This work examines the biblical book of Exodus in its Greek translation from the third century BCE. The focal point of analysis is on laws that involve the death penal-ty, whether in the Hebrew or Greek texts. Using a method which prioritizes the eval-uation of the translated text in comparison to its source text, the present work ar-gues that laws involving the death penalty in Greek Exodus in no small way depart from the Hebrew text’s contents. This conclusion becomes clearer when the lan-guage, syntax, and traits of the Greek legal genre are combined with this comparison of the translation to its parent text. Through creative translation practices, the trans-lator of Exodus takes steps to remove or obscure capital punishment in some laws, add this penalty to another, or otherwise render a Hebrew law’s content in such a way that minimizes the scope or practicability of the capitally punishable offence. One such innovative measure of the translation is in the use of a Ptolemaic legal-syntactic trait that limits the practicability of a given legal command. Here the trans-lator draws on the scribal habits and rules of Greco-Egyptian law from the third cen-tury. In other cases, the translator renders with terms or phrases that superficially represent the Hebrew source text but do not semantically correspond to the Hebrew text in the Greek translation. This project points out these occurrences by means of comparison with the literary and documentary source materials from around the time of the translation. A particular interest is given to Greek legal materials. Out of this translation-technical data emerges the hypothesis that the translator of Exodus rendered these laws in such a way that they might coincide with the legal values and potentially the legal practices of the ethnic superpower of the day (the Greeks). Rel-evant comparisons are made in order to substantiate this observation.
1.1 Aspects and levels of analysis 12
2.1 Terminology for the death penalty in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE 55
2.2 Terminology for the death penalty in the Ptolemaic period 67
2.3 Command verbs in the orators’ citations of law codes 85
4.1 ‘
4.2
4.3 Cases in which, according to critical editions,
A1.1 Command verbs in hellenistic law codes 273
A2.1
A2.2
A2.3
A2.4
A2.5
