Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today, The

The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today. By Abraham Wasserstein and David J. Wasserstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, xviii + 334 pp., $75.00.

The ancient Greek text known as the Epistle of Aristeas to Philocrates (hereafter Ep. Arist.) narrates a story told by Aristeas concerning the first Bible translation, which was made about three centuries before Christ when the Hebrew Pentateuch was translated into Greek. Wasserstein's book, The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today, traces the story Aristeas tells and the subsequent legends it inspired through the centuries, over a wide geographical range, and in three of the world's major religions-Christianity, Judaism, and Islam-as well as its use by a polytheist of fourth-century Egypt. Texts that include either major embellishments of the story of the origin of the Septuagint or only passing references to it are found "in the Iberian Peninsula and in Caucasian Iberia, on the shores of the Atlantic and in the wastes of Central Asia . . . not just in its original Greek but also in Latin and in Persian, in Armenian and in Ethiopic, in Hebrew and Arabic, and in Georgian, to say nothing of English and Portuguese and other languages of modern western Europe" over a span of more than seventeen centuries (p. 270). The scholarly interest that the Ep. Arist. has enjoyed since the sixteenth century continues even to this day.

Wasserstein's The Legend of the Septuagint is presented in ten chapters, an appendix, an extensive bibliography, and an index. It introduces the Ep. Arist. (chap. 1) and discusses the development of the legend of the origin of the Septuagint in its Hellenistic Jewish milieu (chap. 2) and in the later rabbinic materials (chaps. 3 and 4). Although the Ep. Arist. does not make the claim that the Septuagint was divinely inspired, the idea that each translator (or pair of translators) produced 72 (or 36) identical, divinely inspired translations appears in later writings. Wasserstein claims that the origin of this element of divine inspiration, most frequently attributed to Philo, is a misreading of a statement that is about translation technique and not about divine origins (p. 45).

Wasserstein claims that additions to the Aristeas legend found in both the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds are the actual source of the idea of the divine inspiration of the Septuagint. He cites three Talmudic texts that include lists of biblical citations where the Greek translation allegedly differed from the Hebrew Torah (Baraitha in tractate Megilla 9a-b in the Babylonian Talmud; tractate Megilla 71d in the Palestinian Talmud; and Mekhilta Bo 14; see p. 54). The function of these lists is to acknowledge with approval the changes the Greek translators made that, although resulting in a Greek text different from the Hebrew, nevertheless reflected accepted rabbinic interpretation of the Hebrew text. Wasserstein argues that such rabbinic approval would have been necessary only during the time the Jews wished to invest the Greek translation with an authority equal to that of the Hebrew. These lists of differences between the Hebrew Torah and its Greek translation clearly heighten the miraculous nature of the claim found in the rabbinic texts that though the translators worked independently they produced identical translations even where the Greek translation was different from the Hebrew (p. 52). Wasserstein argues that Rabban Gamaliel II (AD 80117) was of the last generation of Palestinian rabbis who would have defended the authority of the Septuagint, and it is to him Wasserstein attributes the invention of the miraculous element of its production (pp. 68, 91, 95, 102). The miraculous element of the Septuagint's origin devised by the rabbi(s) then passes into Christian tradition and is first attested by Irenaeus in the late second century (p. 68). Thereafter the divine inspiration of the Septuagint became a doctrine of the Christian church until the Protestant Reformation, with a few earlier dissenters such as Jerome and Hugh of St. Victor.

Wasserstein's claim for the invention of the miraculous element of the story in rabbinic circles of first-century Palestine, though plausible, probably overreaches the textual evidence he offers, and his argument from circumstantial evidence could admit other conclusions. Wasserstein's theory is not compelling, but it is at the heart of his central theme that "the most powerful argument used by the Christian Church in favour of the inspiration of the Greek Bible is based on a story fashioned in the workshop of the rabbinic aggada" (p. xxii). The dating of the rabbinic material he relies upon is notoriously difficult, and he offers only circumstantial evidence for a first-century Palestinian provenance, noting that the Babylonian Talmud also preserves the earliest extant rabbinic form of the story (p. 67). Moreover, such lists of differences are found in several other rabbinic writings (pp. 69-83), and because no two lists are identical they were apparently produced and/or amended over time. To ground his theory Wasserstein seems to assume an "original" form of the lists extant in first-century Palestine without offering solid text-critical evidence. He rejects a Hellenistic-Jewish origin for the reason that the miraculous element is absent from Philo and Josephus, though that absence in Philo assumes that Wasserstein's own reading is correct against the many who have seen the implication of a miracle in Philo's words (pp. 67-68). He also rejects a Christian source for the idea of the miraculous origin of the Greek translation because "[i]t is virtually inconceivable that the Rabbis would have borrowed this story from their Christian rivals at any time" (p. 68). Wasserstein's opinion may be true, but it would be more compelling if he could demonstrate with historical evidence that the rabbis never borrowed ideas from Christian sources.