The Letter of Aristeas

The Letter of Aristeas
Author: Benjamin G. Wright III
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2015-09
Genre: Bible
ISBN: 9783110431353

In modern scholarship, there has been no fully fledged commentary written on the Letter of Aristeas, an important work of Hellenistic Judaism in Alexandria, which contains the earliest version of the translation of the Septuagint. This volume fills that gap. The book will be of relevance to anyone interested in Hellenistic Judaism, the Septuagint, the ancient Jewish community in Alexandria or ancient Jewish paideia.

Aristeas to Philocrates

Aristeas to Philocrates
Author: Moses Hadas
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2007-07-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1556355068

The work commonly known as the Letter of Aristeas presents an account of the genesis of the Septuagint, and incidentally reflects currents of religious thought at a significant period of history. The book is a work of conscious literary art, composed according to the canons of the Greek schools, and the exaggerations and inaccuracies that have marred its credit in the past are marks not of the author's ignorance or bad faith but of the genre to which it belongs. Considered against its historical and intellectual background, Aristeas to Philocrates is a document of first-class importance and a unique specimen of its kind in the literature of the period. Professor Hadas's edition studies the book from the point of view of its literary as well as religious affinities and significance. His introduction fixes the place of the book in the history of Greek literature as well as of the religious development of the Jews, and his running commentary similarly illustrates the text from both points of view. The translation is in straightforward English. The Greek text is that of H. St. J. Thackeray and the brief critical notes that accompany it are by Professor Hadas.

The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria

The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria
Author: Sylvie Honigman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2004-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134462948

The Letter of Aristeas tells the story of how Ptolemy Philadelphus of Egypt commissioned seventy scholars to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek. Long accepted as a straightforward historical account of a cultural enterprise in Ptolemaic Alexandria, the Letter nevertheless poses serious interpretative problems. Sylvie Honigman argues that the Letter should not be regarded as history, but as a charter myth for diaspora Judaism. She expounds its generic affinities with other works on Jewish history from Ptolemaic Alexandria, and argues that the process of translation was simultaneously a process of establishing an authoritative text, comparable to the work on the text of Homer being carried out by contemporary Greek scholars. The Letter of Aristeas is among the most intriguing literary productions of Ptolemaic Alexandria, and this is the first book-length study to be devoted to it.

The Meaning of the Letter of Aristeas

The Meaning of the Letter of Aristeas
Author: Ekaterina Matusova
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2015-05-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3647540439

Ekaterin Matusova offers a new approach to the old problems of interpretation of the "Letter of Aristeas".Chapter 1 deals with the question of the structure of the narrative. Matusova argues that at the time of Aristeas compositions of the kind of the Reworked Pentateuch, or Rewritten Bible were circulating in Egypt in parallel with the LXX and were a source of interpretations of the Hebrew text different from the LXX and of specific combinations of subjects popular in Second Temple Judaism. In particular, Matusova further argues that the leading principle of the composition of the Letter is that of the Reworked Deuteronomy, where subjects referring to the idea of following the Law among the gentiles were grouped together. The analysis is based on a broad circle of Jewish sources, including Philo of Alexandria and documents from the Qumran library. The principle of the composition discovered in this part of the study is referred to as the Jewish paradigm.Chapter 2 offers a new interpretation of the frame story in the narrative, i.e. of the story of the translation in the strict sense. Matusova shows that two paradigms are skilfully combined in this split story: the Jewish one, based on the Bible, and the Greek one, which involves Greek grammatical theory. She further argues that the story, when read in terms of Greek grammar, turns out to be a consistent story not of the translation, but of the correction of the LXX, which is important for our understanding of the early history of the translation. The analysis involves extensive excurses into Greek grammatical theory, including a discussion of Aristotle, Dionysius Thrax and other Hellenistic grammarians.In Chapter 3 Matusova tries to find the reason for the combination of these two paradigms, namely the Jewish biblical paradigm and the Greek grammatical ones, and to interpret their interconnected meaning, by placing it in the broad historical context of the Ptolemaic state

The Legend of the Septuagint

The Legend of the Septuagint
Author: Abraham Wasserstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2006-04-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 113945501X

The Septuagint is the most influential of the Greek versions of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. The exact circumstances of its creation are uncertain, but different versions of a legend about the miraculous nature of the translation have existed since antiquity. Beginning in the Letter of Aristeas, the legend describes how Ptolemy Philadelphus commissioned seventy-two Jewish scribes to translate the sacred Hebrew scriptures for his famous library in Alexandria. Subsequent variations on the story recount how the scribes, working independently, produced word-for-word, identical Greek versions. In the course of the following centuries, to our own time, the story has been adapted and changed by Jews, Christians, Muslims and pagans for many different reasons: to tell a story, to explain historical events and to lend authority to the Greek text for the institutions that used it. This book offers the first account of all of these versions over the last two millennia, providing a history of the uses and abuses of the legend in various cultures around the Mediterranean.

The Letter of Aristeas

The Letter of Aristeas
Author: Thackeray H St J (Henry St John)
Publisher: Legare Street Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-10-27
Genre:
ISBN: 9781015803367

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism

The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism
Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 588
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110375559

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

The Formation of the Jewish Canon

The Formation of the Jewish Canon
Author: Timothy H. Lim
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2013-10-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0300164343

DIVThe discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provides unprecedented insight into the nature of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament before its fixation. Timothy Lim here presents a complete account of the formation of the canon in Ancient Judaism from the emergence of the Torah in the Persian period to the final acceptance of the list of twenty-two/twenty-four books in the Rabbinic period./divDIV /divDIVUsing the Hebrew Bible, the Scrolls, the Apocrypha, the Letter of Aristeas, the writings of Philo, Josephus, the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature as primary evidence he argues that throughout the post-exilic period up to around 100 CE there was not one official “canon” accepted by all Jews; rather, there existed a plurality of collections of scriptures that were authoritative for different communities. Examining the literary sources and historical circumstances that led to the emergence of authoritative scriptures in ancient Judaism, Lim proposes a theory of the majority canon that posits that the Pharisaic canon became the canon of Rabbinic Judaism in the centuries after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple./div

Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginnings of Christian Epistolography

Ancient Jewish Letters and the Beginnings of Christian Epistolography
Author: Lutz Doering
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783161522369

The author provides the most extensive analysis available of ancient Jewish letter writing from the Persian period until the early rabbinic literature. In addition, he demonstrates the significance of Jewish letters for the development of early Christian letter writing.