Letter of Aristeas

Background

After the conquests of Alexander the Great, a large Jewish community took shape in Alexandria, Egypt. Because its members used Greek as their everyday language, they found it increasingly difficult to read the Hebrew Scriptures. In this setting the Law was translated into Greek, and this translation marked the beginning of the Septuagint.

The Letter of Aristeas is a Greek document that tells, in narrative form, how this translation came into being. The author presents himself as Aristeas, a courtier of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and writes in the form of a letter addressed to his brother Philocrates. Ptolemy II ruled Egypt in the first half of the third century BC. The letter is not part of the Bible but an ancient extrabiblical writing, and no church tradition includes it in the canon (the list of books the church recognizes as Scripture).

Narrative

The story told in the letter runs as follows:

• Demetrius of Phalerum, who is in charge of the Library of Alexandria, proposes to the king that the library also acquire the books of the Jewish Law.
• The king sends envoys to Eleazar, the high priest in Jerusalem, to request translators. Aristeas is among the delegation.
• Eleazar sends seventy-two elders, six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, together with a copy of the Law.
• The king holds a seven-day banquet, during which he questions the elders about government and conduct of life, and he marvels at their wise answers.
• On the island of Pharos the elders carry out the translation in consultation with one another, completing it in seventy-two days.
• The translation is read aloud before the Jewish community of Alexandria, which approves it and pronounces a curse on anyone who would alter it in the future.

The letter also contains a passage in which Eleazar defends the dietary laws by interpreting them allegorically, as well as a description of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Outcome and Influence

The number seventy-two was later rounded to seventy, and from this the name "Septuagint" (Latin Septuaginta, "seventy") derives. Although the letter deals only with the translation of the Pentateuch, the name later came to designate the entire Greek Old Testament.

The story grew over time. The Jewish philosopher Philo reports that the translators, though working separately, produced identical translations, and he attributed this to divine inspiration. The Jewish historian Josephus paraphrased the contents of the letter in his Antiquities of the Jews. Some of the early Church Fathers related that the elders each translated in a separate cell.

This tradition fed into debates over the authority of the Greek translation. Jerome did not accept the story of the separate cells as historical. Augustine, by contrast, held that the Holy Spirit was at work in the Septuagint as well.

Assessment

Today scholars generally regard the letter as a pseudepigraphal work written not by a royal courtier but by an Alexandrian Jew who borrowed the name of a historical figure. The following grounds are commonly cited:

• Some passages contain chronological inconsistencies, such as the statement that Demetrius was in charge of the library during the reign of Ptolemy II.
• For a work supposedly written by a Gentile courtier, it exalts the Jewish Law to an excessive degree.

Many scholars date its composition to around the second century BC, though opinion varies. The view that the letter is pseudepigraphal is said to have gained wide acceptance through the work of the English scholar Humphrey Hody in the late seventeenth century.

Several interpretations have been offered regarding the letter's purpose. The principal ones hold either that it sought to establish that the Greek translation was as reliable as the Hebrew original, or that it aimed to defend the wisdom of the Jewish Law before the Greek world. Even if the details of the story are not accepted, its broad outline—that the Pentateuch was translated into Greek at Alexandria around the third century BC—is generally acknowledged.

Church traditions differ in their approach to the translation the letter describes, namely the Septuagint:

• The Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint as the authoritative text of the Old Testament.
• The Catholic Church includes in its canon, as deuterocanonical books, certain books contained in the Septuagint.
• Protestantism takes the Hebrew Masoretic Text as the basis for translating the Old Testament. However, because the New Testament frequently follows the Septuagint when quoting the Old Testament, Protestants treat the Septuagint as an important resource in textual study.