The Septuagint
© ITCHS 2024
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DRAFT
[Ed: This essay is a draft chapter for a book-length consideration of the character of the Silent Years, the years between the last canonical prophet of the Old Testament and the prophetic works of the New Testament. The first chapter considers The Seven Day Week as a Jewish conception progressively imported into the Roman Empire. The second considers the development of Monotheism, the third Slavery. The chapter below is the third following two others considering major Jewish institutions which may have contributed to a growing influence on surrounding cultures: The Second Temple and The Synagogue.]
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The argument of the present work is precisely that Jewish influence was coming to full flower in Europe and, in fact, throughout the Mediterranean basin—and certainly beyond that into the Persian Empire generally throughout what are called the Silent Years. The name can be both ambiguous and misleading. In theological circles, it refers to the absence of canonized prophetic utterance after Malachi in the Old Testament and before the writings of the New Testament. Alongside that theological distinction, there seems to be a scholarly silence concerning what was happening to and through the Jewish people and their Scriptures during that period, a silence supported by the fact of very little direct documentation. We have Philo in Alexandria and Josephus at Rome (as well as the New Testament writers) in the half century after the Silent Years ended, but we conveniently ignore their testimony whenever it isn't supportive of our narrative.
Scholarly silence, rather than the ancient world’s silence, is significant. But there are one or two enormous facts that even determined silence finds itself called to say something about. One of those is the translation out of Hebrew and into Greek of Hebrew Scripture. If the present study didn’t conveniently ignore the Persian Empire, the silence would have to consider as well the evidence of translation into one or more languages appropriate to a Babylonian readership. If certified, canonized prophetic proclamation had ceased, the Word which was already given was being made available to the entire Greek-speaking world.
The Fable of Library Acquisition
The translation of Scripture into Greek is called the Septuagint. It is one of the perennial controversial topics for religion departments, controversy thoroughly based in rejection of what seemingly everyone in the early Roman Empire believed.
What everyone believed is considered a fable, but we need to start somewhere. The fable was that the second Ptolemy king of Egypt (that is the second king after Alexander himself had died, whose reign extended from 284 B.C. to 246 B.C.) built a great library on the shores of the Mediterranean at the city named by Alexander after himself, Alexandria.
The great Alexandrian library is not a myth. Ptolemy Philadelphus was evidently quite a bookworm, and he set himself a goal of having hand-written copies of all the great books of the world at his library. The bookish proclivities of Philadelphus and the intent of his library collection are also not in question.
But then the fable starts. Philadelphus contacted the High Priest in Jerusalem, with whom he was presumably on good terms and who in any case was caught between Seleucid and Ptolemaic pretensions to control in Palestine—also a matter of historical record. And Philadelphus, knowing that the Jews had a remarkably different religion from anyone else’s, backed by a substantial volume of written documents, asked that the High Priest undertake officially to send a translation team to Alexandria for the purpose of translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.
When we recognize that one of Philadelphus’ later successors occupied Palestine on four different occasions within his single reign, the story thus far seems a totally plausible military preparation for a monarch who only needed to get his army across Sinai to be in Jerusalem’s back yard. One might even think that Philadelphus would want every scrap and piece of parchment that the Jews could be inveigled to translate—any such information might turn out to be militarily important or even essential.
Method of Translation
Thus, for a fable, this certainly starts with a great deal of verisimilitude. The fable continues that the High Priest sent 72 scholar-translators to Alexandria. This also seems reasonable as an effort by the High Priest to be on good terms with one of the two 800-pound gorillas in his political living room. The word “Septuagint” means seventy. In the ancient world, it was often represented by LXX, the Roman way of writing 70. The fable says there were actually 72 translators, 6 from each tribe, but let’s just say that 70 is close.
Now as far as many modern scholars are concerned, we are clearly into fable because their predecessors have clearly and unequivocally asserted that there are Ten Lost Tribes of Israel dating back to 722 B.C. They were clearly much too evaporated to be used by any high priest 400+ years later.
Moreover, the legend goes on that Philadelphus made extraordinary efforts to test the translators, dealing with them individually and having them each make a separate translation.
And, what do you know, all 72 translations were identical! Now, come on!
The present study is not here to contradict current academic consensus. And it does seem a little gratuitous for Philadelphus to be so careful to test the translators. But perhaps he was also a great showman-publicist who wanted credentials as an impeccable scholar. Or maybe he had heard that Jews were contentious among themselves and that, if he let them start a committee translation, they might never get the work done.
Of course, those problems of Philadelphus’ odd behavior are nothing compared to all 72 coming up with the same translation.
However, even here a suspicious (and maybe cynical) academic mind can’t help but wonder.
For example, the Jews might have been known for arguing among themselves, but like everyone from the Old-World cultures, they had become past masters of political intrigue as well. What if the Jews anticipated Philadelphus? What if they had already translated the Scriptures into Greek at Jerusalem? And what if they gave each of the 72 translators the officially-sanctioned translation so that whatever Philadelphus did, the library would get what had been officially sanctioned at Jerusalem for its collection?
What Constituted the Scriptures?
It should, of course, be noted that the preceding discussion talks about translating “the Scriptures” like Martin Luther by himself at Wartberg Castle translating the Heilige Schrift into German, or John Wycliffe, with friends’ help and the patronage of John of Gaunt, translating Scripture into Middle English, or like 50 chosen scholars translating the Bible into King James English. We know what specifically was in these translations.
In all these cases, we think we know what “scriptures” we are talking about. But what were “the Scriptures” in Alexandria?
The fact is we don’t know for sure, which, of course, is the nature of fables. Later on, the official line from Talmudic sources is that Philadelphus got the Torah, that is the Five Books of Moses, as the Jewish Scriptures.
If Philadelphus had been on a military-intelligence fishing trip to get a thorough map of Jewish thought preparatory to invasion, he certainly was skunked by getting only documents that claimed to be better than 1000 years old with an absence of the other 34 books that certainly by 100 B.C. had been recognized as canon. (Protestant Bibles accept the Jewish canon of the Old Testament as reflected in the LXX, but were all the books of the LXX translated in this first—and only attested—translation effort?)
Imagine Philadelphus at an official party for the translators at the inception of their work.
Philadelphus: “Welcome, welcome! Welcome, Professor Cohen, Professor Levi. So good to meet you at last. As you know, I am so excited about getting all the Hebrew Scriptures into my new—and if I must say so myself, great—library here in Alexandria. So, how many documents will you be translating?”
Cohen: “Five.”
Phil. “Five! They must be very long books. Aren’t there any others?”
Levi: “Oh yes, but we left them behind.”
Phil. Oh, I’m disappointed. I imagine there were some by people like David and Solomon, weren’t there? Even I have heard of them!”
Cohen: “Oh yes, the Psalms of David, the Proverbs of Solomon. Yeah, sure, but we left them behind too.”
Phil: “Oy, kavalt.”
Solution of Modern Scholars
Modern scholars are convinced that the rest of the Old Testament was translated piecemeal down through 100 B.C. and without any sense of official sponsorship or specified translators, evidently dribbled in book by book and somehow accepted as part of the LXX. Dribbled or not, the suggestion has been repeatedly made that all these other bits and pieces and perhaps the Torah itself, were a God-send for Jews of the Diaspora whose trade language was Coiné Greek and who were increasingly rusty or totally illiterate in Hebrew.
In one of the greatest academic disasters in history, the great library at Alexandria burned down. When in 48 B.C. Caesar set fire to the fleet in the Alexandrian harbor, the fire spread to the city and thus to the library. Seneca citing Livy placed the loss to the library at 40,000 scrolls. (“Library of Alexandria,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria. Last visited 03/04/2024.) It was an internationally-felt loss for the world. And with that loss, the original Septuagint was probably destroyed, leaving us nothing to go on—except of course the repeated references to LXX as a single document with a widespread distribution in the ancient world.
If modern scholars don’t necessarily handle the issue, it seems that all those dribbled bits and pieces translated over two centuries somehow were all collected with whatever the original LXX had been and from that time forward were, mistakenly, accepted as part of the original translation. The fun and games of the modern academic debates alluded to here can be imagined without further investigation.
For, they are mainly irrelevant to the present argument.
It is enough for the present argument that during the supposedly Silent Years, Hebrew Scriptures perhaps for the first time shouted out their message in the universal trade language of the Mediterranean basin.
A Boon for the Diasporan Jews
In recent centuries the Bible has been translated into many, many indigenous languages, and it is a commonplace for such translations that indigenous peoples are much more interested in and receptive to scriptural ideas “in their heart language,” even if they have already heard of such ideas or have even read the Scriptures themselves in some “foreign,” trade language. The desirability of a translation in one’s own first-learnt language is anything but a fable.
Coiné Greek was not a heart language for the Mediterranean though it may have by then been felt as heart language to a large Greek Mediterranean population. For Jews around the Mediterranean, some may have considered Coiné Greek their heart language, but in any case, if they were bad at Hebrew, Coiné Greek was a likely second-best alternative for them. It is a very reasonable conjecture that the Diasporan Jews were delighted to have a copy for themselves in a language they could easily understand and appropriate.
A New Way of Thinking for the Gentiles
Moreover, along with Diasporan Jews, any of the Gentiles who were interested now had open access to Jewish central thought. Aristobulus, the Alexandrian Peripatetic Jewish Philosopher, asserted that Pythagoras and Plato had both been cognizant of translations from the Jewish Scriptures (“Aristobulus of Alexandria,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristobulus_of_Alexandria. Last visited 03/04/2024.) If so, someone had already been interested enough, before Philadelphus, to get some translation work done and noticed. It is thus a very easy inference that many non-Jews were eager to get their hands on the Jewish documents
One would think that official Judaism would have appreciated that general interest and would have tried to get out an official version of the documents, especially as anti-Judaism increased in the Hellenized world, in order to forestall invidious and false “translations” by their opponents. (The motivation of Elizabethan theatre companies printing their own scripts to stall off pirated editions of plays provides an interesting and complicated example of normal human thinking about key documents and their publication.)
We have already alluded to Luther’s translation from his garret in Wartburg Castle. As normally told, Luther is, for most intents and purposes alone, translating in a bare upper room. He may have disappeared so thoroughly that the German Emperor was at a loss to find him. Nevertheless, it is characteristically asserted that it is Martin Luther’s German that became the central linguistic foundation for modern German literature.
In England a lifetime earlier, Wycliffe’s work found enormous official opposition, and copies of his work could be a death sentence for the owner. Geoffrey Chaucer, however, was the brother-in=law of Wycliffe’s patron, John of Gaunt. It is difficult to believe that Wycliffe’s translation didn’t work into the foundation of Middle English literature.
And of course, King James English is the foundation of all Modern English style and literature as well.
By these precedents, if even a small part of the Bible got translated into Greek only part way into the “Silent Years”, that should have been more than enough to start to change all of Western thinking and literature.
Calling these years the Silent Years biases modern scholarship to very opposite conclusions.
We can leave the controversies of the Septuagint here, but it is perhaps interesting and possibly relevant to note that when Christianity came along in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, the Septuagint became very important to Christians in Europe. The Septuagint was in their language, at least the trade language they all did business in. They might have originally become Christians through the preaching of Paul, Peter, John, or one of the other apostles or one of their chosen associates. But once Christian, such populations inevitably had a personal interest in the Judaism from which Christ came.
So LXX became more and more famous and studied. By the second century A.D., Judaism officially acted and declared the LXX to be inaccurate. Meanwhile, Jewish synagogues had moved to the central architectural feature of the Torah scroll enshrined on the Jerusalem-oriented wall of the synagogue, the Torah not in the Coiné Greek language of the Diasporan Mediterranean but in the original Hebrew.
However checkered the history of the Septuagint in the ancient world and however debated the exact chronology of its composition, whether all together in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus or dribbled in successively over a two-hundred-year inception period, the important point is not the contentions and alternate narratives. (It would be somewhat relevant to the argument here if scriptures were dribbled in in a certain order and at specified times during the Silent Year period. If the whole Bible was sensational in Luther’s German or in Wycliffe’s Middle English, one would expect such dribbled-in Scriptures over a two-hundred-year period would have caused multiple sensations in disparate areas of thought and feeling for the Greco-Roman world. Imagine, for example, the Psalms as one of these sensations, followed successively by a sensation for Proverbs, and then two more for Isaiah and Daniel!)
Let’s get very specific. Ecclesiastes is one of the least quoted books of the Bible even if it is the statement of the supposedly wisest king who ever lived, Solomon. Say that in 150 B.C. someone had finally decided to translate Ecclesiastes into Greek and to insert Ecclesiastes into the Septuagint as an entirely separated dribble.
Would it cause any sensation among European pagans to read, entirely as a new and separate reading from Hebrew Scriptures:
Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry
heart: for God has already approved what you do.
Let your garments be always white; let not oil be lackjng on your head.
Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life which he has given you under the sun (italics ours) (Ecc. 9: 7-9a, RSV).
However we decide on these controversial issues, it is indisputable that the Septuagint or any part thereof actually read by non-Jews—such a partial Septuagint presented not a god among gods like the pagan mythologies but a God Who Spoke in His own voice, not in ideas generated by intellectually sensitive theorists. It is almost beyond comprehension and imagination to think that non-Jewish readers around the Roman Mediterranean could read the original texts and yet remain utterly limited to pagan conceptions of everything around them.
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Next Chapter: Jewish Factions and Stances