Letter of Aristeas

The Letter of Aristeas, of unknown but pseudonymous authorship, is a Hellenistic Jewish primary text usually placed in the second century BCE on inferential grounds, so the atlas records no publication year rather than assign one the dating does not actually support. Its strength is that it is the primary source of the tradition that seventy two elders produced the Greek translation of the Torah, one of the roots of the weight the number seventy two carries in later tradition. Its limit is the ordinary one for a pseudepigraphal work: its own claimed authorship is not its real authorship, and its account of the translation's origin is itself a later legend rather than a contemporary record.