authors not as translators [ἑρμηνέας] but as prophets and priests of the mysteries, whose sincerity and singleness of thought has enabled them to go hand in hand with the purest of spirits, the spirit of Moses. Thus, already in Philo, we find the attitude to the Septuagint version of the Pentateuch which, as we shall see, Augustine applied to the entire Septuagint, namely that the translators were prophets and that, consequently, the translation was inspired.38 Finally Philo says (see 41–44) that