Women’s Property Rights in Egypt and the Law of Levirate Marriage in the LXX

Abstract

Abstract If, as theorists of reception studies have argued, readers respond to the meanings that a text has accumulated in the past, this begs the question what the translators of the »first« translation of the Torah, the LXX, responded to. This paper presents a case study of the LXX of Deuteronomy 25:5–6, and argues that the translation is best understood if we assume that the translators were not just transferring a text form one language into another, but were also interacting with a tradition of interpretation and the extensive inheritance rights of women in Egypt.