290 A History of Judaism
papyri survive from Egypt after the destruction of most of the Jewish
community in 117 ce, but a continuous Greek liturgical tradition can
be inferred from the survival of Greek documents (sometimes in Heb-
rew script) dating to the end of the first millennium in the Cairo
Genizah.^1
That Greek remained the religious language of choice for many
Mediterranean Jews at least for the first half of the first millennium ce
can be surmised less from the choice of Greek by Jews for inscriptions
in regions such as Asia Minor and Syria, where Greek was the language
of the general population, than from the use of Greek in the city of
Rome, where a preference for Greek over Latin marked out Jews as a
distinctive sub- group within the main body of the urban plebs. These
inscriptions also provide our best evidence for the organization of these
Jews into synagogue communities led by officials named as ‘father of
the synagogue’, ‘ruler of the synagogue’, ‘gerousiarch’, ‘presbyter’ and
similar titles. Quite how, and by whom, these leaders were appointed is
uncertain, but frequent references to those who have been disarchon
(‘twice ruler’) suggest some process of election.
These communities almost certainly showed the same devotion to a
Greek version of the biblical text that we have seen in the circles of
Philo and that transferred from Greek Judaism to Christians in the first
century ce. It will have been for the benefit of such Jews that revised
versions of the Septuagint were made in the second century ce in order
to bring the Greek text of scripture closer to the meaning of the current
Hebrew text. We have seen that this process had already begun in the
late Second Temple period, but the efforts of Theodotion, Symmachus
and especially Aquila (see Chapter 2) went much further than the minor
changes to be seen in some of the Greek biblical texts found in Qumran.
For Aquila, it was essential to represent not only the meaning of the
Hebrew but also the structure of the Hebrew sentences, so that he was
prepared to invent new Greek words, and to create a very idiosyncratic
Greek style, in order to give the flavour of the original: his insertion of
the Greek word syn twice in the first sentence of Genesis to represent
the Hebrew et, which functions simply to indicate that ‘heaven’ and
‘earth’ are objects of the verb ‘create’, was ridiculed by Jerome at the
end of the fourth century.^2
Aquila himself may have operated within a rabbinic milieu in Pales-
tine, but his translation certainly had a wider circulation down at least
to the sixth century, as emerges from an intervention by the emperor
Justinian on 8 February 553 in response (so the emperor claimed) to