The Torah Speaks Greek

The story begins, as several of the good ones do, with a king who wanted a library. Ptolemy II Philadelphus, sole ruler of Egypt from 282 BCE, was assembling what would become one of the ancient world's great collections in Alexandria - and his librarian, so the account runs, pointed out a gap. The laws of the Jews were not in it. They were written in a script nobody at the Mouseion could read, in a language the scholars of the city did not speak. The king, apparently, found this unacceptable.

What happened next is one of the tribe's great foundation stories of the diaspora: the first time the Torah left its own language, crossed a border, and was handed to a world that had not asked to receive it. Or rather - and this is where the story gets interesting - to a world that had partly become ours. The Jews of Alexandria were already, by the third century BCE, one of the largest Jewish communities anywhere. They were doing business, raising children, building synagogues. Many of them could no longer read Hebrew. The Torah that crossed into Greek was crossing to reach them.

This is translation as survival. Not surrender - survival.

The legend of the seventy-two

The story of how the translation was made comes down to us in a text called the Letter of Aristeas - and it arrives with considerable ceremony. In this account, Ptolemy II writes to the High Priest Eleazar in Jerusalem, asking for scholars fit to undertake the work. Eleazar sends seventy-two elders: six from each of the twelve tribes. They are received with banquets and philosophical conversation, installed on the island of Pharos, and given seventy-two days to complete the task. They finish on schedule. When the resulting translation is read aloud to the Alexandrian Jewish community, the congregation declares it perfect. Nothing is to be changed, added, or removed.

It's a magnificent story. It has the stamp of a founding charter - the kind of account a community tells itself to explain why the thing it uses every day deserves the reverence it gets. The number seventy-two, slightly rounded, gives the translation its lasting name: the Septuagint, from the Latin septuaginta, seventy. It's usually written as LXX. The rounding may be an echo of the seventy elders Moses assembled in the desert - the text reaching back to authorise itself through an older text, which is very much how the tradition works.

The scholars call what came out of this process one of the most consequential translation projects in human history. That judgement is, if anything, understated.

What the record actually shows

Peel the legend away and the scholarship is still extraordinary. The historical consensus is that the Torah - the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch - was translated into Koine Greek in Alexandria in the early-to-mid third century BCE. Koine was the Greek of the markets and the harbour-front, the common tongue of the eastern Mediterranean after Alexander's conquests: not literary Greek, but the Greek that everyone could actually read. It was the right choice. The translation was for a community that needed its book in the language of its daily life.

Other books followed over the next two centuries, book by book, translator by translator, in Egypt and in the wider Greek-speaking Jewish world. We know this partly because by around 132 BCE, the grandson of the sage Ben Sira could refer to the Law, the Prophets, and other ancestral books in Greek in the preface to his grandfather's book. That proves an established Greek scriptural tradition, not that every later biblical book had already reached a final Greek form. The Septuagint was never a single event. It was a long project, carried by communities that refused to leave their inheritance untranslated.

Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish philosopher of the first century CE, worked from it. So did the early Greek-speaking Church, which adopted the Septuagint as its Old Testament and quoted it as scripture. It remains the Old Testament of the Greek Orthodox Church today. The translation intended for the Jews of Alexandria ended up as the Bible of the Christian world.

The day the translation became complicated

For several centuries the Septuagint was simply the Bible. The Greek-speaking Jewish world used it; Philo built his entire philosophical edifice on it; Alexandrian and diaspora Jewish communities prayed and studied from it. Then the early Church adopted it, and something shifted.

When the Church began using the Septuagint to argue its theological positions - citing the Greek text as evidence, sometimes in ways that depended on a Greek rendering that diverged from the Hebrew - Jewish scholars noticed. The book that had been a gift to the diaspora was being turned into a tool of argument against the tradition that had produced it. Jewish attitudes cooled accordingly.

The later rabbinic tractate Soferim preserves the most striking expression of this unease: it compares the day the Torah was translated into Greek to the day of the Golden Calf. Later fast-day lists, including Orach Chayim 580:2, mark the eighth of Tevet as the day the translation went out into the world. It's a severe verdict, and it has the particular bitterness of watching something you made become useful mainly to other people.

By the second century CE, Jewish scholars were commissioning new Greek translations. Aquila produced one so literal it was almost unreadable in Greek - as though determined to resist any reading that strayed from the exact Hebrew. Symmachus and Theodotion made more idiomatic versions. The argument about how to translate scripture, it turned out, was really an argument about who owned the meaning.

What it means that the book survived in translation

The Septuagint is sometimes told as a story about loss - the moment the tribe's book escaped into other hands, to be used in arguments the translators never intended. That reading isn't wrong, exactly. But it's incomplete.

The LXX also kept the tradition alive in the one place, in the third century BCE, where keeping it alive mattered most. Many Jews in Alexandria could not read the Hebrew. The Septuagint gave them their own scripture back. It gave their children access to the stories that made them who they were, in the language those children actually spoke. It was a diaspora making a tool of survival - converting an ancient text into a living one, for a community that had changed without being asked.

Seventy-two scholars, six from each tribe, working for seventy-two days on an island in the harbour - the legend is very careful about the number, very careful about the representation, very careful about the speed. It is the story of a community insisting that the translation was not a compromise but a completion: the whole people, in the whole book, rendered whole in a new tongue. The legend is probably not history. But it is very good theology.

The Torah that left home in Greek has been read in Greek, Latin, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Church Slavonic ever since. It shaped the vocabulary of the New Testament, the philosophy of Philo, the liturgy of Eastern Christianity. The tribe didn't know any of that when the work was done. They just needed people to be able to read it. Translation, in the end, is the oldest form of transmission - and transmission, as this site keeps noticing, is what the tribe has always been best at.