19 The Septuagint as Nomos: How the Torah Became a “Civic Law” for the Jews of Egypt

JOSEPH MELEZE MODRZEJEWSKI (PARIS)

WHY “NOMOS”?

When Greek-speaking Jewish and Christian authors mention the Torah of Moses,^[448] they follow the Alexandrian translators of the Bible and unhesitatingly use the term nomos or its derivatives: νδμος, νομοθεσια,^[449] του νδμου των ^,Ιουδαlων βιβλια^[450]—there are numerous examples.

Torah signifies in the first place “instruction”. The Hebrew word (from yarah, to throw or fling) indicates a direction to follow, a course of conduct enjoined upon Israel by the Almighty as the means of staying faithful to the Covenant made on departure from Egypt. This said, torah and torot also signify legislation, in the sense given to this word in connection with the law collections from the ancient Near East. The giving of the Torah copies the example set by the political ideology of the oriental monarchies, where the true author of the laws imposed on a people was not the sovereign who promulgated them, but the divinity that gave them. The first known law-giver in the world, Ur-Nammu, promulgated his laws by order of the moon god Nanna, guardian divinity of the city of Ur. On the stela found at Susa at the beginning of this century, and pre­served in the Louvre, King Hammurabi receives the laws from the sun god Shamash: he is the “king of justice, to whom the god Shamash has granted the equity”.^[451]

The link between the god who gives the law or the order to establish laws and the recipient of the gift is more important than the place where the gift takes place.

Turning to nomos we find nothing of this nature. The Laws of Solon, οι του Σoλωνος νoμοι, were not given to the Athenians by Athena with Solon in the role of intermediary between the divinity and the people. The role of the nomothetes is to write down and publish normative propositions of which he is neither author nor agent of transmission.^[453] Such propositions originate in the collective will of the social group organised as a civic body. Here we find a conception of rules diamet­rically opposed to that characterising eastern—including Biblical—legislation.^[454]

Why, then, do we find nomos and not rhetra for the Greek translation of the Torah? The latter is a term that would fit very well the notion of covenant, and which is consistent with the legend of a relationship between the Jews and the Spartans.^[455] Better still would be thesmos, the first official appellation of Athenian law. This term survived into the classical period in the name of festivals (thes- mophoriai) and magistrates (thesmotetai) and it is widely attested outside Athens in inscriptions.⁹ Further, even graphe, “scripture”, equivalent to mikra, could have been employed.

The semantic richness of nomos is undoubtedly of prime importance to explain this preference. Connected by Plato with both “understanding”, νους, and “distribution”, Sιανομη,¹2 nomos in fact derives from nemein—“to appor­tion” or “to allot”. The root is nem- as is found in “Nemesis”. To begin with, it refers to the portion allotted to each person out of the division of the common property of an organised group, in particular of a civic body.¹³ Further, it refers to generally adopted practice such as usage and custom.¹⁴ According to Plato, the men who survived the flood obeyed the patrioi nomoi, which were simply customs that are observed without force of law.¹⁵ Two, more specialised, mean­ings derive from this basic sense. These are nomos as a rule of common conduct erected into an obligatory norm, above all the rule of apportionment in a polit­ical system such as that of the Greek city; and equally, nomos as a generally

O Curty, “A propos de la parente entre Juifs et Spartiates”, (1992) 41 Historia 246 and E Gruen, “The Purported Jewish-Spartan Affiliation”, in RW Wallace and E M Harris (eds), Transitions to Empire. Essays in Greco-Roman History, 360—14 B.C. in Honor of E. Badian (Normond and London, 1997) 254.

⁹ For examples, see H van Effenterre and F Ruze, Nomina. Recueils d’inscriptions politiques et Juridiques de Rarchaisme grec (Rome, 1994—1995), I, nos 2, 24, 44, 102; II, no. 59. See C Gioffredi, Thesmos e Nomos, “Nuovi studi di diritto greco e romano” (Rome, 1980) 55; I Zeber, “Quelques idees sur la notion de thesmos”, Studi A.

¹⁰ E J Bickerman, “The Septuagint as a Translation” (1959), in Studies in Jewish and Christian History (Leiden, 1976), vol. 1, 167, esp. at 168 n.2 concerning Eusebius, Chron. GCS ed. Helm 7, 139. In fact, the title of this work has not directly survived. See the fragments in A-M Denis, Fragmenta Pseudoepigraphorum quae supersunt Graeca (Leiden, 1970) 217; English version by AY Collins in JH Charlesworth (ed), The Old Testament Pseudoepigrapha (Garden City, 1983-1985) 831. The fundamental study is N Walter, Der Toraausleger Aristobulos (Berlin, 1964).

¹¹ On Paul and his relationship to the Law, see, for example, M Winger, By what Law? The Meaning of Nomos in the Letters of Paul (Atlanta, 1992). I have taken up this question in my study “Les tourments de Paul de Tarse”, in Melanges en Rhonneur de Jean Imbert (Paris, 1989) 397, and Symposion 1988 (Sienna and Pisa, June 1988) (Cologne and Vienna, 1990) 319.

¹² Plato, Laws, 714a. cf. Politics, 297b.

¹³ R Turasiewicz, “W kregu znaczeniowym pojecia nomos” [= “In the semantic field of the notion of nomos” (in Polish)], (1974) 29 Meander 7.

¹⁴ For an excellent synthesis on custom in Greek law, see A Maffi, “La consuetudine nella Grecia arcaica e classica”, Recueils Societe Jean Bodin 51: La Coutume (Brussels, 1990) vol. 1, 71. See also C Carey, “Nomos in Attic Rhetoric and Oratory”, (1996) 16 Journal of Hellenic Studies 33.

¹⁵ Plato, Laws, 680a.

agreed moral and intellectual standard.^[456] There was great scope for further developments.

The politics and institutions of Alexandria and Egypt under the first Ptolemies provide the decisive historical context in the movement from Torah to nomos. In the Hellenistic world, the notion of nomos continued to be used for referring to the laws of the Greek cities, both ancient and new foundations.^[457] It also recovered, however, its original meaning of “usage” or “custom”, in the sense of rules of conduct that were not directly promulgated by the legislative power of the king.

The availability and usefulness of the term determined the choice made in the Septuagint. The Torah of Moses was at one and the same time the history of humanity, of the family of Abraham, and of the Jewish people, and also the civil and religious laws of the last. Yet, it could also become νδμοs των 'Iοvδαlων in the Greek version prepared in Alexandria in the third century BC. After Paul of Tarsus, the first Christian author to talk of an “ancient covenant” (παλαιa διαθηκη),^[459]9 Latin used the term testamentum, the equivalent of διαθηκη, since lex, an order in the imperative given to a third person, was too narrow a con­cept to convey the richness of Jewish Law.^[460]

Moving on from the issue of such lexical choices, the attitude of the Ptolemaic monarchy towards norms that it had not created had practical consequences. These allow the discipline of legal history to contribute to consideration of the theme “from Torah to Nomos”. This is not the place to revive the debate on who decided to translate the Torah into Greek and their motives for doing so. No one can doubt that King Ptolemy was hardly concerned whether or not the Jews in his kingdom understood their national Law in its original version. His curiosity about the literature of foreign peoples, however, fits the idea of a pro­ject that aimed to collect in the Library of Alexandria all the major works of world literature.

Practical considerations could indeed have strengthened the Ptolemies’ inter­est in the Law of the Jews. The Jews were an important element in the popula­tion of the Ptolemaic state, not only in Egypt, but also in Judaea, a region which remained under the authority of the Ptolemies throughout the third century BC. Although integrated into the culturally dominant Greek-speaking group, the Jews remained apart in their religious practices, which were governed by a Law of supposedly divine origin.^[464] Royal authority was willing to recognise it. To make this possible it was necessary, however, for the Law to be accessible to those charged with ensuring its enforcement. In other words, a translation was required. The Jewish community’s needs in worship were thus united with the political aims of the monarchy, which guaranteed the national traditions of all those who made up Ptolemaic society.

From this perspective, the project of translation can be seen to be part of a political programme established by the Ptolemies to maintain the “peaceful coexistence” of traditions peculiar to the populations of their kingdoms: the Greek-speaking conquerors and the conquered of Egyptian stock. This perspec­tive provides a suitable approach to the problem. It will allow us to place the project described in the Letter of Aristeas in the institutional context of the Ptolemaic monarchy at the beginning of the third century BC.^[465] Let us start with the conquered.

THE TORAH OF THE SEPTUAGINT AND THE DEMOTIC CASE BOOK

In contrast to the peoples of the ancient Near East, Pharaonic Egypt does not seem to have shown much interest in written laws. In the hieroglyphic sources, nothing, or next to nothing, is found comparable to the major Sumerian and Akkadian legislative monuments in cuneiform script mentioned at the start of this chapter. It is not until the end of the New Empire, the Saitic restoration, and the Persian domination that our sources provide clearer evidence of the legisla­tive endeavour of the Egyptian monarchs.

The first of these sources is an Egyptian papyrus in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, dating from the end of the third century BC.²⁶ It preserves on the recto a text known as the Demotic Chronicle; on the verso we can read (although the reading is difficult and sometimes uncertain) an account of an exercise in codification. From this we learn that in the third year of his reign (519 BC) Darius I, the second Achaemenid sovereign of the country, ordered his Satrap in Egypt to bring together a commission of “wise men” drawn from the warriors, the priests, and the scribes of Egypt, who were to write down the Egyptian law that had been in force before the Persian conquest of 525 BC. After sixteen years of labour, a collection was promulgated in two versions: the “Assyrian” and the “Epistolary”. The former was in Aramaic, the official lan­guage of the Achaemenid Chancellery; the latter was in Egyptian Demotic.

The work of Darius has not come down to us in the form described in the text cited above; it seems, however, to have survived the Macedonian conquest of Egypt. This can be concluded from a second document, a long Egyptian papyrus, dating from the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, entitled the “Legal Code of Hermopolis West”.²⁷ The word “code” is misleading. What we have here is a collection of styles for the use of indigenous judges and notaries, giving them models for drawing up deeds and judgments, or indicating the solution to adopt in difficult cases. It would be better described as a manual or “case book” (prontuario legale in Italian), so long as it is not attributed to the initiative of a king, such as Bocchoris. To do so would merely revive the hypothesis of it as royal legislation equivalent to that of it as a “code”,²⁸ so that one would go round in a circle.

One can avoid this dilemma by investigating the specific background from which this collection emerged. This was the milieu of the learned priests who, in the “Houses of Life” of their temples, produced and copied religious, scien­tific, and legal works for the use of the Egyptian clergy and their clients. Viewed

²⁶ P. Paris BN dem. 215. See my article “Law and Justice”, supra n.25, 3 n.15.

²⁷ G Mattha and G R Hughes, The Demotic Legal Code of Hermopolis West (Cairo, 1975). See now K Donker van Heel, The Legal Manual of Hermopolis [P. Mattha]. Text and Translation (Leiden, 1990), which combines the edition of Mattha and Hughes with corrections suggested by P W Pestman and some unpublished readings by M Malinine.

²⁸ Thus, P W Pestman, “L'origine et l'extension d'un manuel de droit egyptien. Quelques reflex­ions a propos du soi-disant code d'Hermopolis”, (1983) 23 JESHO 14, esp. at 21. in this fashion, we can see that our collection belongs to the category of “sacred books”: dm’-nter (djema-neter) in Egyptian (Εεμ(ε)νουδι in Greek transcrip­tion).^[466] Rather than a “code”, we should try to talk of a “priestly custumal” (case book). We thus find a link to the codification of Egyptian law attributed to Darius, in the work on which participated the priests who were experts in han­dling the national law and anxious to preserve it. The priests were the guardians of the collection and transmitted it through the generations, introducing into it variations, which differed from one religious centre to another.^[467] We are thus faced with a work in multiple versions that is, however, unitary when viewed from the perspective of its milieu of origin; a work, moreover, that bears evi­dence the great attachment of the Egyptians to the legal practice of their national heritage.

It is here that the paths of the two “sacred books”—the priestly Egyptian Custumal and the Torah of Moses—cross. Each was translated during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. We have only become sure of this for the priestly Egyptian Custumal in the last twenty years, thanks to an Oxyrhynchus papyrus (P. Oxy. XLVI 3285) published in 1978. This is a copy, made in the second cen­tury AD, during the Antonine period, which derives from an original that can with certainty be dated to the beginning of the third century BC.^[468] In the second century AD, the Septuagint, a translation made by the Jews for the Jews, became the Christian Bible, after the destruction of Egyptian Judaism in the tur­moil of the revolt of 115-117 AD; at the same time, its Egyptian equivalent, the Egyptian Case Book in its Greek version, still preserved, if not its legal author­ity, at least its ideological force as representing the national heritage of an Egypt that continued to assert its national identity in the face of successive conquerors.

This parallel survival of the two translations throws a retrospective light on the link that could have existed between them at the period when they were made. Unfortunately, we do not know the identity of the translators of the Egyptian collection, even in a mythic form, such as in the case of the Septuagint. Egyptians skilled in Greek are readily found in Alexandria under the first Ptolemies. It is easy to imagine a team of translators under the direction of a Hellenised scholar, such as Manetho, who, at this period, wrote a history of his country in Greek. All that we lack is a “demotic Aristeas” to transmit to future generations the memory of this deed of his countrymen.

It is possible that in the Library of Alexandria the Greek version of the Egyptian Case Book was shelved next to the Greek text of the Torah of Moses. But the parallels that characterise these two works go beyond such mere juxtaposition: they are inscribed in the institutional history of the role that they acquired in the administration of Ptolemaic justice.

“sacred books” and royal justice

We have known for a long time that a Greek translation of the collection of Egyptian laws was used in court when Greek pleaders were ranged against Egyptian pleaders in litigation. The evidence for this comes from the proceed­ings in the “Case of Hermias”. This was a famous dispute which took place in Diospolis-the-Great (Thebes) at the end of the second century Bc, the record of which has come down to us in a beautiful papyrus preserved in the Turin Museum. During the hearing, a Greek advocate presented to the members of the jury, themselves Greek, extracts from the “law of the country” (∈κ τοv ττμ χωρας νoμου μeρη).³2 The expression νoμος or νoμοι της χωρας has a much wider application than the styles and solutions to difficult cases collected in the Case Book. It applies to the totality of local law, the law of the country practised by the natives and enforced by their national courts, the Iaokritai, in the event of a dispute.^{[469] [470] The Iaokritai, Egyptian priests, could consult the priestly Custumal in its original demotic. For a Greek official, such as the epistates Herakleides, before whom the final hearing in the case of Hermias was held, this original was inaccessible. He needed a translation. We may take for granted that the transla­tion from which extracts were cited to him was taken from the official version of the Egyptian Case Book, the existence of which from the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus is now proved by Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 3285.}

Recognition that the Greek version of the priestly Custumal could be used in judicial proceedings when the concerns of native litigants were relevant, and that the law of the country, νoμος τηs χωραs, had to be cited before Greek judges, raises the question of whether the Greek version of the Torah, νoμος τωv 'Iουδαlων, was likewise cited in analogous situations involving Jewish litigants. A number of Ptolemaic documents confirm that this was in fact the case. The parallelism of the two “sacred books” is corroborated throughout the organisa­tion of Ptolemaic justice, the basis and working of which we now understand well thanks to the reconstruction put forward by the late Hans Julius Wolff.^[471]

We find a document crucial to this reconstruction in the course of a process between Jewish litigants that took place in El Faiyum in 226 BC.³⁵ One Dositheos, an Egyptian Jew, had summoned Herakleia, daughter of Diosdotos, also Jewish, to appear before the dicastery of Krokodilopolis, the local court for immigrants living in the “Arsinoite nome”. The reason for the suit is of little sig­nificance: Dositheos accused Herakleia of having insulted him in a public place and of having torn his cloak; he assessed the total loss at 200 drachmas.³⁶ But his courage having failed at the last moment, he did not appear before the judges, and it was Herakleia who proceeded with the action. Among the docu­ments that she produced in court was the extract of a royal law or decree (dia­gramma), which governed the working of justice in the framework of the system created by Ptolemy II Philadelphus.

In this decree, the king ordered that, in the Ptolemaic dicasteries, the courts peculiar to the Greek-speaking population, and the Greek counterpart to the Iaokritai, the judges had to follow a hierarchical order of applicable rules of law. The first place was given to royal legislation. The king, however, was aware of the limits of his legislation, which was restricted to the administrative and fiscal field. He consequently ruled that, in the absence of a rule of royal law, the judges ought to resort to the “civic laws”, πολιτικοi νoμοι. If the latter did not give a regulation that settled the litigation, they were to judge, in modern parlance, “following their soul and conscience”, or according to “the most equitable opin­ion”, gnome dikaiotate.

Where did the “Law of the Jews” fit in this hierarchy? To answer this ques­tion we must try to be more specific about the precise meaning of all the terms of the decree. There is no difficulty with royal legislation, here represented by the diagrammata, the term used above all for the legislative will of the king.³⁷ Nor is there any problem with the “most just” or “most equitable” opinion, gnome dikaiotate. It is an idea known in the Greek tradition in the case of gaps in the law; our papyrus in this respect adds to the evidence of Demosthenes and some epigraphic documents, and thus confirms the panhellenic nature of this principle.³⁸ On the other hand, the term “civic laws”, πολιτικοι' νoμοι, is more difficult to explain.

der Ptolemaer”, (1988) 105 SZ 167. See also the discussion in “Droit et justice dans le monde hel- lenistique au IIIe siecle avant notre ere. Experience lagide”, Mneme G. A. Petropoulou I (Athens, 1984) 53.

³⁵ P. Petrie III 21g + P. Gurob 2 = CPJud. I 19.

³⁶ On this point, see my article “ �?Paroles nefastes’ et �?vers obscenes’. A propos de l’injure verbal en droit grec et hellenistiques”, Anthropologies Juridiques. Melanges Pierre Braun (Limoges, 1998) 569, and (1998) 1 Dike 151.

³⁷ On the notion of diagramma, see my “Note sur la legislation des Lagides”, Melanges d’histoire ancienne offerts a William Seston (Paris, 1974) 365.

³⁸ The sources are gathered together in J Triantaphyllopoulos, “Le lacune delle legge nei diritti greci”, Antologia giuridica romanistica ed antiquaria (Milan, 1968) 49. See also G Flore, “�?Diagramma’ e �?gnome dikaiotate’ nell’Egitto tolemaico”, Scritti S. Pugliati V (Milan, 1978) 257.

In the opinion of Wolff, this phrase referred to the “national laws” of the lit­igants.^[472] When they were of the same origin, that is to say, came from the same city, or, as is the case here, were members of the same ethnic community, the king authorised reference to the law of their ancestral home. He requested the judges to apply its rules to fill the gap in the royal law. The difficulty with this is that the Greek-speaking immigrants in Egypt had not brought with them the texts of their native law. In any case, we never find in a papyrus an account, for example, of an Athenian law being applied to litigants of Athenian origin, as the theory of Wolff would require. The only exception to this is the very case of the Jews. But, of course, the royal decree was not made for the Jews alone, what­ever may have been the interest of King Ptolemy in their law. Rather, it was addressed to the entire Hellenic community of which the Jews were only one part.

It is thus necessary to vary Wolff’s hypothesis. The decree reveals an intention rather than a reality. The men who drew up the royal diagrammata at the Alexandrian court foresaw the possibility, in the event of gaps in royal legisla­tion, of applying to litigants their national law as a subsidiary law. In practice, however, the term “civic law” took on a wider meaning: it became a synonym for legal koine, the Greek “common law” followed by Greek-speaking immi­grants, and enforced by the court in a law suit. Thus the nomoi politikoi were for the Greeks what the nomoi tes choras were for the indigenous population. Both were elevated to the rank of applicable law, leges fori, in their respective jurisdictions.^[473]

None the less, the legislator’s intention had important consequences for the problem here at issue. The Torah of Moses was the sole foreign law that we can be certain had been effectively imported into Egypt by a group of immigrants who were members of the Hellenic community. As a national law for the Jews, it corresponded perfectly with the definition of “civic law” held by the royal chancellery in the administration of justice. Thanks to its Greek version, it became applicable to the Egyptian Ioudaioi. The judges of the dicastery and the king’s representatives could find in the text of the Septuagint useful rules to gov­ern disputes referred to them by Jewish plaintiffs.

Thus, in the case just discussed, the Jewish lady Herakleia could have cited the provisions on violence inflicted by others in the book of Exodus (Ex. 21.18-27). The failure of her opponent to appear in court caused only that part of the decree ruling against absentees to be used. Our curiosity is left unsatisfied as regards the sanction for blows and wounds. The same can be said about another Ptolemaic document, the complaint of one Sabbatios, who undoubtedly came from Samareia, a village with a strong Jewish population in El Faiyum. Samaritans who settled in Egypt alongside their Jewish fellow believers had most likely founded this village. The wife of the complainant, when pregnant, had been attacked by another woman, Joanna, and was in danger both of a mis­carriage and her life.^[474]

It is known that the Septuagint professed a doctrine on this issue that was a stage in the development of the Jewish law on miscarriage. Like Hippocrates, Aristotle, and other Greek authors who distinguished between the living and the not yet living foetus,^[475] the Alexandrian translators contrasted the child that was “grown” (εξεικονομισμενον) with the child that was not yet grown (μ⅛ εξεικονομισμενον). In the latter instance, a miscarriage following violence inflicted on the mother gave rise to damages, while the loss of an unborn child already grown was considered as homicide.^[476] Did Sabbatios, who sought mea­sures of conservation against the attacker as long as the danger that founded his complaint persisted, count, in case of miscarriage, on the application of the law of Exodus should his child be still born? Or, was he indeed only concerned with the health and life of his wife, those of the child not being taken into considera­tion? Such an approach is vouched for by other Greek documents from Egypt dealing with similar incidents.^[477]

Two other documents, this time definitely originating in this village in El Faiyum, help us to pin down more carefully the hypothesis of the application of the Jewish Law to the Ioudaioi of Egypt. In so far as relevant, they are concerned with marriage and divorce.

MARITAL HAPPINESS AND THE “CIVIC LAW OF THE JEWS”

The first of these documents is a complaint brought by one Helladote, daughter of Philonides, wife of Jonathas, a Jew.^[478] Judging by her name and patronymic, Helladote was a Greek. Having married a Jew, she had become integrated into the community of her husband. Helladote referred to her marriage as contracted “according to the civic laws of the Jews”, [κα∙ra τoν νoμον] πολιτικoν των 'Ιουδαιων. The reading πολιτικoν των 'Ιουδαιων is certain; [κατα τoν νoμον], restored by Wolff, is highly likely.

In an article published in 1965, the late Edoardo Volterra suggested that this turn of phrase could be a reference to the traditional formula that declared a Jewish marriage contracted “according to the law of Moses and Israel” (kedat Moshe ve-Yisrael). He suggested that since the expression “Law of Moses”, nomos Moyseos in Greek, would have been incomprehensible to a Ptolemaic judge, it had been replaced by “civic law of the Jews”.^[479] This is an interesting hypothesis, and in support of this theory one could point to a variant of the for­mula, which, instead of “Moses and Israel”, features “Moses and the Jews” (kedat Moshe ve-Yehudaei). This variant is attested by documents from the region of the Dead Sea and the Cairo Genizah^[480] and is cited by the Jerusalem Talmud as in use among the Alexandrian Jews.^[481] It provides an excellent paral­lel between the Aramaic Yehudaei and the Greek ^,Ιουδαlων.

Volterra’s hypothesis, however, does not assist with the point immediately at issue. It is very unlikely that Helladote would have referred to a Jewish ketub- bah. We can undoubtedly accept that, for their marriages, Egyptian Jews organ­ised nuptial ceremonies at which the young husband pronounced the formula in question in Aramaic or in Greek. On the other hand, it is less certain that a Jewish marriage in Egypt in this era gave rise to the drawing up of two deeds— a Greek contract and a Hebrew or Aramaic document—as was to become the provincial practice in Judaea under the Roman Empire.^[482] The oldest known Aramaic ketubbah is indeed to be found among the Egyptian papyri; it only dates, however, from the reign of Theodosius II.^[483] In the third century BC, Egyptian Jews used the Greek συγγραφη as the form of contract for marriage. It is in this sense that we have to understand the word συγγρaφεσθαι in Helladote’s complaint. The verb refers to a written agreement, συγγραφη, a term that is not too bad a lexical equivalent for ketubbah, the “writ”. All the evidence, however, points to this being a Greek document drawn up according to a style in which the formula “Moses and the Jews” had no chance of appearing.

What we in fact find in this text is not a reference to the formula for marriage, but an allusion to the Torah itself. Helladote considers her marriage to a Jew as a legal act that follows Jewish law. To indicate a valid marriage, a Greek would say that he “lives legally with his wife”, συνειμι κατa νoμοvς. This, for example, was the formula twice employed by the Cretan Dryton son of Pamphilos in con­nection with his two successive marriages.⁵¹ Dryton alluded to the Hellenistic custom that governed the family life of the Greeks in Egypt. Helladote favoured a more exact reference. It is from her that we learn what appears to have been the official name for the Greek version of the Torah in legal practice in Ptolemaic Egypt. The Torah of Moses, which had been made accessible to judges and the king’s representatives in the version of the Septuagint, was one of the “civic laws”, following the definition that the royal legislation reserved for the national laws of litigants in the administration of justice. It was a πολιτικoς νoμος that the monarchy would enforce when royal legislation was itself silent. It was “the civic law of the Jews”, nomos politikos ton Ioudaion.

Helladote did not know that the Torah did not contain provisions on the con­tracting of marriage. She has unintentionally provided us with important infor­mation on the place of the Jewish Law in the institutional practices of the Ptolemaic monarchy. Her ignorance was perfectly forgivable. The Septuagint would certainly not have been Helladote’s bedside book. On the other hand, it was indeed biblical law that authorised her husband Jonathas to repudiate his wife. This followed the rule in Deuteronomy 24.1, which is the basis of the Jewish law on divorce: “When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house”. Helladote has ceased to find favour with Jonathas; he has found “something displeasing” in her, aσχημον πρaγμα (in Hebrew �?ervat davar, literally “the nakedness of the thing”), a vague idea that led, as is well known, to a large variety of interpretations.⁵²

Now, on this point, biblical law contradicts the Greek matrimonial custom that was in force among the Greek-speaking immigrants in Egypt. Greek law had established quasi-equality between husband and wife in matters of divorce. The marriage contracts known from papyri contain clauses that prepare in advance for divorce, whether on account of the wrongdoing of one or other of the spouses, or, later, by mutual consent. The Greek husband formally bound himself “not to throw out of doors” (μ⅛ εκβaλλειν) his wife.⁵³ This was clearly what Jonathas had done when he “ejected” Helladote from his house, (eκκλreceived official endorsement through recognition in the judicial system. In Ptolemaic Egypt the Torah was neither an “imperial law for the Jews” as it was in the Achaemenid Empire, nor was it an “ancestral law” confirmed by the Seleucid monarch follow­ing the procedure initiated by Alexander for the benefit of the free Greek cities. Instead, it was regarded as a “civic law”, and, established in the version of the Septuagint, was considered as an authoritative text of the judicial system that had been created for the Greek-speaking community, of which the Jews formed a part. In this regard, the Ptolemaic solution appears much wiser than the approach of Jason and Menelaus, “Hellenists” of Jerusalem: a century later, during the Maccabean crisis, they had the ambition to turn the Torah into a true Greek nomos, which the assembly of citizens could not only amend by vote but also, in the same “democratic” way, supplement with other laws.^[490]

In conclusion, we may note certain points that seem firmly established.⁶¹ Contrary to the view of Victor Tcherikover, the right to live in conformity with their ancestral law was not conferred on the Jews of Egypt by the Ptolemies in the same way in which it had been on the Jews of Judaea by the Seleucid monar­chy. It did not derive from an act of favour of the sovereign. The right evolved from the institutional practices of the Ptolemaic monarchy and the judicial organisation it set up around 275 BC, during the reign of Ptolemy II.⁶² Furthermore, while Tcherikover exposed the apparent paradox that the Jews, though free to live in Egypt according to the rules of their national Law, pre­ferred the practice of Hellenistic law, we can instead provide a more complex explanation.⁶³ In fact, we can readily demonstrate that, though they used Greek notarial styles, they remained faithful to the Torah.

Use of a Greek formulary does not necessarily involve an unreserved adher­ence to Greek law.⁶⁴ The resulting practices could often be interpreted as man­ifesting a pre-Mishnaic halakhah. On the issue of divorce, Hellenised Judaism adopted solutions that returned to a pluralistic halakhah. These varied from repudiation of the spouse, as in the case of the unfortunate Helladote, to divorce by mutual consent in certain Jewish environments at the beginning of the Roman Empire.⁶⁵ The same holds true for the prohibition on loans on interest between Jews.⁶⁶ The papyrus documents reveal a tension between the written Law and a fluid halakhah, which we can only guess at in most cases, but which, from time to time, we are able to grasp as a tangible aspect of Jewish life in the epoch of the second Temple.

In all, the results of research of the type set out here serve only to confirm fur­ther the fundamental importance of the papyrus record to the study of the Alexandrian Bible. Papyrology locates the vocabulary of the Septuagint in the context of Alexandrian and Ptolemaic life. Lexical research—such as that of, notably, Anna Passoni DelPAcqua⁶⁷ and, more recently, Helene Cadell—pro- vides endless evidence to support this claim, which Orsolina Montevecchi has this issue in my article “Juifs et Grecs entre l’Etat et la religion. La crise maccabeenne et sa signifi­cation politique”, (1994) 149 Revue des sciences morales et politiques no 1: Etats et religions 1, 27.

⁶¹See M Harl, G Dorival, O Munnich, La Bible grecque des Septante (Paris, 1988) 74.

⁶² V Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1959) 300—1, and 506, nn.11—12); Prolegomena, CPJud. I, 7.

⁶³ Prolegomena, 32—6.

⁶⁴ See likewise, A Passoni Dell’Aqua, “Prassi greca e costume egiziano nel negozio giuridico di una donna ebrea di Alessandria”, (1990) 70 Aegyptus 123; cf. (1993) 71 RHD 264.

⁶⁵ BGU IV 1102 = CPJud. II 144. See my study “Les Juifs et le droit hellenistique”, supra n.52, and the greater focus in “Jewish Law and Hellenistic Legal Practice”, in Collatio Iuris Romani: Etudes dediees a Hans Ankum I, Studia Amstelodamensia XXV (Amsterdam, 1995) 313, and Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law (Oxford, 1996) 87—8.

⁶⁶ For the details, see Les Juifs dEgypte, supra n.1, 94—101 (2nd edn, 159—70; The Jews of Egypt, 112—19), a chapter taken up again in the article, “Jewish Law and Hellenistic Legal Practice”, supra n.65, 313—15, and Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law, supra n.65, 88—90.

⁶⁷ A Passoni DelPAcqua, Il testo del Nuovo Testamento (Turin, 1994), esp. at 157—72: “La ver- sione dei LXX”, with a bibliographical list, 170 n.34.

already clearly made in her manual.^[491] Furthermore, the Septuagint had a visible influence on the onomastic practices that provide evidence of the self-awareness of the Jews of the Egyptian diaspora in the second century BC.^{[492] [493] Such an influ­ence can also be found in the rare private letters that survive from this dias- pora.70}

In the attempts to answer the questions raised by the legal practices of the Jewish communities of Alexandria and Egypt, legal history aims to provide such investigations with a contribution that supplements linguistic and textual research. It opens up new avenues that philologists and theologians may explore in their investigation of the problems that continue, most happily, to be posed for us by the Alexandrian Torah—that extraordinary product of the encounter between Greek culture and Jewish religion.