Yossi Shain

Jan 14, 2025 | jewishreviewofbooks.com | Malka Simkovich |Akiva Schick |Hillel Halkin |Yossi Shain

In the late third century BCE, a group of scholars working on a translation project in Egypt invented a Greek word that would change the course of Jewish—and arguably human— history. The project was to render the Hebrew Torah into Koine Greek. According to a second-century BCE novella called the Letter of Aristeas, the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus (the son of Alexander the Great’s general) commissioned a Greek translation of the Torah for the royal library.