The Septuagint
Biblical Narrative
In the days of Ptolemy the second, surnamed Philadelphus, who reigned over Egypt after his father Ptolemy son of Lagos, there was in Alexandria a great library, and the king sought to gather into it the books of all peoples. Demetrius of Phalerum, his keeper of books, said unto him: Lord, there is a law of the Jews, given them by Moses the son of Amram from God Himself, but it is in their tongue, and we have it not in Greek. Send therefore to Eleazar the High Priest in Jerusalem, that he may send to thee elders, learned men of every tribe, who will translate it.
Then the king sent ambassadors with great gifts unto Eleazar, and freed a hundred thousand Jewish captives whom his father had taken when he conquered Coele-Syria, and he sent unto Jerusalem vessels of gold and of silver for the Temple, and one hundred talents of silver for sacrifices. Eleazar received the messengers with honour, and chose six elders of every tribe of Israel, learned in the Law and in the tongue of the Greeks: seventy and two in all. And he sent with them a scroll of the Law written in letters of gold.
When the seventy-two came to Alexandria, the king feasted them seven days, and asked of each in turn a question concerning kingship and wisdom; and each answered him with such understanding that he marvelled, and gave thanks unto the God of Israel. Then he led them out to the island of Pharos, where the great lighthouse stood, and gave them a house apart, that no man should disturb them; and they translated the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, into the tongue of the Greeks.
And when they had done, the elders of the Jews of Alexandria gathered, and the translation was read in the hearing of the people, and the people praised it, and pronounced a curse upon any who should add or take away. Thus was the Torah given a second time, in another tongue — that the nations also might hear the words which the Lord spoke to Moses upon the mountain. And in the synagogues of the Greek-speaking diaspora the Torah was read in Greek for the next thousand years.
And when the work of translation was finished, Demetrius brought together the multitude of the Jews to the place where the laws had been translated, and read them over to all in the presence of the translators; and the multitude approved them, and bestowed great commendation upon the men.Letter of Aristeas 308–311
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The Septuagint — abbreviated LXX from the legendary seventy-two translators — is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible begun in third-century BCE Alexandria. The earliest layer is the Pentateuch, translated from a Hebrew Vorlage in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BCE). The Prophets and Writings followed in stages over the next two centuries, by translators of varying skill: from the smooth idiomatic Greek of the Pentateuch, to the mechanical word-for-word Aquila-style of certain later books, to the Targum-like paraphrase of Daniel.
The romantic origin story comes from the Letter of Aristeas, a Greek epistle purporting to be a contemporary court report but actually composed in Alexandria around 150–100 BCE — well over a century after the events it describes. Modern scholarship (Bickerman 1958, Tcherikover 1959, Honigman 2003) treats Aristeas as a Hellenistic-Jewish apologetic novella, designed to justify the LXX's authority and to argue that Greek and Jewish wisdom belong together at the king's table.
The Qumran caves transformed the textual study of the Septuagint. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments of Greek Leviticus from Cave 4 (4QLXXLeva, 4QLXXLevb), Greek Numbers (4QLXXNum), and Greek Deuteronomy (papyrus 7Q1) date to the second and first centuries BCE — direct manuscript witnesses far older than the great Christian codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus (4th c. CE). Even more striking, certain Qumran Hebrew manuscripts (4QSama, 4QJerb) preserve a Vorlage closer to the Septuagint than to the Masoretic — proving that the Greek translators worked from genuinely different Hebrew text-types, not from later Christian alteration.
The Septuagint became the Bible of the early Christian church and, for that reason, was eventually abandoned by Judaism. Aquila of Sinope, Symmachus, and Theodotion produced more literal Jewish revisions in the second century CE; by the time Origen compiled his six-column Hexapla in Caesarea (c. 240 CE), the LXX had become a Christian inheritance. It remains the canonical Old Testament of the Eastern Orthodox churches to this day.
The Letter of Aristeas is not what it claims to be — a contemporary court report — but a sophisticated Hellenistic-Jewish charter myth, asserting that the Greek Torah is no compromise but a second Sinai.Sylvie Honigman, The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (2003), paraphrased