The First Translations The Septuagint, mid-3rd century BC
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By the 3rd century BC, after the conquest of much of the Middle East by Alexander the Great and his successors, there were many Jewish people living outside Palestine, in Egypt and elsewhere, who no longer understood even Aramaic, let alone the Hebrew in which most of their Scriptures were written. Some translations were therefore made into Greek, the most commonly-used language of the region. The most famous of these at the time was the Septuagint, which was regarded with great respect because of a tradition that seventy scholars from Alexandria (in Egypt) had worked under divine inspiration for seventy days to produce it (this was why it was called “Septuagint”, which means “seventy”). Later, many of the early Christians also used this as their holy book. Several books written in Greek by Jewish authors of this period were often grouped together with the texts translated from Hebrew and Aramaic, and were also regarded as holy scripture; many Christian churches still recognise some of these books. They are correctly called the Deuterocanon, or sometimes, less accurately, the Apocrypha. Although the ancient Hebrew texts had been written on long rolls of leather, in Egypt a more convenient writing material was a kind of “paper” made from strips of fibre from the stalks of the papyrus plant. These were laid at right angles to each other, then pounded and treated until they stuck together and formed a smooth writing surface. This was not a suitable material outside Egypt, however; in a drier climate, it became brittle, while in a wetter one it soon rotted. Elsewhere, therefore, people used vellum (the treated skin of sheep or goats), or other materials. |
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