Twice in the Hellenistic era the Torah crossed the language barrier into Greek, and the Rabbis remembered the two events very differently. Both are recorded in exemplum 61 of Moses Gaster's 1924 Exempla of the Rabbis.

The first attempt was a simple transliteration of the Hebrew text into Greek letters, the work of five men at the court of Ptolemos (one of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic kings of Egypt, third century BCE). That day was an evil day for Israel, the sages said. Why? Because once the holy letters were flattened into a foreign alphabet, the protective strangeness of Hebrew was gone. Anyone could now handle the words without knowing what they carried. The Talmud in Soferim 1:7 compares that day to the day the Golden Calf was made.

The second attempt was the famous Septuagint, the full translation into Greek carried out, according to the legend, by seventy-two elders under the same King Ptolemy. The Talmud (Megillah 9a) describes how the king shut each of the seventy-two scholars in a separate cell, so that they could not consult one another, and then demanded the same translation from each. By miracle they produced identical texts. But the legend also says each of them introduced the same eighteen deliberate changes to certain verses, softening passages that a pagan king might have read too literally or too dangerously. For example, where the Torah says In the beginning God created, they wrote God in the beginning created, so Ptolemy would not misread bereshit ("in the beginning") as a first power preceding God.

The double tradition captures a lasting Jewish ambivalence about translation. A sacred text rendered into the tongue of the nations becomes available to everyone, which is a gain, and less securely itself, which is a loss. The day the Torah learned to speak Greek was at once a gift to the world and a wound for Israel.