the formation of the bible 33
century bce, and the rest of the biblical books were translated over the
next century or so. Differences in translation styles suggest that a num-
ber of translators were at work, possibly in different places. At some
time in the mid- second century bce, a Jewish author composed a roman-
tic account, purportedly a letter to a non- Jew called Philocrates from his
brother Aristeas, of how the translation of the Torah had come about at
the command of the Graeco- Macedonian king Ptolemy Philadelphus a
century earlier. According to this ‘letter’, Ptolemy summoned seventy-
two sages from Jerusalem to complete a translation of the Jewish law
into Greek for inclusion in the royal library, and the text is full of dec-
larations of admiration for Jewish wisdom by the gentile king. The
reliability of this account has long been questioned, but it does demon-
strate the pride of the Jewish author in the Greek text which he claimed
had resulted. By the mid- first century ce, this translation was being
celebrated on the island of Pharos in the harbour of Alexandria with an
annual festival, when ‘not only Jews but multitudes of others cross the
water ... to do honour to the place in which the light of that version
first shone out.’ The philosopher Philo (see Chapter 7), who recounted
the details of the festival, added tellingly to the version of the Letter of
Aristeas in his description of the translation process. According to the
Letter of Aristeas, the seventy- two translators compared their versions
at the end of each day in order to achieve the best possible version of the
Hebrew. Philo’s version was different. According to him, the translators,
having chosen the island of Pharos ‘where they might find peace and
tranquillity and the soul could commune with the laws with none to
disturb its privacy’, sat there in seclusion, and, becoming ‘as it were,
possessed’, each wrote exactly the same words ‘as though dictated to
each by an invisible prompter’.^11
This Greek translation of the Bible, known as the Septuagint (‘the
Seventy’) in (numerically slightly inaccurate) commemoration of the
story of the translators of the Pentateuch, is preserved for us now almost
entirely through copies made by Christians, for whom it was from the
first century ce the authoritative version of the biblical text, but these
comments by Philo reveal that by the first century ce some Alexandrian
Jews revered the Septuagint no less. Nor was the Greek translation
ignored in the land of Israel, for a full text of the Minor Prophets (the
biblical books from Hosea to Malachi) was found in the Septuagint
Greek in a scroll in Cave 8 at Qumran by the Dead Sea along with the
rest of the Dead Sea scrolls. Occasional references in the Babylonian
Talmud to ‘the translation of Ptolemy’ reveal awareness of the