In the Book of Kings it is stated that on the tenth of the month of Tevet, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came with his troops and began to besiege Jerusalem: “And in the ninth year of his reign, on the tenth day of the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar moved against Jerusalem with his whole army” (Melachim 2 – 25:1). This siege was the beginning of the calamity, whereas, at the end of it, the First Temple was destroyed and Israel was exiled. After the destruction of the Temple, the fast of the tenth of Tevet was set - as one of the fasts of destruction, which was predicted by the prophet Zechariah. In addition, two other events that happened near that day, were added to this day - the death of Ezra the scribe and the translation of the Torah into Greek.
The Gemara in the Megillah explains that Ezra the scribe is in fact the prophet Malachi. So Ezra was one of the founders of the Knesset and was the connecting thread between the period of prophecy and the Sages of Israel. The Sages also referred to Ezra as the one who re-established the Torah by saying: “when some of the Torah laws were forgotten from the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael, Ezra ascended from Babylonia and reestablished the forgotten laws.” (Mashechet Sukkah) And that the Torah deserved to be given by him.
Mashechet Megillah regarding the translation of the Torah into Greek: “Rabbi Yehuda said: Even when our Rabbis permitted [to write in] Greek, they permitted it only in a Torah scroll, and not for other books of the Bible, which must be written only in Hebrew.
And this was due to the incident of King Ptolemy, as it is taught in a baraita: There was an incident involving King Ptolemy of Egypt, who assembled seventy-two Elders from the Sages of Israel, and put them into seventy-two separate rooms, and did not reveal to them for what purpose he assembled them, so that they would not coordinate their responses. He entered and approached each and every one, and said to each of them: Write for me a translation of the Torah of Moses your teacher. The Holy One, Blessed be He, placed wisdom in the heart of each and every one, and they all agreed to one common understanding. Not only did they all translate the text correctly, they all introduced the same changes into the translated text.
[Here are some of the changes:] And they wrote for him: G-d created in the beginning [bereshit], reversing the order of the words in the first phrase in the Torah that could be misinterpreted as: “Bereshit created G-d” (Genesis 1:1). They did so to negate those who believe in the preexistence of the world and those who maintain that there are two powers in the world: One is Bereshit, who created the second, G-d.
And they wrote: I shall make man in image and in likeness, rather than: “Let us make man in our image and in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26), as from there too one could mistakenly conclude that there are multiple powers and that G-d has human form.
Instead of: “And on the seventh day G-d concluded His work” (Genesis 2:2), which could have been understood as though some of His work was completed on Shabbat itself, they wrote: And on the sixth day He concluded His work, and He rested on the seventh day.
Instead of: “And the residence of the children of Israel, who resided in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years” (Exodus 12:40), which when read literally is imprecise, for they did not dwell in Egypt that long, they wrote: And the residence of the children of Israel, who resided in Egypt and in other lands, was four hundred years.
And in the list of unclean animals they wrote for him: The short-legged beast [tze’irat haraglayim]. And they did not write for him: “And the hare [arnevet]” (Leviticus 11:6), since the name of Ptolemy’s wife was Arnevet, so that he would not say: The Jews have mocked me and inserted my wife’s name in the Torah. Therefore, they did not refer to the hare by name, but by one of its characteristic features.”
