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The Letter of Aristeas has Ptolemy's librarian seek the Jewish law for the royal library. In his First Apology, Justin, the earliest Christian witness to the story, makes it the books of the prophets that Ptolemy wants and has him send to Herod for them.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Letter of Aristeas 1:10
Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates
Pseudepigrapha, Hebrew Bible Expansions
Demetrius of Phalerum, the president of the king's library, received vast sums of money, for the purpose of collecting together, as far as he possibly could, all the books in the world. By means of purchase and transcription, he carried out, to the best of his ability, the purpose of the king. On one occasion when I was present he was asked, How many thousand books are there in the library? and he replied, 'More than two hundred thousand, Your Majesty, and I shall make every effort in the immediate future to gather together the remainder also, so that the total of five hundred thousand may be reached. I am told that the laws of the Jews are worth transcribing and deserve a place in
Justin Martyr, First Apology 31.3
Early Christian
And their prophecies, as they were spoken and when they were uttered, the kings who happened to be reigning among the Jews at the several times carefully preserved in their possession, when they had been arranged in books by the prophets themselves in their own Hebrew language. And when Ptolemy king of Egypt formed a library, and endeavoured to collect the writings of all men, he heard also of these prophets, and sent to Herod, who was at that time king of the Jews, requesting that the books of the prophets be sent to him. And Herod the king did indeed send them, written, as they were, in the foresaid Hebrew language. And when their contents were found to be unintelligible to the Egyptians, he again sent and requested that men be commissioned to translate them into the Greek language.
Date: 155-160 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
“... The earliest preserved Christian witness to the story of the origin of the Septuagint is Justin Martyr, who relates that the writings of the prophets were translated by order of King Ptolemy of Egypt (1 Apol. 31.1–5). Justin brings the number of translators down from seventy-two as in Aristeas to seventy (Dial. 71.1–2), which became the traditional number in most Christian sources. While the Letter of Aristeas merely hints at divine aid in the translation (Let. Aris. 307) and the account of Josephus is essentially non-supernatural, Justin follows the trajectory reflected in Philo by seeing direct divine involvement with the translators. Other early Greek Fathers likewise emphasize the supernatural nature of the Greek translation; for example, Irenaeus reports the story of how each of the translators arrived miraculously at the same translation, although working in separate cells (Haer. 3.21.2; see also Exhortation to the Greeks 13; and Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 1.22.148–9). ...”
Graves, Michael
"The Septuagint in the Latin World" in Salvesen, Alison, and T. M. Law (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint
(p. 606) Oxford University Press, 2021
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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