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

The Letter of Aristeas is a diasporic Jewish work composed in Ptolemaic-era Egypt, likely during the second century BCE. In an under-examined section, Aristeas offers an elaborate ekphrasis of a set of ritual objects that Ptolemy II constructs and sends as gifts to the Jerusalem temple (§§ 51b-82). 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. 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 whose efforts bridge the Alexandrian present with a scriptural past.