DISSERTAZIONI DI DOTTORATO
2024-2025

GARCÍA ORTIZ Jesús Salvador

Old Greek Deuteronomy and Jewish Politics in Ptolemaic Egypt.
The Socio-Political Implications of the Greek Translation of Deuteronomy.

  Greek version of Deuteronomy generally displays consistency in word order, style, structure, and lexical and syntactic equivalence corresponding to the Hebrew text. There are even some Semitisms. There is formal equivalence between the Greek translation and its presumable Hebrew source text, both quantitatively and qualitatively. However, the Greek text occasionally features variations regarding the expected Greek term for a specific Hebrew word. The lexicon relating to judicial, social, and political officials is a case in point, which is not always fixed. This study elucidates the rationales underlying the use of κριτής and γραμματοεισαγωγεύς in Deut 1:9-18; 16:18–17:13 (Chapter I), ἄρχων in Deut 17:14-20 (Chapter II), ἀρχίφυλος and γερουσία in Deut 29:9-14, and φύλαρχος, πρεσβύτερος and ἐκκλησία in Deut 31:24-30 (Chapter III). This dissertation aims to outline the socio-political context of the Greek translation of Deuteronomy in Ptolemaic Egypt (3rd century BCE, second half). For this purpose, this study considers the pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic use of the terms under scrutiny, the Egyptian Ptolemaic papyrological and epigraphical evidence, the comparison and exegetical analysis of the oldest available Hebrew and Old Greek texts, and the elucidation of the Hebrew Vorlage of the Old Greek text of those passages.

 The terms reflect the socio-political context in threefold aspect. 1) The neologism γραμματοεισαγωγεύς indicates the twofold specialised function of writing and of presenting the Jewish legal cases before the competent authority performed by some Jews, within their politeuma, and belonging to a scribal class working for the Ptolemaic official state (cf. Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum). Among them was the translator of Deuteronomy. 2) The preference for κριτής and ἄρχων denotes a controversy between Jews and Egyptians. Κριτής conveys the Jewish people’s desire to ethnically distinguish themselves from the Egyptians, since the Ptolemaic state designated as λαοκριτής the judges of Egyptian origin. The title δικαστής was of exclusive use for the judges established by the Ptolemaic judiciary belonging to the δικαστήριον. The use of ἄρχων to designate the future Israelite king represents a pro-Jewish and pro-Ptolemaic political answer to an Egyptian polemical version of the Jewish Exodus (cf. Hecataeus of Abdera and Manetho), in which the Jewish people are portrayed as the cause of all the ills of Egypt. Ἄρχων conveys the message that the Jews did not represent a threat to the Lagid dynasty but a political support just like Joseph according to his story narrated by the book of Genesis. This implies that the Greek version of Genesis was already available to the Deuteronomy translator. 3) The use of the technical terms ἀρχίφυλος, φύλαρχος, γερουσία, πρεσβύτερος, and ἐκκλησία suggests the Jewish effort of increasing and strengthening the Israelite political identity within a Greek milieu in the Ptolemaic Egypt with noticeable ethnic rivalries.