From the making of the translation one can trace the movement that ended in Christianity.  By reading their Scriptures in Greek, Jews began to think them in Greek and according to Greek conceptions.  Certain commentators have seen in the Septuagint itself the infusion of Greek philosophical ideas.  Be this as it may, it is certain that the version facilitated the introduction of Greek philosophy into the interpretation of Scripture, and gave a new meaning to certain Hebraic conceptions, by suggesting comparison with strange notions.  This aspect of the work led the rabbis of Palestine and Babylon in later days, when the spread of Hellenized Judaism was fraught with misery to the race, to regard it as an awful calamity, and to recount a tale of a plague of darkness which fell upon Palestine for three days when it was made;[22] and they observed a fast day in place of the old Alexandrian feast on the anniversary of its completion.  They felt as the old Italian proverb has it, Traduttori, traditori! ("Translators are traitors!").  And the Midrash in the same spirit declares[23] that the oral law was not written down, because God knew that otherwise it would be translated into Greek, and He wished it to be the special mystery of His people, as the Bible no longer was.

The Septuagint translation of the Bible was one answer to the lying accounts of Israel’s early history concocted by anti-Semitic writers.  As we have seen,[24] the Alexandrian Jews began early to write histories and re-edit the Bible stories to the same purpose.  And for some time their writings were mainly apologetic, designed, whatever their form, to serve a defensive purpose.  But later they took the offensive against the paganism and immorality of the peoples about them, and the missionary spirit became predominant.  Alexander Polyhistor, who lived in the first century, included in his “History of the Jews” fragments of these early Jewish historians and apologists, which the Christian bishop Eusebius has handed down to us.  From them we can gather some notion of the strange medley of fact and imagination which was composed to influence the Gentile world.  Abraham is said to have instructed the Egyptians in astrology; Joseph devised a great system of agriculture; Moses was identified variously with the legendary Greek seer Musaeus and the god Hermes.  A favorite device for rebutting the calumnies of detractors and attracting the outer world to Jewish ideas, was the attachment to some ancient source of panegyrics upon Judaism and monotheism.  To the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and the Greek historian Hecataeeus, who wrote a history of the world, passages which glorify the Hebrew people and the Hebrew God were ascribed.  Still more daring was the conversion into archaic hexameter verse of the stories of Genesis and Exodus, and of Messianic prophecies in the guise of Sibylline oracles.  The Sibyl, whom the superstitions of the time revered as an inspired seeress of prehistoric