Sometime between the middle of the second century and the late
first century BCE, an anonymous Jew of Ptolemaic Alexandria
authored a fictional letter, containing a remarkable story of
Jewish-Greek cooperation. Told through its fictional, Gentile
narrator, Aristeas, the letter, known as The Letter of Aristeas,
recounts the story of the Hebrew Torah’s translation into
Greek, commissioned by King Ptolemy II for the library of
Alexandria but carried out by Jewish translators sent by
Jerusalem’s High Priest. Culturally, the Letter is a striking
text. It frequently asserts the pre-eminence of the Biblical god
and its prophet, Moses, alongside its recurrent and unapologetic
use of Greek literary conventions and philosophy. In light of
this remarkable tension, one might wonder what the author’s
intention was for such a text as this. Accordingly, this study
will seek to ascertain the Letter’s intended function and the
author’s likely impetus or motivation for writing his work.
Scholars, such as Tcherikover and, more recently, Wright have
made many attempts to ascertain the purpose of the Letter, often
involving claims that the author was seeking to persuade hesitant
Jews to embrace Greek society and thus wrote the Letter to
achieve this purpose. These scholars have often imagined the
readership to be conservative Jews,
cautious about embracing Greek society and culture. Moreover,
even those who reject thistheory and instead consider the Letter
propaganda for the Septuagint, often view the text’s readership
as consisting of deeply faithful Jews. Therefore, scholarship has
sadly tended to overlook the possibility that the Letter’s
author (known as Pseudo-Aristeas) might have been writing
specifically for Jews with a weaker attachment to Judaism or,
indeed, those who had abandoned Judaism altogether.
Following this line of thinking, this study, by considering the
Letter itself and other Alexandrian sources, shall argue that
Pseudo-Aristeas was actually addressing these Jews of limited
religious conviction, whose insufficient religiosity, if not
apostasy, served as Pseudo-Aristeas’ main impetus in writing
the Letter. Moreover, this text’s overarching purpose, as I
shall demonstrate, was to restore the Jewish identities of these
wavering Jews by persuading them to re-embrace the traditions of
their forefathers. Pseudo-Aristeas also sought to safeguard his
readers’ newly restored identities (assuming that they
re-embraced Judaism) by providing them with ethical instruction
that would prevent them from ‘relapsing’ into an
insufficiently Jewish lifestyle
