#symmachus

“Everything would be fine if you hadn’t died.”

Morgiah paced, restless, around the clay pit holding the ash that was once Symmachus. Ash that had once formed the arms that held her as a little girl. Ash that consisted of the blood, sweat, and tears of her father, her protector. 

“You should have fought harder. You could have. I know it. I don’t care if you had to cut through a thousand mer to survive. You should have come back to me, protected me, protected us.”

A lifeline, a soldier, a husband, a father, a king; all reduced to nothing but the fine, grey power nearly indistinguishable from the dust that sat on the surfaces of the tomb. For all the Empire had done in memoriam of her father after his death, there was nothing to show of it. No one had entered this part of the tomb in years. Not even Barenziah nor Helseth had visited when they returned. Morgiah wished she hadn’t. She remembered little of ancestral tombs from her childhood, and to her now they seemed like a cruel rest. Ash that was once a life, a good man, for all she’d known at eight years old. Maybe all she’d been told were lies, maybe her own memories were lies. If he were still alive, perhaps he’d be an unforgiving ruler and a harsh father. Perhaps he’d withdraw in his old age, abandoning his wife and children in all but formalities. There was nothing to show for who he’d be. Nothing but ash.

“I know I wouldn’t be here,” She continued aloud, her voice monotone but betraying a slight tremor. She glanced at the ground and noticed the dust was dirtying the hem of her skirts. “At least I wouldn’t be here, at your grave, wondering who you’d be to me. Longing for the life I’d have in Mournhold, the life I deserve. Do you have any idea what it was like? The things I’ve seen, the things I’ve done, the things done to me, across the continent and throughout decades, all because you couldn’t-“ 

Was the Septuagint Destroyed When the Library of Alexandria Was Burnt Down in 48 BC?

By Author Eli Kittim 🎓

The Argument

Some people (typically Jewish apologists) claim that the Septuagint doesn’t exist because it was destroyed when the Library of Alexandria was burnt down in 48 BC.

This conclusion, however, is both textually misleading & historically erroneous.

First

The Alexandrian Library and its collection were not entirely destroyed. We have evidence that there was only partial damage and that many of its works survived. According to Wiki:

The Library, or part of its collection, was

accidentally burned by Julius Caesar during

his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how

much was actually destroyed and it seems

to have either survived or been rebuilt

shortly thereafter; the geographer Strabo

mentions having visited the Mouseion in

around 20 BC and the prodigious scholarly

output of Didymus Chalcenterus in

Alexandria from this period indicates that

he had access to at least some of the

Library's resources.

Second

The Septuagint had already been written and disseminated among the diaspora since the 3rd century BC, and so many of its extant copies were not housed in the Library of Alexandria per se.

Third

Textual Criticism confirms that the New Testament authors used the Septuagint predominantly and quoted extensively from it. If the Septuagint didn’t exist, where did the New Testament authors copy from? And how do you explain the fact that the New Testament and the Septuagint often have identical wording in their agreements?

Fourth

The Dead Sea Scrolls also demonstrate that the Septuagint was far more accurate than the 10th-century-AD Masoretic text. See, for example, the textual controversy surrounding Deuteronomy 32:8. Both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint have “sons of God.” The Masoretic text is demonstrably inaccurate because it has “sons of Israel,” a later redaction. Israel didn’t even exist at that time!

Fifth

Emanuel Tov, a leading authority on the Septuagint who has explained the various textual families (or text-types) of the Old Testament, never once mentioned that we lost the Septuagint, or that it was destroyed, or that it was no longer in circulation. On the contrary, he claims that it continued to be in use during the Christian period and that it is much more older than the 10th-century-AD Masoretic text, which the Jews call the “Hebrew Bible.”

Sixth

If the Septuagint was completely destroyed, as some have erroneously suggested, from where were the later revisionists and translators copying from? We have historical evidence that they were, in fact, copying from the Septuagint itself. Wiki writes:

Theodotion … was a Hellenistic Jewish

scholar, … who in c. 150 CE translated the

Hebrew Bible into Greek. … Whether he was

revising the Septuagint, or was working

from Hebrew manuscripts that represented

a parallel tradition that has not survived, is

debated.

So there’s evidence to suggest that the Theodotion version is a possible *revision* of the Septuagint. This demonstrates that the Septuagint existed in the second century AD! Otherwise, where was Theodotion copying from if the Septuagint didn’t exist?

Seventh

The great work of Origen, Hexapla, compiled sometime before 240 AD, is further proof that the Septuagint was still in use in the 3rd century AD! Wikipedia notes the following:

Hexapla … is the term for a critical edition

of the Hebrew Bible in six versions, four of

them translated into Greek, preserved only

in fragments. It was an immense and

complex word-for-word comparison of the

original Hebrew Scriptures with the Greek

Septuagint translation and with other Greek

translations.

Encyclopedia Britannica adds:

In his Hexapla (“Sixfold”), he [Origen]

presented in parallel vertical columns the

Hebrew text, the same in Greek letters, and

the versions of Aquila, Symmachus, the

Septuagint, and Theodotion, in that order.

Eighth

Besides Origen’s Hexapla, we also have extant copies of the Septuagint. According to wiki:

Relatively-complete manuscripts of the

Septuagint postdate the Hexaplar

recension, and include the fourth-century-

CE Codex Vaticanus and the fifth-century

Codex Alexandrinus. These are the oldest-

surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of

the Old Testament in any language; the

oldest extant complete Hebrew texts date

to about 600 years later, from the first half

of the 10th century.

Ninth

There’s also historical and literary evidence that the Greek Septuagint was in wide use during the Christian period and beyond. Wiki says:

Greek scriptures were in wide use during

the Second Temple period, because few

people could read Hebrew at that time. The

text of the Greek Old Testament is quoted

more often than the original Hebrew Bible

text in the Greek New Testament

(particularly the Pauline epistles) by the

Apostolic Fathers, and later by the Greek

Church Fathers.

Tenth