It was the year 246 before the ordinary era, according to the Jewish census, the year 3515 since creation. In the heart of Egypt, under the reign of Greek ruler Ptolemy II, a powerful ruler who was interested not only in wars and wealth, but also in wisdom and knowledge. When he heard of the famous law of Moses, the Torah of the Jewish people, he decided that this sacred teaching should be translated into Greek so that his people could also share in this ancient wisdom.
This was not the first attempt. Over sixty years earlier, an attempt had been made to translate the Torah, but it had failed then. Now a second, much more thorough attempt was made. The king invited 72 wise men of Israel - men who knew the Torah to its deepest depths. But he did not entrust them with a joint translation. Instead, he had them each individually locked in 72 separate rooms, without any form of communication.
In one version of the story, as told in the tract Sofrim 1:7, it was five senior scholars who were commissioned to translate the Torah for the king. But what seemed like a royal honour was viewed with fear by the people of Israel. The sages knew: the Torah is no ordinary book. Every letter, every word, every sequence has deeper meanings - celestial layers of wisdom that cannot simply be captured in another language.
That day, say the sages, was as dark for Israel as the day the Golden Calf was made. For although at first glance it seemed an attempt at understanding, the translation meant a loss of sacred precision. The G-dly rhythm of Hebrew was lost in the phrases of Greek. And that hurt.
What happened then is considered miraculous in Jewish lore. Each of the 72 scholars independently made the same translation, including 13 specific changes. At these points, they each felt that a literal rendering would distort the essence of the Torah.
These changes were not arbitrary interventions. They were intended to avoid misunderstandings - to protect the essence of the Torah from misinterpretation. For example, they did not literally translate the opening line of the Torah as "In the beginning, G-d created" - which could be misunderstood in Greek as if a force called "Beginning" created G-d himself. Instead, they wrote: "G-d created in the beginning."
Some adaptations were intended out of tact and caution. For instance, the word for "hare" - one of the unclean animals in the Torah - was translated as "short-legged animal", so as not to offend the king. For the Greek word for "hare" was too similar to the name of Ptolemy's wife.
So, independently of each other, they applied the same corrections - a unanimous intuition that was seen as supernatural.
Thus was born the Septuagint - Greek for "of the seventy", although the number was actually 72.
In the centuries that followed, especially during the Talmudic period, the 8th of Tevet - the day the translation was completed - was even considered by some to be a day of mourning and fasting. For although the translation had great impact, there was a fear that something sacred had been lost: after all, the pure, G-divine precision of the Hebrew Torah could not be fully conveyed in another language.
What began as an attempt at accessibility grew into a turning point in Jewish history - a day when the Torah started speaking Greek, and with it entered a new world, full of opportunities, but also full of risks.
Written by Sarah Bakker
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1 thought on “Van Tanach naar Bijbel: De dag waarop de Tora Grieks ging spreken”
Thank you.
I read a Hebrew translation of what you wrote (I used Google Translate).
The act is found in the Babylonian Talmud in Tractaat Megillah, page 9:1, 9:2. I used Google Translate to translate from Hebrew to Dutch. (Is there a translation of the Talmud into Dutch?):
When our rabbis allowed the Ionic language, they allowed it only in the Torah scroll and because of King Ptolemy's act. King Ptolemy had performed an act in which he summoned seventy-two elders and lodged them in seventy-two houses, and he had not told them why he had summoned them. He entered each one and said to them, "Write for me the Torah of Moses, your master. The Holy One, blessed be He, gave counsel in the hearts of each, and they all agreed that they knew one thing and wrote it down for him (Genesis 1:27). God created in the beginning (Genesis 1:1). I will make man in my image and likeness (Genesis 1:26). And he finished on the sixth day and rested on the seventh day (Genesis 5:2). Man and woman He created them, but He did not write of their creation (Genesis 11:7). Let Me descend there and mourn. Their tongue is there (Genesis 18:12). And Sarah laughed at her kin (Genesis 49:6). For with their nose they slaughtered an ox and with their will they plucked out a manger (Exodus 4:20). And Moses took his wife and sons and put them on a human carrier (Exodus 12:40). And the habitation of The Israelites, who lived in Egypt and other lands for four hundred years (Exodus 24:5), and he left out the dunghills of the Israelites (Exodus 24:11), and on the dunghills of the Israelites he did not lay his hand (Numbers 16:15). I have coveted none of them (Deuteronomy 4:19), whom the LORD your God has divided for a light to all nations (Deuteronomy 17:3). And he went to serve other gods, which I had not commanded him to serve, and they wrote for him the young female foot, and they did not write for him (Leviticus 11:6) the hare, because the wife of Ptolemy is a hare, which he must not say. The Jews mocked me and threw my wife there in the Torah: