JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ible
within both Judaism and especially Christianity, this relatively
restrained account was embellished in many directions.
Within the Jewish world, it is primarily to the first century
C.E. philosopher *Philo, himself a native of Alexandria,
that we owe several significant additions to Aristeas’ narrative.
For example, Philo names the Island of Pharos as the location
at which the translators worked, and he describes an
annual festival, still observed in his day, to honor their work.
Moreover, he speaks of those responsible for the Septuagint
as prophets rather than (mere) translators. In this way, he is
able to account for material that was found in the Greek but
not in the Hebrew text.
As fully elaborated in the work of the fourth century
Christian writer Epiphanius, each of the translators was isolated
in a cell and cut off from discussion or comparisons with
his colleagues – and yet all 72 produced texts that were identical
in every detail (in other forms of the tradition, the translators
worked in pairs). This and other “miraculous” occurrences
served to demonstrate the sacredness of the text produced and
the role it was to play as Scripture for Christians.
It is not entirely clear what the author of Aristeas intended
in this regard. On the one hand, as noted above, the
deliberations of the elders proceeded in much the same way
as modern teams of Bible translators operate. Nonetheless,
what they produced was accepted as somehow authoritative
by the Alexandrian Jewish community and, by extension, the
larger Jewish world. This is seen not only in the curse uttered
against all who might change it, but also in the deliberate way
in which the reception of the Septuagint is modeled on the reception
of the Ten Commandments and accompanying laws
in the biblical book of Exodus.
It is likely that when the author of the Letter of Aristeas
fashioned a communal curse on those who would change the
Greek Pentateuch, he had some specific concerns in mind that
were relevant to his own second century B.C.E. context; that
is to say, as early as that date, if not even before then, there
were individuals who were revising the Septuagint of the Pentateuch
and of other books subsequently translated. Such individuals,
who may have come from or worked in Jerusalem,
judged most, if not all, differences between the LXX and their
Hebrew text as deficiencies in the Greek, and they therefore
sought to “correct” the LXX in the direction of the Hebrew text
of their community. Although they probably also had some
linguistic interests, their goal, as well as their motivation, was
primarily what may be described as theological.
As noted above, Philo, while also recognizing differences
between the Greek and the Hebrew, devised another explanation
entirely; namely, that these divergences were as much a
part of God’s inspired message as were the far more numerous
places where the Greek and the Hebrew were in agreement.
It may be that the author of the Letter of Aristeas had,
in some inchoate sense, a similar intimation; if so, he did not
explicitly express it. For most early Christians, the creators of
the LXX, whether they knew it or not, were prophetic in the
sense that much of their distinctive wording looked forward
to the coming of Jesus as Christ. And this was in spite of the
fact that the LXX was created for Jews by Jews, almost three
centuries before Jesus’ birth!
We are, it would seem, without much, if any, external
information (that is, outside of the text of the LXX itself) on
the location, order, or modus operandi of those responsible
for the LXX beyond the Pentateuch. With few exceptions, it
is reasonable to place these translators within the context of
Alexandria. It is also likely that the book of Joshua was translated
next after the Pentateuch. Beyond that, there are a few,
but only a few, references to historical figures or events that
can be gleaned from any of the LXX books; more numerous
are likely examples of dependence of one LXX book (or,
better, its translator) on another, thereby allowing for some
tentative relative, although not absolute, ordering of books
chronologically.
The task of discerning the history of the creation of the
LXX is further complicated by the nature of the evidence. For
the most part, our earliest texts for this Greek material derive
from codices (manuscripts in book form, rather than scrolls)
from the third and fourth centuries C.E.; in particular, Codex
Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Sinaiticus. The
codices are uncials (that is, written in all capital letters) from
important Christian scriptoria; therefore, they contain the
LXX as part of their “Bible” (the New Testament completes it
for them). There is no reason to think that Christian scribes
deliberately changed the originally Jewish text for tendentious,
theological reasons, although it is certain that all sorts
of scribal changes led to many differences, some substantial,
between what the codices contain and what the earliest Greek
(or Old Greek) read. We are not without earlier evidence in
the form of a limited number of Greek texts from Qumran
and other Dead Sea locales; citations, allusions, and reworkings
in the New Testament; and Qumran scrolls that preserve
in Hebrew the likely Vorlage or text that lay before
the LXX translators (which, as noted above, is sometimes
close to our received or Masoretic Text, but on occasion quite
different from it).
A reasoned and important conclusion from an analysis
of all of this material is that what we term the Septuagint is in
fact an almost accidental gathering together of texts from diverse
sources. Some of the books of the Septuagint, as in the
Pentateuch, appear to be quite close to the Old Greek. In other
cases, the earliest form of the translation is lost in almost all
sources (as in Daniel), or is entirely lost (as for Ecclesiastes), or
is combined with later material (as in Reigns [that is, the books
of Samuel and Kings]). Even when due allowance is made for
this diversity of origins, scholars are struck by the very different
ways in which translators approached their Hebrew.
The range runs the gamut from almost wooden literalism to
recontextualizing to paraphrase. It used to be argued that the
translators of Ketuvim were freer inasmuch as those books
were considered somewhat less important that the Torah and
Nevi’im. Such a contention does not, however, stand up under
close scrutiny. The point needs to be made that we simply do
596 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3