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 (Latin, Septuaginta), seventy, a round number for the more exact seventy-two, probably arose from this tradition of the execution of the work by seventy-two elders in seventy-two days.  The story of the parchments sent from Jerusalem for the use of the translators (with the request that they might be returned with them) has been rejected on the ground that the text used by them differs too widely from the Palestinian text.  See further on this subject in No. 5, below.  It has been further affirmed that Demetrius Phalereus did not belong to the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, but to that of his father Ptolemy Soter, the son having banished him from court in the beginning of his reign.  For this reason some have proposed to assign the founding of the Alexandrian library to the father and not the son.  But whatever be our judgment in respect to Demetrius and his relation to the two Ptolemies, the voice of history is decisive in favor of the son and not the father, as the