Monday, September 7, 2009

The Unkosher Queen - Megila 9a

The Septuagent is a famous translation of the Torah from Hebrew into Greek. According to Megila 9a here is the story of its creation. The King Talmi summoned 72 Rabbis, without telling them what the purpose of the summons, and kept them apart from each other with instructions to translate the Torah. By a miracle, each Rabbi produced exactly the same translation. The Talmud lists many changes in meaning that were incorporated into the translation to avoid theological problems. One problem was more practical though - they deleted mention of the hare ('Arnevet' in Hebrew) from the list of non-kosher animals because the word happened to also be the name of the king's wife.

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