The Letter of Aristeas was a written account from the perspective of Aristeas, a Ptolemaic official, to Philocrates around the first or second century BCE. The letter describes Aristeas’s journey to Jerusalem and how the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, came to be. The significance of the letter is it allows us to see the motivation behind the Septuagint and how the Jews convinced the Ptolemaic King that the Hebrew Bible was not only an important item to the Jewish culture, but also an overall important philosophical read. Philosophy was stated as “a well-reasoned assessment of each occurrence” and the Hebrew Bible was said to aid such thoughts (Letter of Aristeas, line 257). The Septuagint was also extremely significant
