The Seventy Elders Ptolemy Could Not Trip at His Banquet

The banquet hall of Ptolemy in Alexandria could seat a hundred, and on the night the king set his trap it was full. Lamps the size of shields burned along the walls. Servants moved between the couches with wine that had been cooled in snow carried down from the mountains. At the high table the king reclined, watching the seventy elders of Judea take their places, and beside him his philosophers leaned in like hounds before a hunt.

The king had brought these men from Jerusalem to render the law of the Hebrews into Greek. But tonight he wanted something else. He wanted to know whether men who claimed to carry a divine wisdom could think on their feet, or whether they only recited what they had memorized in their schools far from any court.

The King Lays His Snare

He turned to the elder nearest him and asked a question, sharp and sudden, about how a king should govern so that he keeps his throne to the end of his life. The old man answered before the wine in the king's cup had stopped trembling. He spoke of imitating the mercy of God, who is patient with the guilty, and of ruling men by gentleness rather than by fear. The king blinked. He had expected a pause.

So he asked the next man. And the next. He moved down the long row of couches, and to each elder he gave a different question, on friendship, on anger, on how to bear insult, on what makes a household strong, on how a man should choose his counselors. He gave them no time. He fired each question the instant the last answer landed, certain that somewhere in the line he would find a man caught with his mouth open and nothing in it.

Each Answer Came Without a Pause

It never happened. One after another the elders replied, and each reply came at once, complete, turned always toward the fear of God as the root of right action. The philosophers of the court had come to watch foreigners stumble. Instead they sat straighter and straighter on their couches. Aristeas, the king's own officer, stood near the wall and could not stop himself from staring.

He would write later that the thing seemed past belief, and that he expected no one reading his account in years to come would credit it. But he had been in the room. He had seen the questioner labor over each question and the answerers reply as though the answers had been waiting in their mouths all their lives. He went afterward to the scribes whose task was to record everything spoken at the royal table, because he wanted the words preserved exactly, and he would not let himself shade a single one.

The Wise Men Praise Their Beasts

Then one of the king's philosophers, stung perhaps by how the evening was going, spoke up to defend the gods of the older nations. There was wisdom, he said, in the reverence the peoples paid to the powers of the world, even to the beasts.

An elder answered him quietly. He spoke of the Egyptians, the philosopher's neighbors down the river, who placed their trust in wild animals and in most kinds of creeping things and cattle, who bowed to them and laid sacrifices before them while the creatures lived and again when they died. A man who worshiped a serpent or a bull, the elder said, had handed his soul to a thing that could not think, could not choose, could not answer a single one of the questions the king had been asking all night. The hall went still. The Egyptians among the servants kept their eyes on the floor.

The Lawgiver's Wall of Iron

The elder did not stop there. He told them why his people would not eat at common tables or mingle freely with the nations around them, why they fenced themselves about with so many rules a stranger found strange. Their lawgiver, he said, was a wise man whom God had gifted to understand the shape of all things, and that lawgiver had walled them round with ramparts no army could breach, with walls of iron, so they would not be drawn into the vain imaginings of the peoples and would stay clean in body and in soul, worshiping the one Almighty God who stood above the whole of creation.

This, the elder said, was why the highest thing a man could own was not gold and not a throne but the hunger to keep adding to what he knew, whether by studying the records of the past or by standing inside great events himself. A soul fed on the noblest things and fixed on reverence had an unfailing guide. The pursuit of that knowledge was the very reason he and his brothers had crossed the sea to this court.

The King Concedes the Contest

The king had set out to expose them. By the end of the night he was the one exposed, his philosophers silenced, his Egyptian guests studying the marble. He raised his cup and ordered that these men be honored above all the others at his table, and he gave the elders gifts. The questions had been his weapon. They had taken it from his hand without ever raising their voices, and he had not known he was losing until the contest was already lost.