The Cities That Built the Bible

by Dr. Robert Cargill

  The Great Sphinx of Giza with the Great Pyramid of Khufu in the background.

  The importance of Alexandria to the Bible stems from the fact that it is where the Hebrew Bible was translated from Hebrew (and Aramaic) into Greek, and where many of the books that comprise the Apocrypha were created. Thus, it must be said that Alexandria made it possible for the Hebrew Bible to live beyond Persian-period Judaism, as it made the Bible accessible to a Jewish population that increasingly favored Greek and Aramaic as its primary languages. This transition to a Greek Bible allowed Judaism to become a viable religion and philosophy in the ever-expanding Greco-Roman world.

  THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

  Founded on the westernmost edge of the Nile Delta by its namesake in 331 BCE, Alexandria was transformed by Alexander the Great from a major Egyptian port town into the seat of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt. Alexandria remained the capital of Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt until the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 CE. Alexandria also became the center of knowledge of the Western world. It was famous in antiquity for its lighthouse (Gk. Φάρος, or Pharos), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and of course for its library.

  Roslyn and I found that getting to Alexandria can be a nightmare and is not recommended for travelers who are elderly or claustrophobic, have motion sickness, or dislike heavy smoking, body odor, or live poultry on overcrowded trains. The city of Alexandria also suffers from significant infrastructural problems, which have only been exacerbated by two full-scale Egyptian revolutions in the past five years. Pollution, insufficient city planning, traffic congestion, and consistently slow response from governmental service agencies all detract from this otherwise popular tourist destination. In October of 2015, rainfall from severe storms flooded the city, leading to the deaths of at least seven people, five of whom were electrocuted when a live power line broke and fell into a flooded street on which they were standing.3 Walking through the streets of modern Alexandria it is sometimes hard to imagine that this was once the center of the intellectual world.

  Of course, as you work your way toward the Alexandrian waterfront, you will eventually happen upon the Bibliotheca Alexandrina—the new Library of Alexandria—a beautiful, modern architectural tribute to the original Library of Alexandria, which was mysteriously destroyed long ago and to which we now turn.

  The Royal Library of Alexandria was the center of the intellectual world twenty-two hundred years ago. Back then, libraries weren’t just places to read books (which were rare enough on their own), but were centers of learning that more closely resemble the colleges and universities we have today. Scholars and philosophers would travel to Alexandria and take up residence for an extended period of time not just to read the books that were present there, but also to discuss intellectual matters with other scholars. It was essentially the real-time, crowd-sourced mechanism for scholarly collaboration and peer review two thousand years before the Internet.

  Inside the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. Photo by Stewart Perkins.

  The library was built in the third century BCE and is traditionally credited to Ptolemy I, who, as we learned in the last chapter, ruled over Egypt with Alexandria as its capital after Alexander’s death in 323 BCE. His Ptolemaic dynasty ruled Egypt until the Roman conquest in 30 BCE. In addition to collections of books, the library possessed lecture halls, meeting rooms, and gardens. It was part of a larger research institution called the “Musaeum of Alexandria,” where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied. The Library of Alexandria was dedicated to the Greek Mousai (Μοȗσαι), or Muses, the nine patron goddesses of the arts. In fact, we get our English word “museum” from the muses (hence “Musaeum”), who were actually the personification of the arts, or the nine applications of knowledge at the time. They were responsible for song and dance and all of the different forms of music and poetry.4

  Unfortunately, the Library of Alexandria met a terrible fate, although who actually burned down the famed library is still a mystery. Plutarch wrote that a fire during Julius Caesar’s Civil War in 48 BCE, which included the Siege of Alexandria, is responsible for the accidental burning of the library.5 Others say it occurred during the attack of the Roman emperor Lucius Domitius Aurelianus (Aurelian) over three hundred years later, sometime between 270 and 275 CE, when the Brucheion (the Royal Quarter in Alexandria where the library stood) was burned to the ground.

  Others suggest it might have been Pope Theophilus, the twenty-third pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, who in 391 CE legalized and endorsed state persecution of paganism, leading to the destruction of all of the “heathen temples,” buildings, and “pagan” monuments in Alexandria. One of these “pagan” centers may have been the Library of Alexandria, which housed writings that contained centuries of pre-Christian (and therefore “non-Christian,” and therefore “heretical” or “pagan”) thoughts and beliefs.6

  However, the answer to the question of who destroyed the Library of Alexandria may be a lot less dramatic. Beginning in the early second century BCE, many scholars began to leave Alexandria for less politically volatile locations, and in 145 BCE Ptolemy VIII Eugeretes II (nicknamed “Physcon,” meaning “sausage” or “potbelly,” by the people because of his obesity) expelled all foreign intellectuals from Alexandria as part of a campaign of revenge against those who had opposed him politically.7 This led to the gradual demise of the Library of Alexandria, whose fate was more than likely a steady descent into disrepair and neglect rather than one single great conflagration.

  Most of the books were kept as papyrus scrolls, and though it is unknown how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, their combined value was incalculable. The Library of Alexandria thus was not only the greatest repository of the Western and Near Eastern world’s knowledge, but became a symbol for knowledge that is wise, meaningful, and worthy of retention throughout history.

  So one can understand the embarrassment many Jews may have felt when they realized that there was no copy of their Hebrew Scriptures in the Library of Alexandria. Judaism was becoming increasingly hellenized during the third and second centuries BCE, and yet a record of Jewish history and religious beliefs was not deemed worthy of inclusion among the world’s great literature. It is likely that as Jews began speaking (and reading and writing) Greek, learned Jewish scribes slowly began translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, giving us what we today call the Septuagint, which is abbreviated using the Roman numerals for seventy, or LXX.8 The creation of an official Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was significant, because it quickly became the standard Bible for all Jews throughout Egypt and Palestine.

  As with many translations of important documents, the problem became whether Jews could trust a new, Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. Remember, we’re not talking about translating just any book like a treaty or a book of medicinal remedies, but the collection of “Scripture”—sacred texts narrating the creation of the earth, tales of the patriarchs, the religious laws to be followed by Jewish people, Jewish prophecy, and the very words of God—now being read in Greek, not Hebrew. This wasn’t an easy shift for some Jews of the first few centuries BCE who felt the integrity of their beloved Hebrew Bible might be threatened by invasive Greek ideas present in a Greek translation. Greek-speaking Jews needed assurances that the Greek Bible they were reading was the actual word of God, as they believed their Hebrew Bible to be. And this reassurance came in the form of the Letter of Aristeas.

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRANSLATION: THE LETTER OF ARISTEAS

  It is incredibly difficult to change religious tradition. Heck, I can’t stand it when the words to a hymn are updated! (It’s “bind us together with chains,” not “cords”!) It goes for skeptics and saints alike; we simply do not like it when things we consider “holy” are altered. (And may heaven forgive U2 for attempting to add a verse to “All Along the Watchtower.” We do not mess with the words of God or Bob Dylan!)

  L
ikewise, anyone raised with a particular version of the Bible knows how skeptical one becomes when a different version of Scripture is being used. Is the new translation accurate? Does it support a theology with which I don’t agree? Why should I trust a new translation? I like the one I have, thank you very much.

  This is not a new problem. The Jews of the first three centuries BCE experienced an even more harrowing threat to their beloved Hebrew Bible. It came in the midst of a culture war in which the ever-expanding influence of Greek culture, religion, philosophy, government, and the Greek language reached Jewish centers in Alexandria and Judea. Because activities in most areas of society—business, education, law—were now being conducted in Greek, and Jewish children were learning Greek so that they could survive in the new hellenized economy, there came a point where Aramaic-speaking Jews began to learn and know Greek better than the Hebrew they learned as children. Ultimately, Hebrew came to be used only when reading the Bible; everything else of importance was written in Greek.9 Thus, the Hebrew Bible needed to be translated into Greek in order for it to be read and understood and remain relevant in the modern Jewish world of the Second Temple period.

  The problem, of course, is that some don’t readily trust new translations of their Bible, especially when it is being translated into the language of the foreign power occupying their land and running the government. Even in antiquity individuals realized, “There is no such thing as translation without interpretation,” because translators inevitably must choose between similar competing words in the destination language, and each word may have slightly different connotative meanings. As Sirach says in its prologue, “What was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language.”

  This posed a problem for Jewish leaders who wanted to promote a new Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible: How do we get our fellow Jews to accept a Greek Bible? The solution became the Letter of Aristeas, a forged document written in the second century BCE. It claims to be a letter from a man named Aristeas, a pagan member of the court of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BCE), to his brother, Philocrates, that tells the tale of how the Hebrew Scriptures came to be translated into Greek. However, as the late Princeton Theological Seminary biblical scholar Bruce Metzger states, “The author cannot have been the man he represented himself to be but was a Jew who wrote a fictitious account in order to enhance the importance of the Hebrew Scriptures by suggesting that a pagan king had recognized their significance and therefore arranged for their translation into Greek.”10 Thus the Letter of Aristeas was likely composed some time closer to 125 BCE.11

  Indeed, the principal purpose of this letter was twofold. First, it needed to convince Jews that this new, Greek translation of the Bible was credible and trustworthy. This meant offering some sort of evidence that the translation was a perfect—trustworthy and accurate—translation of the perfect word of God. It accomplished this task by recounting the miraculous tale of seventy-two scribes in pairs (six from each of the twelve tribes) taking (coincidentally) seventy-two days to translate the Torah (Let. Arist. 307) and producing thirty-six copies that were identical down to the letter.

  This, of course, is a complete fable, as anyone who has ever set a copy of the Septuagint next to a copy of the Hebrew Bible will immediately see. There are differences between the two documents in length due to omissions of portions of the Hebrew text and the addition of Greek interpretations as well as in the arrangement of the text at the verse, chapter, and even book level; also, books appear in the Septuagint that are not in the Hebrew canon! And all of this is in addition to the mistranslations, mistakes, and deliberate alterations that were made by the Greek translators, which we’ll discuss later in this chapter. Thus, although the Letter of Aristeas tried to convince Jews that the Septuagint was a perfect translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the reality is that the Septuagint was the product of over 150 years of translation, beginning about 250 BCE, by multiple authors, which produced a relatively accurate version of the Hebrew Bible (in most places).

  The second goal of the Letter of Aristeas was to couch the Jewish faith in a philosophical framework that was palatable to Hellenistic philosophers and other Greek aristocrats. In much the same way that Flavius Josephus attempted to recast the Jewish faith as Hellenistic philosophy that was acceptable to Roman authorities (see Chapter 11), the Letter of Aristeas was written to make the Hebrew Bible and Jewish faith look more “Greek,” in the hope of stemming Greek persecution of Jews and the loss of the Jewish faithful through attrition. In fact, Josephus appears to have knowledge of and to rely heavily upon the Letter of Aristeas to summarize the justification of Judaism to his Roman audience.12 Similarly, the Jewish author Philo of Alexandria also tells the story of the translation of the Bible into Greek, adding that the thirty-six translations were identical because they “had been divinely given by direct inspiration.”13 Simply put, Greek philosophy and culture were in vogue, and the Letter of Aristeas wanted to make the Hebrew Bible and Jewish thought look as Greek as possible.

  Thus, the letter opens with a rationale for why the Greek king would want a copy of the Hebrew Bible in his Library of Alexandria. Letter of Aristeas 10–11 recounts a supposed conversation between the king and Demetrius of Phalerum, the president of the king’s library. Demetrius suggests to the king, “I am told that the laws of the Jews are worth transcribing and deserve a place in your library.” Demetrius explains that the Jewish Scriptures must be translated, and in response the king orders that a letter be written to the Jewish high priest to ask for a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.

  The Letter of Aristeas begins with a decree from none other than the Greek king himself that the text of the Hebrew Bible be translated into Greek.14 The purpose of this introduction is to convince Jewish readers that the Greek king genuinely appreciates the Jews and their Scriptures, and that the Greek translation of the Bible has been authorized at the highest levels of both Greek and Jewish authority.

  Following lists of the names of the translators, the materials collected to produce both the translation and the luxurious place the translations would be made, and even descriptions of what the high priest wore to oversee the process (96–99), the Letter of Aristeas offers a lengthy philosophical exchange on the interpretation of Jewish law by the high priest (121–71), again reassuring the readers that he was well versed in both Hebrew Scripture and its interpretation and that by proxy his chosen translators were “men who had not only acquired proficiency in Jewish literature, but had studied most carefully that of the Greeks as well” (121).

  Following the description of a congratulatory banquet hosted by the Greek king, Letter of Aristeas 310–11 declares the outcome of the translation process:

  After the books had been read, the priests and the elders of the translators and the Jewish community and the leaders of the people stood up and said, that since so excellent and sacred and accurate a translation had been made, it was only right that it should remain as it was and no alteration should be made in it.15

  Note that the Letter of Aristeas makes sure to pronounce the resulting Greek translation as “excellent,” “sacred,” and, most important, “accurate,” which was one of the two primary goals of the entire letter: to reassure faithful Jews that the Septuagint is a faithful translation of the Hebrew Bible.16

  One final assurance is achieved in 312:

  When the matter was reported to the king, he rejoiced greatly, for he felt that the design which he had formed had been safely carried out. The whole book was read over to him and he was greatly astonished at the spirit of the lawgiver. And he said to Demetrius, “How is it that none of the historians or the poets have ever thought it worth their while to allude to such a wonderful achievement?” And he replied, “Because the law is sacred and of divine origin.”17

  By placing the final affirmation of the philosophical sophistication of the Hebrew Scriptures in the mouth of the Greek king himself, the
Letter of Aristeas simultaneously convinces both Greek and Jewish readers that Judaism is no threat to the Greek overlords and that the Jewish people are noble and philosophically sophisticated.

  The forged Letter of Aristeas accomplishes both of its propagandistic goals and answers the question of why the great Greek poets and philosophers had not yet alluded to the Hebrew Scriptures: they hadn’t been able to read them. Thus, for Jews of the Second Temple period, the Letter of Aristeas was the reassurance they needed that the Greek Bible was a trustworthy translation.

  THE ROLE OF THE SEPTUAGINT

  The Septuagint became the de facto Bible of Jews in the first centuries BCE and CE. This means it was the version of the “Scriptures” that was more often than not cited by the various authors of the New Testament.18 It was also the Bible of choice for Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and most of the church fathers, who favored it over the Hebrew version. The Jewish use of the Septuagint did not begin to wane until the second century CE. This was due to the gradual displacement of Greek by Latin as the lingua franca following the rise of Rome in the east, but also as a response to Christians, who had become fond of this “less Jewish” version of the Hebrew Scriptures. The waning of Jewish interest in the Septuagint coincided with a rekindled interest in preserving the Jewish religious traditions following the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE on the Jewish side, and the Septuagint was ultimately replaced on the Christian side by the Latin version of the Bible.19

  But while the Septuagint was at its height of popularity, New Testament authors found that it often provided the textual support they needed to introduce many new interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures—interpretations that the Hebrew authors had neither intended nor considered prior to the creation of the Septuagint—that would both favor Christianity over Judaism and further distinguish Christians from Jews.