Alexander’s Conquests and the Spread of Greek

The decisive background to the Septuagint is the transformation of the eastern Mediterranean after Alexander the Great launched his Asian campaign in 334 B.C.E. The chain of victories—Granicus in 334 B.C.E., Issus in 333 B.C.E., and Gaugamela in 331 B.C.E.—broke Achaemenid control and opened the Near East to a new political unity under Macedonian arms. Alexander founded Alexandria in Egypt in 331 B.C.E. and continued east to the Indus before his death in Babylon in 323 B.C.E. The empire quickly divided among his successors, yet the cultural and linguistic shift he initiated remained. The Greek language became the everyday medium of administration, commerce, and urban life from Egypt to the Levant and deep into Mesopotamia. This is the world in which the Greek Old Testament arose.

Greek did not displace local tongues by decree alone. Aramaic had served as the administrative language of the Achaemenids and continued to be spoken widely; Hebrew persisted within Judea’s religious and family life. Yet the creation of garrison cities, royal foundations, and trading colonies inserted Greek speech into every significant port and administrative hub. Macedonian and Greek settlers received land and privileges, and municipal life was organized along Hellenic lines. The result was not a fragile bilingualism but a robust Koine Greek that levelled Attic refinements into a shared, practical idiom. The Koine that emerged across the third and second centuries B.C.E. provided a neutral platform for law courts, tax records, merchant contracts, and learned correspondence. It is the same Koine in which the Septuagint translators rendered the Hebrew Scriptures.

Koine Greek’s rise is explained by stability and utility. The successors—Ptolemies in Egypt and Seleucids in Syria-Mesopotamia—needed a language that could bind soldiers, clerks, and traders within new administrative networks. Greek filled that role. Royal chancelleries issued orders and recorded receipts in Greek; harbor masters kept rolls in Greek; guilds and immigrant associations framed their statutes in Greek. Bilingualism persisted at the village level, especially in Judea where Hebrew and Aramaic remained central to synagogue and family life. Yet in cosmopolitan centers such as Alexandria, Antioch, and Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, a Jewish traveler could buy and sell, petition authorities, and debate Scripture using Greek without friction. The Septuagint answered a real linguistic need: Greek-speaking Jews required the Law, Prophets, and Writings in the language that structured their daily affairs.

The political contour of the period mattered. After Alexander’s death, Ptolemy I Soter took Egypt and secured Judea intermittently before the Seleucid ascendancy. The Ptolemaic dynasty (305–30 B.C.E.) governed through Greek institutions layered upon Egyptian realities. Their regime encouraged Mediterranean trade, established a standing bureaucracy, and fostered scholarly activity around the royal Museion. The Seleucids, in turn, attempted to consolidate control in Syria and Mesopotamia, founding cities and settling soldiers on land. This competition drew Judea into the orbit of both powers. Regardless of which house controlled Coele-Syria at any given moment, the language of court and city remained Greek. The centuries between 300 and 100 B.C.E. therefore guaranteed that a Greek Bible would be both usable and widely read wherever Jewish communities lived beyond Judea.

Koine’s status as the lingua franca also shaped the translators’ style. Translators could assume that their readers were familiar with the conventions of Greek legal and administrative prose. They adopted standard Greek equivalents for regular Hebrew juridical terms, maintained consistent renderings for cultic vocabulary, and coined Greek expressions that, while Hebraized in rhythm and syntax, still read as Greek to a Hellenistic audience. They chose clarity over ornament, regularity over colloquial flair. This explains why the Pentateuch often presents Greek that is literal to the point of stiffness: the translators preferred exactness, knowing that their audience valued a careful bridge to the Hebrew wording they revered.

The decision to translate began with the Torah in the early third century B.C.E., within the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 B.C.E.). That chronological anchor fits the broader Hellenistic language situation. By that date, Greek was already the language of civic life in Alexandria and the river ports of the Delta. Jewish settlers who managed warehouses, counted grain, and coordinated shipments could not be expected to master Hebrew fluently enough for synagogue exposition unaided by a Greek version. The Torah’s translation provided that aid. As the Hellenistic centuries progressed, the same linguistic forces pressed for translations of the Prophets and the Writings. The world Alexander had made guaranteed a Greek Scripture.

The ascendancy of Greek also established durable reading habits. A Jew born in Cyrene or Alexandria in 240 B.C.E. grew up hearing Genesis and Exodus read in Greek, learning the commandments in Greek, and praying psalms by Greek phrasing while still honoring the Hebrew originals. This reality carried into the first century C.E., when Christian congregations across the Mediterranean heard the Scriptures in Greek. The Septuagint’s vocabulary stocked the New Testament’s theological lexicon precisely because Koine united the eastern empire linguistically. Thus, when pastors today observe that New Testament authors quote Old Testament verses in Greek forms close to the LXX, they are witnessing the natural outcome of a language policy set in motion by Alexander’s conquests and solidified under his successors.

Jewish Life in the Hellenistic World

The spread of Greek did not erase Israel’s identity. It created new contexts in which faithfulness to Jehovah’s Law had to be articulated in multilingual cities, mixed legal systems, and synagogues built for expatriate communities. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E., Jews had already begun to live in Egypt and throughout the Near East; the return in 537 B.C.E. restored worship in Jerusalem but did not reverse diaspora patterns. The Hellenistic centuries enlarged and formalized these communities, furnishing civic privileges and responsibilities that required Greek literacy and cultural competence without compelling spiritual compromise.

In Egypt, Jews organized as a politeuma, a recognized corporate body with internal governance, courts, and synagogues. This arrangement gave Jews substantial freedom to adjudicate disputes according to ancestral law while participating in the larger Ptolemaic order. In cities such as Alexandria, Naucratis, and Memphis, Jewish associations met in synagogues that functioned as houses of prayer and instruction. Public inscriptions and communal decrees reveal a Jewish population comfortable using Greek titles for offices and Greek forms for donor lists while maintaining the Sabbath, circumcision, and dietary laws. The need to expound the Law to children and to litigants who lived and worked in Greek strengthened the case for a Greek Torah.

Linguistically, Jewish life in the diaspora exhibited predictable patterns. Family piety and synagogue reading preserved Hebrew and Aramaic formulas, especially in prayer and blessing. At the same time, daily life demanded Greek. Children named Yehoshua received documents under the form Ἰησοῦς. Contracts referenced property boundaries and dowries in Greek idiom. When a synagogue official announced the reading of the Law, a Greek translation permitted women, tradesmen, and younger men who had not mastered Hebrew to hear the commandments with understanding. The translators therefore bore responsibility not merely to transfer words across languages but to preserve reverence. They rendered the Divine Name with care, and early Greek copies often retained the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew characters, marking the sanctity of Jehovah’s Name even within a Greek line of text. This combination—Greek accessibility with profound reverence—characterized Jewish life in Hellenistic centers.

Education in diaspora communities reflected the same blend. Boys learned letters in Greek schools that taught reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic; some advanced to rhetorical training. Within the synagogue, teachers rehearsed the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the deliverance from Egypt; and the covenantal stipulations. The Septuagint allowed these domains to meet. A Jewish youth could progress from Greek primers to Genesis in Greek without losing the ancestral narratives. The Greek Bible thus functioned as the hinge between civic education and covenant instruction. It also fostered a technical vocabulary for law, sacrifice, purity, and ethics that Jews could bring into civic discourse when defending their customs before officials, magistrates, or neighbors.

Beyond Egypt, the pattern repeated. In Cyrenaica to the west and in Syria to the east, Jews formed communities that traded, owned property, and built synagogues. In Asia Minor’s port cities—Ephesus, Smyrna, and Miletus—Jewish merchants interacted with Greek guilds and Roman administrators; the synagogue stood as a recognized institution of communal life. The more distant the community from Judea, the more indispensable a Greek Scripture became for catechesis and worship. Even within Judea itself, cities founded on Greek lines possessed populations for whom Greek was familiar. The social fabric of the Hellenistic world therefore multiplied contexts in which the Hebrew Scriptures, to be heard and obeyed, required a faithful Greek presentation.

The ethical questions that accompanied Hellenization sharpened Jewish self-understanding. The adoption of Greek dress, attendance at gymnasia, and participation in civic cults raised boundary issues. Faithful Jews navigated these pressures by maintaining Sabbath observance, refusing idolatrous rites, and educating their children in the Law—all while using Greek to transact daily life. The Greek Bible supplied the right boundary: a clear covenantal standard articulated in the lingua franca. It meant that a Jewish tanner or scribe in Alexandria could explain the Law to his apprentice without shifting into a foreign tongue and that a widow could hear the reading of Deuteronomy with comprehension every Sabbath. Linguistic accessibility served holiness rather than eroding it.

The Hellenistic economy also encouraged Jewish mobility. Grain routes from the Fayum to Alexandria, shipping lanes along the eastern Mediterranean, and caravan paths through Coele-Syria and Mesopotamia kept Jewish families moving as opportunities arose. Wherever Jewish traders settled, synagogues followed. The Greek Scriptures moved with them because they could be read aloud and understood immediately by men and women formed in the urban Koine. This portability helps explain the speed with which the teachings of Jesus Christ later traveled through the same network. Before Christian missionaries preached in Greek, the Scriptures had already been heard in Greek for generations. The Septuagint was not an accommodation to foreignness but a well-established means by which Jews maintained their identity in a multiethnic empire.

From the standpoint of textual studies, Jewish life in the Hellenistic period produced conditions favorable to careful translation and controlled transmission. Synagogue reading imposed discipline. Once a translation of a book entered liturgical use, consistency mattered because families memorized passages and communities synchronized public reading. The translators’ tendency toward steady equivalence—rendering particular Hebrew words with stable Greek counterparts—grew from this setting. The result is a translation body with patterns that can be tracked book by book and that, in many cases, help modern students discern whether a difference reflects a distinct Hebrew Vorlage or an interpretive decision. The disciplined religious life of Hellenistic Jewry thus strengthened the reliability of the Greek witness.

This period also prepared the church’s future. When Jesus was born in 4 B.C.E. and the apostles later proclaimed the gospel, their audiences outside Judea were accustomed to hearing the Scriptures in Greek. The missionary sermons in the synagogue, the reasoning from Moses and the Prophets, and the letters sent to congregations all presupposed a Greek Scripture familiar to both Jews and God-fearing Gentiles. That pastoral reality traces back to the centuries between 300 and 100 B.C.E., when Jewish life settled into forms adapted to the Hellenistic city without surrendering covenant fidelity.

The Role of Alexandria

Alexandria in Egypt supplied the decisive environment for the first stage of translation. Founded by Alexander in 331 B.C.E. at the western edge of the Nile Delta, the city commanded Mediterranean shipping and Nile agriculture alike. Under Ptolemy I (305–282 B.C.E.) and Ptolemy II (285–246 B.C.E.), Alexandria became the administrative and intellectual capital of the dynasty. The Museion and Library were not literary ornaments; they were instruments of royal policy, gathering texts, scholars, and technical expertise that could serve governance, prestige, and learning. In this setting, a Greek translation of the Torah was both useful and honorable. It served the Jewish community’s needs and suited a court invested in assembling the world’s literature.

The city’s physical plan encouraged scholarship and communal life. The Heptastadion linked the mainland to Pharos Island, creating a harbor complex where ships from across the Mediterranean docked. The royal quarter housed the palaces and the Museion with its lecture halls, walkways, and library stacks. The Jewish quarter occupied a substantial district; later evidence indicates that Jews formed a large fraction of the population and enjoyed recognized status. Under Ptolemaic administration, these quarters flourished. Synagogues stood within walking distance of markets stocked with Syrian timber, Greek pottery, and Egyptian grain. A bilingual world the translators would have known filled the streets: Greek for commerce and civic transactions, Hebrew and Aramaic in prayer and ancestral instruction. Alexandria’s social geography made a Greek Scripture inevitable.

Alexandria’s book culture made a Greek Scripture respectable. Royal agents acquired texts aggressively; ships that docked were searched for books to be copied. Grammarians, lexicographers, and editors worked to collate texts and standardize copies. This created tools translators could exploit. When rendering the Torah’s genealogies or legal prescriptions, a Greek scribe could draw on established forms for lists, decrees, and catalogues—forms that read naturally to Greek ears. The same environment encouraged consistent terminology. The translators could choose a Greek word for covenant, sacrifice, or purity and use it uniformly because Alexandrian scholarship valued regularity and cross-referencing. Although the translators were Jews working for Jewish audiences, they labored in a city that prized precision, indexing, and the disciplined handling of texts. That atmosphere improved the quality and stability of the translation.

Alexandria also offered scribal resources necessary for accurate copying. Papyrus manufacture, trained scribes, and professional correctors supported commercial and scholarly book production. Once the Torah translation was completed, the existence of skilled copyists and a market for books ensured its rapid multiplication. The same infrastructure handled subsequent translations of prophetic and wisdom books. This does not imply a court-controlled project for every book; rather, it means that once Jewish translators produced their work, a city built to copy and circulate texts provided the means to preserve and disseminate it widely. In practical terms, a synagogue in a nearby Delta town could obtain a Greek scroll more readily because the capital excelled at book production.

Alexandria’s Jewish leadership played a central role. Elders and teachers within the community guided synagogue practice, judged disputes, and oversaw instruction. When Greek became the language of everyday life, they bore responsibility to ensure that worship and catechesis remained intelligible. A faithful Greek translation of the Torah addressed that need. As subsequent generations requested Greek renderings of Isaiah, the Twelve, and the Psalms, the same leadership encouraged and vetted the work. The result is a translation history that, while not centrally managed by a single commission, remained under the moral and pedagogical care of a community that revered Jehovah’s Law. This social guardianship explains why the Septuagint’s earliest books exhibit a sober literalism: community leaders expected the Greek to serve the hearing of the Hebrew, not to replace it.

The city’s strategic position further amplified the Septuagint’s reach. Grain shipments from Egypt fed the Aegean and Levant. Merchants and pilgrims passed through the harbors en route to Cyrene, Cyprus, and Syria. As Jewish travelers came and went, they carried Greek Scripture with them. An Alexandrian envoy could recite the Law in Greek at a synagogue in Ptolemaïs or Sidon without losing his hearers. The same pathways that carried papyrus, wine, and oil carried scrolls and reading habits. Alexandria was not merely the birthplace of the Septuagint; it was also the hub from which Greek Scripture diffused across the Mediterranean Jewish world.

The character of Alexandrian Greek also shaped the translators’ choices. Alexandria’s Koine was both standard and cosmopolitan. It borrowed Egyptian place-names, accommodated Semitic loanwords, and welcomed technical jargon. This elasticity allowed the translators to transliterate certain Hebrew terms when a precise Greek equivalent was unavailable or when transliteration served reverence, as with divine names and sacred objects. At the same time, the city’s grammatical studies pressed toward regularization, encouraging translators to render recurring Hebrew terms with recurring Greek terms to aid readers and catechists. Such consistency gave later Christians a stable lexicon for preaching Christ from Moses and the Prophets. The choices made in Alexandria became the vocabulary of synagogues across the empire.

Alexandria’s significance is therefore threefold. It housed a Jewish community that required and honored a Greek Bible, it possessed the scribal and scholarly tools to produce one of high quality, and it sat at the crossroads of Mediterranean trade that guaranteed the translation’s wide circulation. These features explain why the Pentateuch was translated there in the early third century B.C.E. and why the city remained central to the ongoing movement to render the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek during the second century B.C.E.

The city’s intellectual disciplines also affected how later corrections and revisions were made. Alexandrian editors were accustomed to comparing multiple copies of a work, marking variants, and noting preferred readings in margins or sigla. When Jewish revisers later brought certain Greek books more closely into alignment with Hebrew forms, they did so in a culture trained to respect textual evidence and to annotate differences. This legacy shows in the subsequent history of Greek biblical texts, where recensional activity can be traced and evaluated with the same sober methods used for other ancient literature. The Septuagint’s Alexandrian cradle provided not only an initial translation but also a model of textual care that would characterize the tradition thereafter.

Alexandria’s role also illuminates the relationship between language and worship. The translators did not create a new canon. They translated the Scriptures Israel already possessed. In doing so, they accepted the discipline of synagogue reading as a check upon their work. A Greek Genesis that departed from recognized ancestral meaning would not survive public recitation and instruction; a community valuing the Law would not tolerate innovation that obscured covenant obligations. Alexandria therefore supplied not only technical expertise but also a communal safeguard: a large, literate Jewish population who heard, memorized, and taught the Greek Scriptures within a framework anchored by the Hebrew. The Septuagint’s reliability owes much to this equilibrium.

Finally, the city’s social order made it plausible that the translation of the Torah would lead to the translation of the Prophets and Writings within a century. Once families heard the Law in Greek, it was natural to desire the same for the Psalms sung in synagogue, for the narratives of Joshua and Judges rehearsed to children, and for the exhortations of Isaiah preached to city dwellers facing pagan pressures. Alexandria had the translators, scribes, patrons, and readers to make this progression a reality. By 100 B.C.E., significant portions of the Hebrew Bible had Greek renderings in circulation, and Jewish communities across the Hellenistic world had become accustomed to receiving God’s Word in a Greek form that honored the Hebrew text.

The historical context therefore justifies the expectations set in this book’s opening chapter. A Greek Old Testament appears precisely where one anticipates it under the pressures and possibilities of the Hellenistic age: after Alexander’s victories standardized a lingua franca; amid Jewish communities integrated into Greek-speaking cities yet faithful to Jehovah’s covenant; and within a metropolis designed to copy and conserve books. The Septuagint is not a curiosity detached from its age. It is the natural fruit of a time when God’s people needed the Scriptures in the language that governed their lives, and when Providence had prepared a city and a culture capable of transmitting those Scriptures with accuracy and care.

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