Where was the Septuagint made?

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Accepted Answer

In Alexandria, the Greek capital of Egypt founded by Alexander in 331 BC, about 510 km from Jerusalem in a straight line; the map point stands on it. The Jews of the city, who spoke Greek and were losing their Hebrew, translated the Law of Moses there in the third century BC, and the rest of the scriptures followed over the next two centuries, so that by about 132 BC the grandson of Ben Sira could write in his prologue that the Law, the Prophets and the rest of the books read differently in Greek than in Hebrew. The story of the translation is told in the Letter of Aristeas, written in Alexandria in the second century BC: King Ptolemy II (283–246 BC), at the suggestion of his librarian, asked the high priest in Jerusalem for seventy-two elders, six from each tribe, who translated the Law on the island of Pharos in seventy-two days. Philo, an Alexandrian Jew of Jesus' time, says the city kept an annual festival on Pharos in honour of the translation, and Josephus retells the letter at length. The number gave the version its name, “the Seventy”, Septuaginta in Latin. Most scholars accept the time and place while treating the royal commission and the miraculous agreement of the translators as legend. This was the Bible of the first Christians outside Palestine. When Luke quotes the passage the Ethiopian eunuch was reading, “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer”, the words follow the Greek of Isaiah; Apollos, “born at Alexandria, an eloquent man, and mighty in the scriptures”, had learned them in that form. The Dead Sea Scrolls include Greek fragments of the Pentateuch from the second and first centuries BC, among the oldest copies, and some Hebrew texts closer to the Septuagint's source than to the later Masoretic text.