A Jewish diaspora grows, as cities like Alexandria, the Ptolemid capital, begin to acquire a substantial Jewish population.
Hellenistic Jews at Alexandria produce the Septuagint, the first version of the Hebrew Bible in Greek, the lingua franca throughout the region. (The name Septuagint, from the Latin septuaginta, “seventy”, is a later derivation from the legend that there were seventy-two translators, six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, who worked in separate cells, translating the whole, and ultimately all their versions were identical. There are in fact large differences in style and usage between the Septuagint's translation of the Torah and its translations of the later books in the Old Testament. A tradition that translators were sent to Alexandria by Eleazar, the chief priest at Jerusalem, at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, a patron of literature, first appeared in the Letter of Aristeas, an unreliable source.)
Analysis of the language has established that the Torah, or Pentateuch, was translated near the middle of the third century BCE and that the rest of the Old Testament was translated in the second century BCE.
