The Auncient History of the Septuagint. Written in Greeke, by Aristeus 1900. Yeares since. Of his Voyage to Hierusalem, as Ambassador from Ptolomeus Philadelphus, unto Eleazer then Pontiffe of the Jewes [...]

Full title: The Auncient History of the Septuagint. Written in Greeke, by Aristeus 1900. Yeares since. Of his Voyage to Hierusalem, as Ambassador from Ptolomeus Philadelphus, unto Eleazer then Pontiffe of the Jewes. Concerning the First Translation of the Holy Bible, by the 72. Interpreters. With many other remarkable Circumstances. Newly done into English By J. Done.

12mo. pp. 219. Modern boards. Stamp of the Johns Hopkins University Library. Charles Deane’s copy with his autograph. Signature of Revd Berkelow on title page.

First edition of this English translation, once misattributed to the poet John Donne and Dean of St Paul’s, or to his son. The account of the (Greek) translation of the ‘Hebrew Law’ or ‘Bible’, achieved in seventy-two days by seventy-two Hebrew scholars imported to Alexandria by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the third century BC – framed here as a letter from the Egyptian courtier Aristeas of Marmora to his brother Philocrates, and first reported by Josephus – is now regarded as entirely spurious, an anonymous Hellenistic forgery of perhaps c.150 BC, designed to establish the superiority of the Septuagint translation over any other version of the text, and to defend or promote Judaism among gentiles and pagan Greeks, e.g. by identifying Zeus with the God of Israel. Despite its historical anachronism and overt revisionist apology, the letter enjoyed widespread reproduction for well over a millennium. It would have to await the 1685 dissertation of the future Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Humphrey Hody, for its first systematic demolition, although its appearance also inspired some spirited rebuttals. The most notable of these was the sniffy reply of the Dutch manuscript collector and scholar-librarian to the queen of Sweden, Isaac Vossius, in a posthumous publication of 1705.

See STC 750.5; G. Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr John Donne, by Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford, 1973, no. 204; E. Havens, “Babelic Confusion. Literary Forgery and the Bibliotheca Fictiva,” in W. Stephens & E. Havens (eds.), Literary forgery in early modern Europe, 1450-1800, Baltimore, 2018, pp. 42-44..

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