The Work of Seventy-Two

The Legend of Aristeas

José Gil�História e Teoria da Tradução

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa 2021

Key Words

• Bible
• Septuagint
• Semitic
• Koine Greek
• Pseudoepigraphical

The Legend

Beginning of the Letter of Aristeas, Vatican Library

3rd Century BC

From Aristeas to Philocrates

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Describes the translation of the Hebrew Bible by 72 different translators into Greek

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The Septuagint

3rd Century BC

Ptolemaic Kingdom

Ptolemy II Philadelphius

-) ruled from 284 to 246 BC

Bust of Ptolemy II, National Archaeological Museum, Naples

During Ptolemy II's reign, the material and literary splendor of the Alexandrian court was at its height

Library of Alexandria

Nineteenth-century artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria, colorized

The Hebrew Bible

8th/7th centuries BCE – 2nd/1st centuries BCE

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Written in Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic

Semitic Languages

Distribution of Semitic languages in the 1st Century

Koine Greek

• Biblical Greek, Hellenistic Greek,

or Alexandrian Dialect

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Back to the Legend…

• The seventy-two translators were asked by Ptolomy II to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek in seventy-two days

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• Legend says they all retreated to their studies and later they all came out with the exact same results.

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Pseudoepigraphia

• Works whose claimed author is not the real author

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• In biblical studies -) works which are not recognized

as being part of the biblical canon

Sources

• www.quora.com
• en.wikipedia.org
• http://dicionario.sensagent.com/Livros_ap%C3%B3crifos/pt-pt/
• https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Greek-states-in-the-3rd-century-BC_fig2_285926277
• https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-seventy-two-elders-of-Aristeas%3A-An-evaluation-Macdonald/a2c4b7a41375dd8bf8bf2e359c23ff3f39adaf25
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0951820719875719
• https://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/r-21-luke10.html
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9M9C5rWKrM

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