Greek philosophy did not need gods. It needed mechanisms. And the “canon” is the supreme mechanism: you fix a corpus, standardize meaning, create a caste of authorized interpreters, and in the long run you obtain political unity. This is how the canons of the “great” religions were born. Everywhere the same pattern: fixed text + authority + empire.
Judaism did not enter this logic through size or military might. It entered through strategic usefulness. Judaism was difficult: rigid monotheism, resistance to syncretism, a written tradition. Exactly the kind of material that, once “put into print” and “translated” into the imperial language, becomes exportable. That is the key. The Septuagint was not “just a translation.” It was the Trojan horse through which philosophy entered the citadel of Judaism and opened the gates to ideological control.
It was not Palestine that explains the philosophers’ “gift,” but the diaspora.
Judaism was not an empire, yet it was everywhere. Documented Jewish centres in that era:
- Alexandria, Leontopolis, Memphis, Pelusium, Naucratis (Egypt); Cyrene (Libya); Antioch, Seleucia, Dura, Damascus (Syria); Tarsus, Sardis, Smyrna, Ephesus, Pergamon, Miletus (Asia Minor); Delos, Corinth, Thessalonica, Philippi, Athens (Greek world); Rome, Ostia, Puteoli (Italy); plus Babylon and the large communities of Mesopotamia.
The diaspora was numerous, cohesive, and resistant to assimilation. Jews did not dissolve. They kept the Sabbath, the dietary laws, circumcision, the calendar. For any empire, such a diaspora is either a problem or a resource. The “modern” solution to the problem: canonization in the language of the empire.
Why it could only work with the Jews
- Rigid monotheism – it does not tolerate syncretism; hence the usefulness of a “taming” through a textual instrument.
- An already existing written tradition – Torah, Prophets, Psalms; raw material already collected and ready to be standardized.
- A vast diaspora – once you have the “correct” text, you throw it into the network: the same message everywhere, in Greek, without the resistance of the language barrier.
That is what a “project” looks like that philosophy can deliver to power: a small people with many nodes in the great cities of the Empire, brought into unison by a single text.
What the “gift” called the Septuagint actually was
It was not a “cultural benefaction.” It was a reconfiguration. In Alexandria, under Ptolemaic patronage, the Jewish text entered the Hellenistic workshop and came out as “canon”: imperial language, philosophical terminology, ambiguities deliberately introduced, passages left open to “interpretation.”
- Programmed ambiguity – plurals and formulas that allow contradictory readings (e.g., “let us make man…” in Genesis 1 becomes a hook for any subsequent metaphysics; “plural of majesty,” “divine council,” “trinity” – everyone later finds their “right” in the text). The text ceases to be a verdict and becomes a playground.
- Mythologization – Eden, the “fall,” the serpent, chronologies and characters treated as a theological engine that overturns the axis of Genesis 1 (image, moral dominion, present responsibility) into the axis of “original defect” and dependence on an external mechanism (law/grace, castes/karma, dharma/enlightenment). The canon no longer liberates conscience; it binds it.
- Hellenistic lexicon – category, “logos,” “ousia/essence,” structures of thought that later allow the rejection of Jesus on philosophical grounds (“you cannot be man and ‘Son of God’ without mixing ‘essences’”). The dispute is no longer moral (“does he do good or evil?”) but ontological: an ideal labyrinth for blocking responsibility.
This is the Trojan horse: “a book for everyone” that enters the city gates with fanfare, while inside its belly it carries paradoxes, backdoors, and categories that empty Revelation of its simple, firm content: man is a moral image, responsible here and now.
How the effect is seen in history (not in days, but in centuries)
- 3rd–2nd centuries BC: the Septuagint becomes the text of the diaspora. “It is written” begins to mean “it is written in Greek.” Authority shifts: from the living word to the canonical corpus.
- 2nd–1st centuries BC: Judaism enters the age of disputes. Alexandrians interpret “allegorically,” Pharisees multiply fences around the Law, Sadducees negotiate with power. The canon in the imperial language standardizes forms but fractures meaning.
- 1st century AD: the conflict explodes. Instead of moral repentance (John, Jesus: give up evil, do the good you know), the public stage becomes a tribunal of definitions. Jesus is rejected on philosophical grounds (essence, power, prerogative), not because he was “immoral.” His politically uncontrollable message is quickly replaced, after his execution, by Pauline theology: grace, “body,” institution – that is, control.
- AD 70: the Temple is destroyed. Judaism is left without its cultic centre.
- AD 132–135: the second revolt; Jerusalem becomes Aelia Capitolina; Jews are forbidden access. The city disappears from their life. What remains? The canon. That book, already worked over by philosophy, feeding endless schools and controversies.
- 2nd–5th centuries AD: the rabbis build a textual “wall” (Mishnah, Talmuds). Too late.
- Pauline Christianity fixes its own canon, for the Empire.
- Islam, later, will use the same recipe (single text, authorized interpretation).
At the end of several centuries the balance sheet is this: Revelation (as a direct call to conscience) has been overlaid by a canonical corpus that produces dependence. The Temple and Jerusalem are lost. What remains is a text-centred order in which truth is no longer a simple call (“do good”) but a bureaucracy of meaning.
When the Temple burned and Jerusalem was erased, the Jews tried to take refuge in what they thought still remained: the text. But there, too, they discovered the battle was already lost. The Septuagint had been circulating for a century and a half, had been adopted by the diaspora, had become the working text for the new Christian religion, and was already “canon” throughout the Greco-Roman world. What the rabbis later attempted through the Mishnah, the Talmuds, and the Masoretes was not a “recovery” but only cosmetic surgery: a vocalized text, adorned with notes, yet impossible to cleanse. The canon had entered global circulation and could no longer be changed.
This is the final victory of the Trojan horse: the people who had received the living Revelation ended up serving a foreign text already infested with ambiguities and paradoxes. The attempt to “repair” it only confirmed their powerlessness. Post-Temple Judaism was no longer the religion of truth, but the administration of a corpus imposed by philosophy and disseminated by empire. At that moment the battle was no longer about Temple or city, but about meaning, and meaning had already been confiscated.
Why it is a “Trojan horse,” not a “cultural gift”
A gift does not change the nature of your relationship with truth. The Septuagint did exactly that. It shifted the centre of gravity from direct moral responsibility to the authority of a text administered by interpreters.
It introduced ambiguities large enough for any hegemonic system to slip its own armour over the text: Paulinism and the empire, and later Islam, were able to “read” in the LXX exactly what they needed in order to standardize the masses.
A double gain was achieved:
- politically, emperors united disparate peoples under the same written norm;
- philosophically, the central idea of Revelation was cut away – man as moral image, free and responsible now.
In its place were installed paradoxes (ontological fall, external grace) that either cancel the moral subject or subordinate him to a mechanism.
The transformation into canon
“But the Septuagint is only a translation.” False. Any canon in the language of the hegemon is a reconstruction. When you pass the text through Hellenistic grammar and metaphysics you change the type of question. You no longer ask “what must I do?” (moral) but “what is it?” (ontological). Once you have shifted the question, you have changed the religion.
“The canon would have appeared anyway.” No. The Jews had had centuries to “fix” obligatory collections. They never did. The canon appears in the Hellenistic era, simultaneously with the imperial mechanics of standardization. The chronology speaks for itself.
Why it still matters today
Because this is where everything breaks: truth as personal responsibility (Jesus: “a good tree bears good fruit; do the good!”) was replaced by truth as a text administered by power. Once the Trojan horse entered, the citadel received the “gift” that made it governable but ripped out its heart.
Through the canon, Revelation was blurred and paradox was installed as the norm.