The Letter of Aristeas אגרת אריסטיאס
A Greek book about how seventy-two elders translated the Torah for Ptolemy. Not an eyewitness account but the story as its tellers wanted it—and no less valuable for that.
Written in Greek; it is dated to the third or, more likely, the second century BCE—roughly between 170 and 130. More than twenty manuscript copies survive from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.
What it tells. The king of Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, wants the Torah in Greek for his library. The high priest sends six men from each of the twelve tribes—seventy-two—and they work in Alexandria and finish in exactly seventy-two days.
What it is not. Scholars hold the book to be a composition: the author is not who he claims to be, the text contains anachronisms, and Demetrius of Phalerum, given a prominent place in it, could not have been what he is shown to be under Ptolemy II. It is Jewish apologetic, written for a Greek reader to raise Judaism in his eyes.
What it is. The earliest account of the Septuagint translation—the one out of which grew everything said about it afterwards, including the Talmud's tradition of the seventy-two elders set apart from one another. Reading it, one sees not how the translation was made but how people wished it remembered.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Megillah 9a — the tradition of the seventy-two elders set apart
Documents of the period
- The Letter of Aristeas — the text itself: seventy-two elders and seventy-two days
Basis: documents and evidence.