A Hippodrome on the Road to Ephrath Few professions are as exacting in their insistence on the suppression of one’s identity as is translation, yet it is inevitable that translators betray in the fabric of their work something of the context in which they write. No target language exists outside of time and space, and even the most faithful translator will deliberately or inadvertently introduce an occasional anachronism to render a remote text more accessible to a contemporary audience. This phenomenon is familiar from ancient Bible versions, where it often manifests itself in the identification of obscure place-names and the clarification of geographical allusions. At such points the historian and historical geographer may step in and ask if anything useful is to be learned from the translation. In what follows I examine several such cases — all of them, I shall argue, ultimately connected — considering first their exegetical foundations and then their historical implications. 1. LXX to Gen 48,7 Before blessing the son’s of Joseph, Jacob recalls his return to the land of Canaan and the death of his wife Rachel: “As for me, upon my return from Paddan, I was bereaved of Rachel in the land of Canaan en route, some distance (1) remaining till Ephrath, and I buried her there on the road to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem” (Gen 48,7). LXX, however, introduces a surprising entity into the translation: “When I came from Mesopotamia of Syria, your mother Rachel died in the land of Canaan as I approached the hippodrome of Chabratha (2) of the land going to Ephratha, and I buried her on the road of the hippodrome, (1) “Some distance” renders the problematic Hebrew ≈ra trbk. For various ancient and modern attempts to grapple with the meaning of the phrase (found elsewhere only in Gen 35,16 and 2 Kgs 5,19) see N.H. TUR-SINAI, “In the Wake of Halashon Vehasefer”, Leπ 20 (1957) 1-3 (Hebrew); E. VOGT, “Benjamin geboren ‘eine Meile’ von Ephrata”, Bib 56 (1975) 30-36; Y. MAORI, The Peshitta Version of the Pentateuch and Early Jewish Exegesis (Jerusalem 1995) 81, n. 43 (Hebrew); C.T.R. HAYWARD, Saint Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on Genesis (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford 1995) 214-215. (2) Cf. htrbk (instead of MT’s trbk) in 4Qgenf. See J.R. Davila’s edition in E. ULRICH et al., Qumran Cave 4. VII. Genesis to Numbers (DJD 12; Oxford 1994) 54.