The Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures was produced for the use of the Jews living in the Hellenistic diaspora. It appears to have started in Alexandria in Egypt probably in the third century BCE. According to the legendary account included in the Letter of Aristeas, a Jewish-Greek document from 150-100 BCE, the translation of the Torah of the Jews into Greek was prompted by King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-247 BCE), who wanted to store the legal wisdom of all the nations in his library. Therefore he asked the High Priest in Jerusalem to supply him with translators. Seventy-two Greek-speaking learned men were dispatched to the nearby island of Pharos to work undisturbed. Supervised by Demetrius, the Alexandrian head librarian, they consulted each other and, after comparing their renderings, produced an agreed translation.

Philo of Alexandria (c.20 BCE-40 CE) offers a more miraculous account. King Ptolemy decided to have the Law of the Jews translated from Chaldaean (Hebrew) into Greek. The High Priest of Jerusalem sent wise interpreters and they were installed on the peaceful island of Pharos. There, possessed by the Spirit, they all ended up with literally the same correct Greek rendering, produced not by translators but by prophets and priests of mysteries. The purpose of the story was to present the Septuagint as an inspired work of the same significance and standing as the Hebrew Bible. The completion of the enterprise was annually celebrated with a Septuagint festival at Pharos. 

In the course of the second and first centuries BCE the Prophets and the Writings were also turned into Greek and the Septuagint was further enriched by the Apocrypha, some of which was originally composed in Greek (Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Maccabees), others being translations into Greek from Hebrew (e.g. the Wisdom of Ben Sira or Sirach and others) or Aramaic (possibly Tobit).

Contrary to the claim of Philo, the Septuagint is not always a strictly literal rendering. To bring the Greek closer to the Hebrew, in the second century CE three new Greek versions were produced. 

Before the discovery of the first Qumran scroll in 1947, no Hebrew manuscript of the Bible belonging to the age of Jesus was known, with the sole exception of the small Nash papyrus containing the Ten Commandments and other scriptural extracts, and dated from between the mid-second century BCE and the first century CE. No rules relating to the making of biblical manuscripts have been preserved before the Talmud and the post-Talmudic tractate on the Scribes, the Massekhet Soferim. With the discoveries at Qumran, Masada, and other caves in the Judaean desert, we have now a considerable amount of written documents on leather and papyrus. They offer direct evidence of what ancient Hebrew manuscripts were like. Qumran alone has yielded remains of 930 original documents. We can now deduce from concrete evidence how they were manufactured.