This
aspect of the work led the rabbis of Palestine and Babylon in later
days, when the spread of Hellenized Judaism was fraught with misery to
the race, to regard it as an awful calamity, and to recount a tale of
a plague of darkness which fell upon Palestine for three days when it
was made;[22] and they observed a fast day in place of the old
Alexandrian feast on the anniversary of its completion. They felt as
the old Italian proverb has it, _Traduttori, traditori!_ ("Translators
are traitors!"). And the Midrash in the same spirit declares[23] that
the oral law was not written down, because God knew that otherwise it
would be translated into Greek, and He wished it to be the special
mystery of His people, as the Bible no longer was.
The Septuagint translation of the Bible was one answer to the lying
accounts of Israel's early history concocted by anti-Semitic writers.
As we have seen,[24] the Alexandrian Jews began early to write
histories and re-edit the Bible stories to the same purpose. And for
some time their writings were mainly apologetic, designed, whatever
their form, to serve a defensive purpose. But later they took the
offensive against the paganism and immorality of the peoples about
them, and the missionary spirit became predominant. Alexander
Polyhistor, who lived in the first century, included in his "History
of the Jews" fragments of these early Jewish historians and
apologists, which the Christian bishop Eusebius has handed down to us.
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