Fancy and legend attached themselves early to an event fraught with such importance for the history of the race and mankind as the translation of the Scriptures into the language of the cultured world.  From this overgrowth it is difficult to construct a true narrative; still, the research of latter-day scholars has gone far to prove a basis of truth in the statements made in the famous letter of the pseudo-Aristeas, which professes to describe the origin of the work.  We may extract from his story that the Septuagint was written in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, about 250 B.C.E., with the approval, if not at the express request, of the king, and with the help of rabbis brought from Palestine to give authority to the work.  But we need not believe with later legend that each of the seventy translators was locked up in a separate cell for seventy days till he had finished the whole work, and that when they were let out they were all found to have written exactly the same words.  Philo gives us a version of the event, romantic, indeed, but more rational, in his “Life of Moses."[19] He tells how Ptolemy, having conceived a great admiration for the laws of Moses, sent ambassadors to the high priest of Juddea, requesting him to choose out a number of learned men that might translate them into Greek.  “These were duly chosen, and came to the king’s court, and were allotted the Isle of Pharos as the most tranquil spot in the city for carrying out their work; by God’s grace they all found the exact Greek words to correspond to the Hebrew words, so that they were not mere translators, but prophets to whom it had been granted to follow in the divinity of their minds the sublime spirit of Moses.”  “On which account,” he adds, “even to this day there is in every year celebrated a festival in the Island of Pharos, to which not only Jews but many persons of other nations sail across, reverencing the place in which the light of interpretation first shone forth, and thanking God for His ancient gift to man, which has eternal youth and freshness.”  It is significant that Philo makes no mention in his books of the festival of Hanukah, while the Talmud has no mention of this feast of Pharos; the Alexandrian Jews celebrated the day when the Bible was brought within reach of the Greek world, the Palestinians the day when the Greeks were driven out of the temple.  At the same time the celebrations in honor of the Septuagint and of the deliverance from the Ptolemaic persecution[20] are remarkable illustrations of a living Jewish tradition at Alexandria, which attached a religious consecration to the special history of the community.

It is not correct to say with Philo that the translator rendered each word of the Hebrew with literal faithfulness, so as to give its proper force.  Rather may we accept the words of the Greek translator of Ben Sira:  “Things originally spoken in Hebrew have not the same force in them when they are translated into another tongue, and not only these, but the law itself (the Torah) and the prophecies and the rest of the books have no small difference when they are spoken in their original language."[21]