Aquila of Sinope

Origins and early life

Aquila was born a Gentile at Sinope, on the Black Sea coast of Pontus, and enters this directory by the second of its three routes: conversion.

Work and career

Tradition makes him a kinsman of the emperor Hadrian, sent to Jerusalem in the emperor's service, who there embraced Judaism and became a disciple of the greatest teacher of his age, Rabbi Akiva. His life's work, completed around the year 130, was a new Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible — extremely literal, word for word, technically precise to the point of strangeness — meant to replace the Septuagint, which the rabbis had come to regard as too loose and too readily turned by Christians to their own purposes.

It succeeded: Greek-speaking synagogues preferred Aquila's version for centuries, the emperor Justinian still authorized its use in 553, and Origen set it beside the Septuagint in his Hexapla, where its fragments survive. One caution belongs here: some rabbinic sources fuse Aquila with Onkelos, the Aramaic translator who has his own place in this directory; modern scholarship treats them as two men, and so does this fiche. He is a rare and well-documented case of a proselyte who became one of the great scholars of rabbinic Judaism.