Fact-Checking the Torah -- another one bites the dust

Turn it over and over, you never get to the end of it.

So I'm doing my Daf Yomi, Megillah 9a-b, and it gets to the Talmud version of the origin of Septuagint.

Only it's not 70 (LXX you know), it's 72. That's a magic number in Judaism: remember Numbers 11:24-29 with the 70 elders plus Eldad and Medad. I would claim that the 70 languages of Talmud Sotah 32b and other citations were in addition to Hebrew and Aramaic, but apparently the number 70 is the descendants of Noach, which includes Shem. (Although 72 is important in gematria.)

Talmai Melekh puts each of these rabbis into a separate room and each comes up with a Greek version of Torah. All of them are identical. None of them are word for word translations. That's a good thing.

The way the rabbis all translated was the same. Every single one of them came up with the same results. That's the Holy Spirit for you.

And what they did, for example, was change the order of words. Instead of translating bereshit and putting it down, then translating bara, and so on, they translated elohim and put that down, then bara, then something else.

Anybody here read the Septuagint lately? That's not how my copy reads. Here's the Williamson Talmud bilingual version of the page in Megillah.

So the Septuagint that has survived, is not what these rabbis wrote. Where did it come from? The Aristaeas letter says Ptolemy got six rabbis from each of the twelve tribes to do it.

{{screech}}

By the time of Ptolemy, the following tribes survived: the Levites, as priests, so descended from Aharon, among both Jews and Samaritans; other Levites, among the Jews but not the Samaritans; the descendants of Yehudah, plus descendants of Gentile converts such as the ancestors of Shemaiah and Abtalion, as Jews; three male DNA lineages among the Samaritans, which survive today. There are at most 5 tribes nowadays, and we can't DNA test for any others because we don't have the test material. There won't be any Richard-the-third reveal here.  

There's a further urban legend involved. "Rabbi" is a Jewish term. What a Samaritan expert was called at the time, I don't know. But a Samaritan expert in their scripture was not an expert according to the Jews. The Jews and Samaritans had been at daggers drawn ever since the Jews returned from Babylon. If you read your Bible you know that. It got so bad that when the Seleucid Syrians attacked across the Holy Land to take Egypt from the Ptolemies, the Jews fought for Egypt (how did that happen, wink, wink?) and the Samaritans fought for Syria. Ever after Egypt and Judea were allies, notably under the famous Cleopatra VII.

If you read my blog, you also know that the contents of Samaritan Pentateuch are not identical to Jewish Torah. The differences come under different headings so start here and read to the end of the blog. The important fact being that when the Samaritan Moses goes up to the top of Pisgah and looks out over the Holy Land, he doesn't see the lands of the northern tribes. While the Samaritan Pentateuch was being transmitted orally, the names of those tribes vanished from this part of Deuteronomy. While the Samaritans have a Joshua, it does not record the sharing out of the land that starts in chapter 15; the Samaritan Joshua instead has a story set in Hasmonean times, as attested by geographic names, with a literate format instead of an oral one. Samaritan "Chronicle" ignores the Assyrian invasion entirely, although it does talk about Nevuchadnetsar. The Samaritans have not recorded genealogies like the ones in Jewish Chronicles I. These are all signs of things that nobody cared about among the ten tribes, not even keeping track of their descent in the male line. There's no tradition of who those three male lineages are descended from.

All of the manuscripts of the Aristaeas letter date after 1000 CE. How old could this letter be and still report such an urban legend? Well, remember, between 200 and 600 CE everything in Talmud was put into writing. The letter's "six rabbis from each tribe" sounds like an urban legend built on top of what Megillah says; urban legends always exaggerate and they always incorporate ignorance. So whoever wrote the letter didn't know anything about Jewish history. The 400 year period until the oldest surviving manuscript of the letter is plenty of time for such an urban legend to develop.

But it would develop out of Talmud and there weren't many Greek geeks at that time reading Talmud, or so I would think. The best-known Greek geeks of antiquity were Eusebius and his heir-in-Greekness Origen, of the 200s and 300s CE. Origen left us his Hexapla, with the Septuagint and the Greek of Aquila (supposedly written under the direction of Rabbi Akiva) -- and this section of Megillah in Talmud is all about how Greek is the only language legal to write a Torah scroll in. This ruling is attributed to Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai who died about 170 CE, but the story about Talmai is not attributed so we have no date for it other than "some time during the development of the oral tradition of Talmud". How it would get into the hands of a Greek geek who is trying to promote the importance of Septuagint, I can't tell you.

And before you tell me that the early Church fathers used Septuagint, read this.

There are three other possibilities, each of which I can knock down.

Supposedly Josephus who died about 100 CE refers to it in his Antiquities but we know that things have been inserted into Antiquities by people who a) copied the grammar of Thucydides. Book 18, sections 65-80 of the Greek (Whiston's English is not numbered this way) are known by their grammar to be an interpolation by somebody using a different grammar than anywhere else in Josephus. What did I say about validating authorship? It works here. 

And b) 18:63-64 is also an interpolation. It uses words that Josephus never uses elsewhere, in bad grammar, and implies meanings Josephus never would have used. These two bits are in one and only one surviving copy of Wars of the Jews, and they are known to be a forgery there. So the scenario is that a Christian, who owned copies of both works, wrote a new manuscript of Wars which included the forgery, and then made the same change to Antiquities.

So just because our surviving version of Josephus refers, supposedly, to the Aristaeas letter doesn't mean that's how he originally wrote it.

The two-fer comes with the claim that Philo's "Jewish Antiquities" also refers to the Aristaeas letter, and we know that he died about 50 CE. Or do we? Remember what I said about Philo. The blatant ignorance and falsehood in Philo's Antiquities shows that no educated Jew wrote this. It wouldn't be the only example in antiquity of one person claiming that somebody else -- somebody famous -- wrote his material. So even if "Philo" refers to the Aristaeas, that doesn't mean the Philo of the Embassy to Gaius knew about the Aristaeas letter. The person who used Philo's name without authorization "knew" it. Or maybe not. As we can tell from Josephus, some Greek geek could have inserted info about the Aristaeas letter into "Philo".

The third place that refers to the letter is Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Book 8, chapter 1 and 2. And the problem here is that we know Eusebius reports urban legends. In History of the Church, Book II, chapter 17, point 1, he says he heard that Peter and Philo met up in Rome. Peter was executed in Rome in 54 CE. It all depends on how long you think Peter was in Rome before his execution. By the time Eusebius heard of this, 200 years had passed after Peter's death, plenty of time to create the legend. 

So the earliest that we know of a "letter of Aristaeas" is the late 200s to early 300s CE, almost half a millennium after Ptolemy I, and Eusebius' claim that Aristaeas was well-educated crashes on the rocks of the "six from each tribe" urban legend. Given that Eusebius reports an urban legend without questioning it, we can't trust him about anything he reports, unless we have external verification.

The question is, why is Megillah not an urban legend while Aristaeas is? Well, Aristaeas apparently originated in writing, not as an oral tradition; it transmits false information about its purported subject; and the oldest verifiable version shows up in a culture other than the one the letter is supposedly about.  Megillah is part of an oral tradition. 

Bottom line. The Septuagint that survived to the 300s CE for Origen to use in the Hexapla, even if it's the same one that survived for Brenton to translate badly in the 1840s CE, is not what Talmud Megillah 9a-b is talking about. It's not Aquila; what Talmud Megillah says is not in the Hexapla for "A" on page 6 of that. So it's a good thing that I already showed that Septuagint is a bad translation because it ignores high-frequency grammar and uses words all wrong. It means Jews don't care where Septuagint came from or that Megillah exposes that it probably wasn't written by Jewish rabbis.

Jews reject translations and external commentaries and interpretations of our literature. We can't afford to waste time on them because there's so much of our own literature to learn, and it supports that the external material is all badly done.