What do Alexandria and Jerusalem have in common? The sacred topography of the Letter of Aristeas

The Letter of Aristeas is an outstanding monument of Alexandrian Jewry, telling the story of the translation of the Jewish Law into Greek. The author of the Letter reports on this event by means of an account of the journey. At its core, the Letter is precisely a travel narrative, a travelogue. Hellenistic historians regard the Letter of Aristeas as an important source for the history of the Jewish community of Alexandria in the third and second centuries BC. There is no doubt that this approach is entirely correct: the Letter is the most valuable material on the history of the Jews of Egypt in this period and also the only source in the crucial question of translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek. In this connection the questions of the dating of the Letter and the search for its Sitz im Leben are of paramount importance. As a result, the intrinsic literary properties of the monument itself are forgotten. In the meantime, the Letter of Aristeas is not simply a collection of historical information; it is also a literary monument, for the study of which it is appropriate to use the tools associated with literary studies. The article presents an attempt to study an ancient document, relying on the methodology of “spatial approach” (spatial methodology). Within the framework of this approach, the subject of the analysis is the fictional world in which the action takes place.