Hebrew Scriptures Are Translated into Greek

During the third century BCE, the Jewish population residing in the Ptolemaic Kingdom began rendering their sacred scriptures into Koine Greek. Centered primarily in and around Alexandria, this effort served a large Greek-speaking Jewish community among whom knowledge of Hebrew was waning. The earliest portion of this enterprise comprised the Pentateuch, translated by Jewish scholars around the mid-third century BCE. Over subsequent generations, further books joined the corpus, extending the enterprise across multiple stages, and most of the Hebrew scriptures were probably available in Greek by the second century BCE.

A persistent tradition explained this translation as a royal commission from King Ptolemy II Philadelphus. As recounted in the Letter of Aristeas, a work regarded by modern scholars as pseudepigraphical, Ptolemy requested seventy-two elders from Jerusalem to produce an authoritative Greek version of the Jewish Law for the collection at the Library of Alexandria. Later iterations of the account, echoed in rabbinic writings and early Christian texts, claimed that these scholars translated the text in isolation yet arrived at identical wording. Philo of Alexandria, writing in the first century CE, described an annual festival on the island of Pharos honoring the translation, but most modern scholars regard the Letter's account as legend, written well over a century after the Pentateuch was translated.