Imagine learning a language precisely so you can translate out of it. That is, in essence, what Aquila of Sinope did. Born a gentile in the Black Sea port city of Sinope - in what is now northern Turkey - he converted to Judaism sometime in the early second century CE, studied Torah under the great Rabbi Akiva, and then devoted himself to a project that still commands astonishment nearly two thousand years later: a Greek translation of the entire Hebrew Bible so scrupulously literal that it tried to mirror Hebrew syntax, word order, and even Hebrew particles that have no real Greek equivalent.
The Septuagint - that magnificent third-century-BCE translation made in Alexandria - had, by Aquila's time, become scripture for many Christian communities. It was quoted in the emerging New Testament writings. It had drifted, through three centuries of copying and use, from the Hebrew textual tradition in wider circulation. For Jewish communities whose Greek was better than their Hebrew, a fresh, authoritative version was needed. Aquila's answer was radical: make it so close to the Hebrew original that there could be no question of what the Hebrew actually said.
The record
Aquila's translation survives only in fragments, the most substantial of which were discovered in 1897 among the Cairo Geniza documents recovered by Solomon Schechter and now held at Cambridge University Library. These palimpsest fragments - a later manuscript written over the earlier text - preserve portions of 1 Kings and other books, and allow scholars to study Aquila's method directly. The ancient church father Origen (c. 185-253 CE) included Aquila's version as one of the six columns in his Hexapla, the monumental parallel-text edition of the Greek Bible, placing it alongside the Septuagint and four other translations. This is our earliest witness to how seriously Aquila's work was taken even by Christian scholars who disagreed with his choices.
The signature strangeness of Aquila's method is best illustrated by a single Hebrew particle: the accusative marker et (את), a grammatical word that marks the direct object but carries no dictionary meaning of its own. Greek has no equivalent. The Septuagint translators - sensibly, from a literary point of view - simply left it untranslated. Aquila rendered it with the Greek word sun, meaning "with" or "together with," which is grammatically awkward but preserved the presence of every Hebrew word on the page. Origen noted the choice with a kind of scholarly bewilderment. Rabbi Akiva, according to the Babylonian Talmud (tractate Megillah 3a), had himself expounded meaning from just such particles, finding significance in the et that others had passed over. Aquila's Greek was, in a real sense, a translation of Akiva's hermeneutic: the conviction that every letter of the Torah carries weight and nothing should be smoothed away for the convenience of the reader.
The record
The Talmud's treatment of Aquila is notably warm. The Jerusalem Talmud (tractate Megillah 1:9, 71c) records that "Aquila the proselyte translated the Torah before Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua, and they praised him and said to him: 'You are the most beautiful of the sons of men' " - a quotation from Psalm 45, applied here as a compliment of rare force. The Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 3a) adds that his translation was authorised for public reading in synagogues of Greek-speaking communities. This stands in contrast to later rabbinic ambivalence about Greek translation in general - suggesting that what distinguished Aquila's version was precisely its uncompromising fidelity to the Hebrew text the rabbis considered authoritative.
Aquila's translation did not last as a living scripture. The communities for which it was made - Greek-speaking Jews who needed the Hebrew Bible in their daily language - gradually shifted to Hebrew literacy or, over centuries, to the vernaculars of the medieval world. The Septuagint survived because the Church preserved it; Aquila's version survived only in the margins of other people's manuscripts. But the method outlasted the text. The question Aquila posed - how literally should a sacred text be rendered, and what is lost when you make it readable? - never goes away. Every translator of the Bible since has had to decide where to stand on the spectrum between his granite fidelity and the Septuagint's literary grace. The argument is still running.
What Aquila built was a monument to the discipline of the convert - to the zeal of someone who had chosen this language, this text, this tradition, and was not prepared to let a single syllable escape without account. Rabbi Akiva's student rendered his teacher's principle in a foreign tongue: nothing in the Torah is accidental, and no translation should pretend otherwise.
