The Septuagint

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The Septuagint

stavros deligiorgis

The greatest human accomplishment in the Weld of translation may well be the scholarly eVort of hundreds of bilingual individuals who, between approximately 250 bce and 1200 ce, translated almost two thousand Sanscrit Buddhist treatises into Chinese. Neither the vast diVerences separating the two languages nor the diVerences between the two cultures stood in the way of the eVective, purposeful work (in equal doses of translation and transcendence) that changed the East Asian landscape, on either side of China and India— including Mongolia and Japan—to the philosophical and religious space we recognize today.

By sheer coincidence during approximately the same historical times similar worldchanging events were taking place in the Eastern Mediterranean. The languages and the civilizations in question were Hebrew and Greek. They were bracketed, if not quite bridged, by the able, authoritative ‘Seventy-two’ translators—according to the early testimonium, the Epistle of Aristeas (c.150 bce)—who travelled from Jerusalem to Hellenistic Alexandria, possibly on a royal commission, during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (c.285 bc). Contrary to widespread opinion, the Jews of Alexandria would not need a translation of the Bible after being dominated by the successors of Alexander of Macedon for only thirty-Wve years. Jews who had been under foreign domination in other parts of the known world for much longer periods of time were not known to have undertaken translations of their Scriptures. The Epistle of Aristeas records Demetrius Phalereus—like any self-respecting chief librarian—expressed an interest in Wlling gaps in his ‘special collections’ and also in the conservation and linguistic accessibility of his acquisitions. A direct quotation from the Epistle makes clear that the reasons for the translation of the Bible were purely intrinsic.

The Books of the Law of the Jews, with some few others, are wanting. For it happens that these books are written in the Hebrew script and language, but, according to the evidence of the experts, have been somewhat carelessly committed to writing and are not in their original form; for they have never had the beneWt of royal attention. It is important that these books, duly corrected, should Wnd a place in your library, because this legislation, in as much as it is divine, is of philosophical importance and of innate integrity.

The legendary ‘Seventy’ translators had to face, we must assume, texts thick with theological, legal, literary, and political concepts for which the Greek they were translating into had no counterpart. Still, the manner in which the Greek language was mined for

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words, phrases, and even the retaining of key Hebrew terms in transliteration, is nothing short of an extended tour de force. The end result managed to communicate, if not the precise lexical and syntactic elements of the Hebrew, at least the tone of sublimity and of the sacred associations that the originals as a whole evoked.

The Epistle of Aristeas was the Wrst to mention the enthusiastic approval of the Jewish community of Alexandria when the task was completed. Later Jewish intellectuals of the stature of Josephus and Philo Judaeus held the Septuagint in such high regard they did not hesitate, in their turn, to amplify and elaborate upon Aristeas’ original, ‘miraculous’ report. Early Christian Church Fathers followed suit. They expanded upon Aristeas’s themes just as Josephus and Philo had done before them even as they were discovering that the numberless quotations of the Hebrew Bible incorporated in the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul were free as well as literal adaptations of the Septuagint.

Later Jewish communities were eventually to distance themselves from the Septuagint. It was compared to a blasphemy as grievous as the worship of the Golden Calf (Sepher Torah, 1. 8), the divine displeasure indicated by the plunging of the Earth into three days of unrelieved darkness (Megillath Taanith, Book of Fasts, Wrst century ce).

The progressive grounding of the Christian liturgy upon the text of the Septuagint, on the other hand, contributed to its being considered a holy text, and one which other languages would want to approximate through translation. The Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Coptic, and Georgian versions, to mention but a few, were based on the Septuagint. (Augustine of Hippo was so happy with it that he thought Jerome’s project of going directly to the Hebrew for his Latin Vulgate to be redundant.)

As a Wnal note we might add that about a thousand years after the Alexandrian drafting of the Septuagint, Greece, and especially the northern city of Thessaloniki, was to become the site of a second map-altering event, comparable in importance to the translation of the Sanskrit scriptures into Chinese. It was the conversion, in the ninth century ce, of the Southern and Eastern Slavic nations to Christianity; the translation of scriptures (by Cyril and Methodius), becoming once again the instrument to that end.

Babel: What Greeks Read Between Some Septuagint Lines

At Babel the post-diluvial God who had promised never to destroy humanity again appears to have noticed a condition that had escaped his earlier wrath: through language humanity could still become one, a creature bigger than its perishable parts. It could overcome its post-lapsarian limitations, in other words, and perhaps even its mortality! The ability of a particular group to communicate with any other group in an unmediated