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1 introductory and interpretive contexts The book of wandering could only be the wandering of the book. So many books within a single one. The desert is the keeper of the book. Return to the book means return to the desert. In the so-­ called Letter to Philocrates, Aristeas relates how the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus was so impressed by the sanctity of the Hebrew Bible that he asked Eleazar the High Priest to send him six elders from each tribe of Israel. For the next seven days, the king put a series of philosophical questions to the seventy-­ two individuals, after which they were secluded for seventy-­ two days to produce a Greek translation of the Bible. This translation so impressed the elders of Israel that they ordered that “it should remain in its present form and that no revision of any sort take place.”1 In a second version of the myth—this time told by Philo of Alexandria—the seventy-­ two elders, gathered on the island of Pharos and sitting in seclusion, “became as it were possessed, and, under inspiration, wrote, not each scribe something different, but the same word for word, as though dictated by an invisible prompter.”2 In their different ways, the two versions of this story justify the project of translation: the transference of authority from one language to another ; the need to find counterpoints between cultures; and—what occupies me in the present study—the desire to absorb, legitimate, or otherwise describe the need for such activity in the first place. The mythology engulfing the production of the Septuagint in many ways justified all subsequent translation of the Hebrew Bible with its insistence that the divine presence could encompass a derivative work, that the vernacular could invoke the same reverence for the original and sacred word, and that the new language could awaken the same piety in the believer as the old.3 As Judaism moved into different cultural spaces, elite Jews sought out new modes of translation to update or clarify the meanings both within and those perceived to be at work behind the biblical narrative. The Bible 2 the invention of jewish identity functioned like a mirror held up to reflect larger cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic models. Owing to Judaism’s bibliocentrism, biblical translation became one of the primary means whereby Jewish philosophers formulated their rational articulations and subsequently disseminated these articulations to others. The various modes of translation to be examined in the present study were not solely a Jewish affair, however; rather, they were inextricably linked and therefore always formulated based on the larger non-­ Jewish contexts in which Jews lived. Translation thus provided a convenient way to absorb or counter the various intellectual trajectories of these larger cultural moments. Translation activity opens up before us a series of vignettes wherein we can grasp something of Jewish and non-­ Jewish encounters.4 When Jews in general and Jewish philosophers in particular translated the biblical narrative—whether in whole or in part—they imagined a new Bible: one that would simultaneously break with the confining shackles of existing dogma by returning to an encounter with a pristine past and that would both embrace a newly constituted set of memories in addition to all the cultural sophistications of the present. This paradox between old and new, with each putting on the garments of the other in order to express itself, reverberates throughout this study, and it plays out in the often-­ contested pages of the biblical narrative as Jewish thinkers sought to read philosophy into the Bible (and the Bible into philosophy) by showing it was already therein. Translation, as mentioned, simultaneously re-­ read, mis-­ read, and un-­ read the biblical narrative. In this it was certainly no different than other modalities of rabbinic interpretation.5 Where philosophical translation differed from the latter, however, was in the depth of its encounter with non-­ Jewish systems of philosophy, which subsequently provided both the map and the tools for charting and making sense of such encounters. Translation becomes a philosophical interrogation that problematizes the relationship of the past to the present, of Jews to non-­ Jews, and of memory to reality. As my argument unfolds, I show that Bible translation is not simply a matter of philology, but of philosophical and cultural aesthetics and thus the poetic realization of philosophical practice. None of the translators that I examine regarded their works as innovations, however, but as reconstitutions of an original text...

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