The Legend of the Septuagint: from classical antiquity to today by Abraham Wasserstein; David J. WassersteinBeginning in the Letter of Aristeas, the legend describes how Ptolemy Philadelphus commissioned seventy-two Jewish scribes to translate the sacred Hebrew scriptures for his famous library in Alexandria. Subsequent variations on the story recount how the scribes, working independently, produced word-for-word, identical Greek versions. account of all of these versions over the last two millennia, providing a history of the uses and abuses of the legend in various cultures around the Mediterranean.
The Meaning of the Letter of Aristeas by Ekaterina Matusovaargues that at the time of Aristeas compositions of the kind of the Reworked Pentateuch, or Rewritten Bible were circulating in Egypt in parallel with the LXX and were a source of interpretations of the Hebrew text different from the LXX and of specific combinations of subjects popular in Second Temple Judaism.