Between the Royal Workshop and the Temple Floor: Crafting Elite Devotion through Ritual Portabilia in the Letter of Aristeas

The Letter of Aristeas (henceforth L.Ar.) is a diasporic Jewish work composed in Ptolemaic-era Egypt, likely during the second century BCE. Though most famously known for its account of the translation of the Torah into Greek, much of the work does not concern the translation project at all. Rather, Aristeas narrates a series of events leading up to the translation project proper and presents these accounts to his reader a source for their intellectual and moral formation. Included among these episodes is an elaborate ekphrasis of a set of ritual objects that Ptolemy II constructs and sends as gifts to the Jerusalem temple (§§ 51b-82). While it is well-recognized that this section employs the rhetorical convention of ekphrasis, often understood as “a descriptive speech that brings the subject shown vividly before the eyes” (Theon. Prog. 118.7), there is little agreement on why L.Ar use ekphrasis to describe these ritual objects in particular? In this paper, I examine the ekphrastic presentation of ritual portabilia as a strategy aimed at cultivating Alexandrian Jewish identity through a focus on elite craftsmanship and benefaction (euergetism). I situate L.Ar.’s employment of ekphrasis both within Alexandrian imperial discourses and theoretical engagement with sight and material agency in Mediterranean antiquity. I argue that the work adapts the conventions of ekphrasis in order to guide its reader through a mode of "ritualized viewing" that parallels the visually-marked practices of how these objects were piously produced and ritually offered to the Jerusalem temple. The work thus elevates Ptolemy II as a model of elite devotion and invites its reader to re-perform this devotional practice as an act of visual piety. By demonstrating the continuities between Ptolemy’s patronage of the Jerusalem temple and the scriptural account of the Israelites’ construction of the wilderness shrine at Sinai, I ultimately reveal how the work reimagines the “diasporic” tradition of temple building and benefaction for an Alexandrian Jewish community at a remove from Jerusalem.