The Septuagint and its Story

“As the story of our interview with Eleazar, the high priest of the Jews, is a remarkable one, and because thou, Philocrates, hast set thy heart, as thou art constantly reminding me, on learning the object and the occasion of our mission. I have endeavoured to give thee a clear account of what took place”

So runs the opening sentence of a letter purporting to have been written by one Aristeas, who represents himself to be a Greek attached to the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king in Egypt from B.C. 285 to 247. The theme of the letter is an account of the translation of the Jewish law, i.e. the five books of Moses, into the Greek language.

Ptolemy Soter, father of Philadelphus, had founded a great library and museum at Alexandria, and Philadelphus wished to extend it. His librarian, Demetrius of Phalerum, told him that certain laws of the Jews were worthy of transcription for inclusion with the royal volumes. There were ample funds for purchasing the books of the Law, but no means of translation was available. Thereupon the king, after first releasing large numbers of Jewish slaves, who had either come into Egypt with the Persians, or later had been brought as captives by the king’s father from his Palestine campaigns, sent Aristeas and Andreas, of the chief of the bodyguards, as an embassy to Eleazar, high priest of the Jews.

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Author: F. E. Mitchell

Keywords: Septuagint, Apocrypha, Greek Old Testament, Greek OT, LXX, Seventy

Source: “The Septuagint and its Story,” The Testimony, Vol. 6, No. 63, March 1936, pp. 95-8.

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