The story
By the third century BCE Greek was the common language of the eastern Mediterranean, and many Jews in Ptolemaic Egypt, whose capital was Alexandria, spoke Greek rather than Hebrew. During the Second Temple period few Jews could read Hebrew, and Koine Greek and Aramaic served as everyday languages. The community needed its scriptures in a language it understood.
To meet that need, Jews living in or around Alexandria translated the first five books of the Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek. Scholars date this work with confidence to the mid- or late third century BCE, on the evidence of its early style of Greek, quotations from the second century BCE and early manuscripts. The remaining books followed over the next two to three centuries, translated by different people with styles ranging from very literal to freely interpretive, along with other Jewish writings now known as the Apocrypha.
The name Septuagint, "the Seventy", comes from the Letter of Aristeas, which tells how seventy-two Jewish elders, six from each of the twelve tribes, were sent from Jerusalem to do the work at the request of King Ptolemy II for the great Library of Alexandria. The Talmud adds that the elders, working in separate rooms, all produced identical translations. Many scholars regard the story as legendary, but Alexandria's Jews celebrated the translation each year with a festival on the island of Pharos, where it was said to have been made. The translation itself is the earliest surviving Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, and copies have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Its influence reached far beyond the Jewish community. The earliest Gentile Christians, who could not read Hebrew, used the Septuagint as their Bible, and the New Testament writers drew on it heavily when citing the Jewish scriptures. It was translated into Latin and other languages, and its order of books shaped the Christian Old Testament. Partly because of that Christian use, and because of differences from the Hebrew text, most Jews turned to other Greek versions, such as that of Aquila, by the second century.
The Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Septuagint as the basis of its Old Testament, reading it in Greek in its services and translating from it into other languages. The Catholic and Orthodox churches include most of its additional books in their Bibles, and for Christians the Septuagint became synonymous with the Greek Old Testament.
Why it matters
By putting the Hebrew Bible into the international language of its day, Jewish translators made its ideas available to the Greek-speaking world and laid a foundation for Christian scripture.
Sources
- Septuagint Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.