Cyrill Andreevich von Buettner PhD in History, associate professor, Saint-Petersburg State University, Philological Faculty, Department of Biblical Studies (11 Universitetskaya emb., Saint-Petersburg, Russia, 199034)
kirvonbuettner@gmail.com
Buettner C. A., von. Numerical Symbolism in the Letter of Aristeas: influence of the Old Testament tradition, Religiya. Tserkov’. Obshchestvo. Issledovaniya i publikatsii po teologii i religii [Religion. Church. Society: Research and publications in the field of theology and religious studies], Saint-Petersburg, 2022, vol. 11, pp. 16–31.
doi: 10.24412/2308-0698-2022-11-16-31
Language: Russian
In the article the author addresses the problem of numerical symbolism in the text of the «Letter of Aristeas», and discusses its possible Old Testament origins. This literary work is a Greek-language pseudepigraph of Jewish origin, written, according to researchers, in the 3rd century BC in Egypt, probably, in Alexandria. It contains the story about the circumstances of the Pentateuch translation into Greek by 72 elders. In this article an attempt to answer the question how the text of the «Letters of Aristeas» could have been influenced by the Old Testament numerical symbolism is made. To do this researcher considers all the contexts in which the numbers seven and twelve, which have a symbolic meaning in the biblical tradition, are used as well as numbers that are derived from seven and twelve by multiplication or division, in the cases when they by extension also have a symbolic meaning. In particular, he discusses the correlation with the usage of the symbolic numbers «7», «70», «700», «12», «6», «72» in the Jewish Old Testament tradition. The article was prompted by the recent controversy among researchers about the symbolic meaning of the number «72» (the number of translators of the Pentateuch in the text «Letters of Aristeas») and its association with the number «70» (the number of Elders — companions of Moses who were at the Theophany on Mount Sinai).
Key words: Letter of Aristeas, numerical symbolism, Hellenistic Judaism, Bible, Old Testament
URL: http://rcs-almanac.ru/en/en-buettner-2022/
