The Septuagint: Hebrew scripture translated into Greek
- Date
- c. 250 BCE
- Category
- Religion & ideology
- Region
- Egypt (Alexandria)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
Around the middle of the 3rd century BCE, the Torah was translated from Hebrew into Koine Greek at Alexandria, the first portion of what became the Septuagint.
Tradition, preserved in the Letter of Aristeas, attributes the project to the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus and to seventy-two Jewish scholars, giving the version its name (from the Latin for seventy). In reality it served the large Greek-speaking Jewish community of the Egyptian diaspora, many of whom no longer understood Hebrew. The remaining books were rendered over the following century. The Septuagint was a landmark of cultural fusion in the Hellenistic world, expressing Jewish religious tradition in the dominant language of the eastern Mediterranean. It became the scripture of Greek-speaking Jews and, later, the Bible of the early Christian church, profoundly shaping the vocabulary and transmission of Western religious thought.
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Empires active in c. 250 BCE
- Maurya Empire322 BCE – 185 BCE
- Roman Republic509 BCE – 27 BCE
- Odrysian Kingdom480 BCE – 46 CE
- Seleucid Empire312 BCE – 63 BCE
- Ptolemaic Kingdom305 BCE – 30 BCE
- Kingdom of Kush1070 BCE – 350 CE
Related religion & ideology events
- Ashoka commissions the Great Stupa at Sanchic. 250 BCE
- Third Buddhist Council and Ashoka's Buddhist missionsc. 250 BCE
- Confucianism becomes Han state ideology; Imperial Academy foundedc. 136–124 BCE
- Enlightenment of the Buddha at Bodh Gayac. 528 BCE (traditional)
- Crucifixion of Jesus and the origins of Christianityc. 30 CE
- Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem70 CE
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Religion
Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.
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