by a single person.” A single generation later Solomon keeps almost none of it: no separate cells, no isolation, no agreement-test, no identical drafts, no inspiration named or implied. What remains is the irreducible core — a king, a request, translators, Hebrew into Greek, on Pharos — the plain commission of Aristeas and Tertullian, and of his own near-contemporary Ishodad of Merv, who likewise gave the origin as a bare one-sentence notice. The Syriac East does not transmit the legend in a single fixed shape: within three generations it runs from bar Kepha’s cells-without-the-Spirit (c. 903) to Ishodad’s bare commission (c. 850) to Michael’s full paired-cells marvel (c. 1199) to Solomon’s king-list note (c. 1222) — the machinery present or absent according to the genre and the compiler’s purpose, not a steady climb.

The temple vessels — a concrete detail of his own

Where Solomon does add rather than subtract is in the king’s recompense. The freeing of the Jewish captives is old — it stands in the Letter of Aristeas and recurs in the Syriac chain (Zacharias, Michael) — but Solomon couples it with a detail none of the others on this timeline carry: in return for the translation Ptolemy “gave back to them also the vessels of their temple.” The motif belongs to the same diplomatic register as the manumission — the king repaying the gift of the Law with the restoration of what is sacred to the givers — and it draws the Alexandrian story toward the larger biblical pattern of a foreign monarch returning the temple vessels (as Cyrus and Darius are said to have done at the return from exile). It is a chronicler’s embellishment, not a doctrinal one: the marvel has been let go, but the historical color is kept and even enriched.

Round seventy, and the roster behind it

Solomon counts “seventy old men,” the round number of Eusebius, Clement, and the Syriac line, not the precise seventy-two his predecessor Michael had restored from Aristeas. Yet the list of names he appends descends from the seventy-two tradition: a parallel Syriac manuscript of his own roster is headed as the names of the seventy-two translators, the count rounded in the narrative even as the underlying twelve-tribes roster (six per tribe, seventy-two in all) is preserved — the same tension between a round “seventy” and an Aristean roster of seventy-two that runs through the whole tradition. He names neither Demetrius the librarian nor (in this notice) Eleazar the high priest, paring the cast to Ptolemy and the translators alone.

Notes

• The work. The Book of the Bee (Syriac Kthbā d-debborithā) is a prose compendium of sacred history in fifty-five chapters — creation, the patriarchs, the life of Christ, lists of kings and patriarchs, and the last things — composed about 1222 by Solomon, metropolitan bishop of Basra (Prāth d-Maišān) in the Church of the East. The Septuagint notice falls in ch. 52, the chapter of king-lists, “the names of the seventy old men who brought out the Scriptures and translated them.”
• Cells and inspiration: both absent. Solomon gives the bare royal commission — no separate cells, no isolation, no agreement-test, no language of the Holy Spirit. On this timeline he stands with Ishodad of Merv and the early Latin and classical bare-commission tellers (Aristeas, Tertullian), against the cells-and-miracle form his immediate predecessor Michael had told whole.
• The frame details. He keeps the round seventy, Pharos, and Ptolemy Philadelphus named; drops Demetrius and (in the notice) Eleazar; dates the event by a world-millennium synchronism; adds the return of “the vessels of their temple”; and lists the translators by the twelve tribes — a roster a parallel manuscript heads as seventy-two names.
• Who he was. Solomon (Solomon of Akhlat), bishop of Basra in the early thirteenth century, was a compiler of the East Syriac tradition; the Book of the Bee is his best-known work and a standard late witness to that tradition’s store of biblical and historical lore. On this timeline he closes the Syriac sequence, the legend in its barest chronicle form just before the thirteenth-century Arabic notices (Ibn al-Rahib, al-Makin) that follow.
• Text and provenance. The English is quoted verbatim from E. A. Wallis Budge’s edition and translation, The Book of the Bee (Anecdota Oxoniensia, Semitic Series I.2; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), ch. 52, read directly — so this witness is verified, not resting on the secondary collection in which it is also reprinted (Wasserstein, Legend of the Septuagint).

Sources