How Two Exempla Frame Jewish Text Under Greco-Roman Rule

The Exempla of the Rabbis (1924), Moses Gaster's collection of medieval Hebrew tales, gathers two short narratives that place Jewish text inside Greco-Roman libraries. The first story follows a captive child who alone can read a Hebrew Bible pulled from a Roman emperor's collection. The second story records the day the Torah was rendered into Greek under King Ptolemy by seventy-two sages locked in separate cells. Read as a pair, the exempla measure what happens when sacred text crosses into imperial space, once as a captive object and once as a commissioned translation.

A Child, an Emperor, and a Library Shelf

The first exemplum opens with a small biographical detail. A child had learned part of the book of Genesis before being captured and imprisoned. The emperor, with no obvious reason, sends to his library for a book, and the volume that arrives happens to be the Hebrew Bible. No one in the court can read it. Someone remembers the captive boy, who agrees to read at the risk of his life if he fails. He begins from the account of creation. The reading carries him through the first chapters of Genesis and into the emperor's notice. The boy tells his story. The emperor concludes that the hidden cause that prompted him to call for the book was the cause of restoring the child to his parents.

The narrative shape is tight. A small portion of Torah, learned in childhood, becomes the instrument by which the child returns home. The reward is named explicitly. The Sages of the medieval collection drew the moral plainly, that great reward attaches to the study of even a small part of the text.

Seventy-Two Sages and an Earlier Library

The second exemplum reaches back several centuries earlier to Ptolemaic Alexandria. The transliteration of the Bible into Greek characters, the story reports, was done by five men in the time of Ptolemy, and the day is remembered as an evil day for Israel. The full translation followed, carried out by seventy-two sages shut up in separate cells. The detail of the cells is the load-bearing one. The translators could not consult one another, and the rabbinic tradition records that they produced eighteen identical departures from the literal Hebrew, all enumerated, each designed to prevent a Greek reader from drawing a heretical or politically dangerous conclusion.

The exemplum holds two judgments at once. The day of translation is marked as a loss, because the Torah was removed from the protective enclosure of its original language. And the very same day is marked as a moment when the translators were guarded from error, each in isolation, so that the new Greek text would not introduce ruptures into Jewish belief.

Two Empires, Two Postures Toward the Text

The two stories sit beside one another in the collection because they answer one another. In the Roman tale, the Hebrew Bible is already inside the imperial library as a foreign curiosity, and a Jewish child is summoned to make it speak. In the Ptolemaic tale, Jewish sages are summoned to produce the foreign version themselves, and the Hebrew text leaves the community as Greek. The first is an act of recovery, in which the captive reads what the empire cannot. The second is an act of release, in which the community itself authorizes a version it will then mourn.

Both postures are familiar from the long Jewish experience of exile. The Exempla preserves them as paired narratives precisely because they are not opposites. They are two faces of the same condition. Sacred text under foreign rule is sometimes recovered through a small voice that no one expected to matter, and sometimes negotiated through a controlled translation that introduces deliberate variants.

Preservation and the Path Into Gaster's Collection

Both narratives reached the modern reader through a long chain of transmission. The Roman exemplum belongs to the family of captive-child tales that circulate in medieval Hebrew anthologies, including the Hibbur Yafeh of Rabbenu Nissim of Kairouan and later compendia copied in Italy and Ashkenaz. The Ptolemaic exemplum has deep roots in classical rabbinic literature, with parallels in Massekhet Soferim, in Bavli Megillah 9a, and in the Yerushalmi. Gaster gathered these short forms in 1924 from manuscripts he had collected over decades of fieldwork, including codices acquired in the Romanian and Ottoman communities he served as Hakham.

The 1924 edition supplied the first English-language renderings for many of these tales and gave the exempla a stable numbering. Without that work, the captive-child story in this particular brief form would be available only to readers of the underlying Hebrew manuscripts, and the alignment between the Roman and Ptolemaic tales would be much harder to see. Gaster's editorial choice to place them in proximity is itself a piece of interpretation.

What the Pair Teaches About Study Under Pressure

The exempla agree that study is durable. The captive child has only a portion of Genesis, and that portion is enough to free him. The seventy-two translators carry the whole Torah into Greek, and even under the pressure of imperial commission they hold the text intact enough to be remembered as faithful, with the eighteen changes catalogued so that later generations could see exactly where the Greek differed from the Hebrew and why.

Both stories also agree that the surrounding empire is not the source of the rescue. In the Roman tale, the unknown cause that moves the emperor to call for the book is read by the emperor himself as a pretext, and the real cause is the restoration of the child. In the Ptolemaic tale, the separated cells are not an imperial kindness but an imperial test, and the unity of the translation is credited to the sages who worked in isolation. The exempla place the Jewish text and the Jewish learner at the center of the action, with the empire serving as the room in which the rescue happens.

The Quiet Argument of the Two Tales

Gaster's pairing argues quietly that the Jewish encounter with empire is not only a story of loss. It is also a story of small competencies that turn out to matter, and of disciplined translation that holds the line even when the text crosses a language boundary. A child who learned part of Genesis becomes the reader the emperor needs. Seventy-two sages who could not consult one another produce a Greek Torah that the tradition can name, count, and remember. The two exempla together place the survival of Torah in two unlikely settings, a prison and a cell, and report that in both the text did its work.