copied (Antiq. 12. 2), is for substance as follows: Ptolemy Philadelphus
(who reigned from B.C. 285 to 247), at the suggestion of his librarian
Demetrius Phalereus, after having first liberated all the Jewish
captives found in his kingdom, sent an embassy with costly gifts to
Eleazar the high priest at Jerusalem, requesting that he would send him
chosen men, six from each of the twelve tribes, with a copy of the
Jewish law, that it might be interpreted from the Hebrew into the Greek
and laid up in the royal library at Alexandria. Eleazar accordingly sent
the seventy-two elders with a copy of the laws written on parchments in
letters of gold, who were received by the king with high honors,
sumptuously feasted, and afterwards lodged in a palace on an island
(apparently Pharos in the harbor of Alexandria), where they completed
their work in seventy-two days, and were then sent home with munificent
gifts. The story that they were shut up in seventy-two separate cells
(according to another legend two by two in thirty-six cells), where they
had no communication with each other and yet produced as many versions
agreeing with each other word for word, was a later embellishment
designed (as indeed were all the legends respecting the origin of this
version) to exalt its character in the apprehension of the people, and
to gain for it an authority equal to that of the inspired original.

3. The letter ascribed to Aristeas is now generally admitted to be
spurious. It purports to have been written by a heathen scholar, yet it
bears throughout marks of a Jewish origin. It represents the translators
as Jewish elders sent by the high priest from Jerusalem. Yet the version
is acknowledged to be in the Alexandrine Greek dialect. For these and
other reasons learned men ascribe its authorship to a Jew whose object
was to exalt the merits of the Alexandrine version in the estimation of
his nation. But we are not, for this reason, warranted to pronounce the
whole account a pure fable, as many have done. We may well believe that
the work was executed under the auspices of Ptolemy, and for the purpose
of enriching his library. But we must believe that it was executed by
Jews born in Egypt to whom the Greek language was vernacular, and
probably from manuscripts of Egyptian origin. Thus much is manifest from
the face of the version, that it was made by different men, and with
different degrees of ability and fidelity.

The name _Septuagint_ (