The Daily Mail meets the Septuagint

THE SEPTUAGINT is mentioned in the Daily Mail, which is impressive, even though it predictably gets it wrong. This in a somewhat overly enthusiastic article about Alexander the Great and Alexandria.

The father of civilisation: Alexander the Great's hunger for knowledge gave us everything from the Old Testament to algebra and even robots

By Bettany Hughes

Last updated at 8:50 AM on 26th March 2010

There is not, and has never been, another city to match it. It was a glittering metropolis, home to the most sexually charismatic queen of all time, founded by a man whose megalomaniac ambitions knew no bounds.

It was a buzzing hub that boasted one of the seven wonders of the world, where intellectual geniuses from both East and West met to tussle and debate in a library containing all the knowledge on the planet.

Founded more than 2,300 years ago, and in its hey-day one of the most powerful places in the world, this is now a lost city, most of it buried beneath waves off the coast of modern Egypt.
Alexander the Great: The Greek leader made Alexandria a place of knowledge, discovery and sexual intrigues

Alexander the Great: The Greek leader made Alexandria a place of knowledge, discovery and sexual intrigues

This is the city of Alexandria. By rights, Alexandria should be a household name, as famous as Athens or Rome. Make no mistake, this was a metropolis as beautiful as Paris, as creative as London, as hip as New York and more learned than Harvard.

And yet, as I discovered while researching a new documentary, somehow this amazing urban experiment is just a footnote in history.

[...]

The mention of the Septuagint is here:

Soon after, Euclid devised the system of geometry that still torments our schoolchildren today. This was also where the Old Testament was preserved for future generations.

It was said that 72 of the best scholars who spoke both Hebrew and Greek worked for 72 days in 72 separate cells to translate the old testament texts into Greek.

Their efforts - named then and today 'the Septuagint' - were not wasted. The Old Testament only survives into the 21st-century thanks to the men of Alexandria in the 2nd-century BC.

This basic story is found in the Letter to Aristeas. Aristeas is itself legendary, but the business about the 72 different cells is a still later improvement of the story. See here for more. The Pentateuch does seem to have been translated in Alexandria in the third (not second) century BCE, with the translation of the other books of the Hebrew Bible coming over the next couple of centuries, with revisions continuing after that.

The business about the Old Testament surviving only "thanks to the men of Alexandria" is, of course, nonsense. The Hebrew text was transmitted quite independently of them.

As for this:

From the death of Hypatia onwards, rival factions battled for control of the city. In 641 AD, as Arab forces swept along the coast, what was left of Alexandria's great libraries were burnt in a whirlwind of battle fires.

The story that Muslim fanatics burned down the Library of Alexandria keeps getting repeated, but the sources for it are late and unreliable. See here and follow the link at the end.

I'm looking forward to seeing Rachel Weisz as Hypatia.