Paul’s words in Galatians 2:19 have been described as “paradoxical” and “without parallel” (Moo 2013), even “breathtaking” (Barclay 2015). Whereas νόμος and ‘life’ are consistently drawn together throughout the LXX and Apocrypha (Das 2014), Paul instead describes νόμος as an agent of death. In this paper I survey the agency of νόμος in the LXX/Apocrypha, and compare it with the agency of νόμος and related terms in Galatians. Despite Paul’s seeming disparity with LXX/Apocrypha, his own dying to νόμος through νόμος coheres with the logic of Deuteronomy 29:10-21 (LXX). However, against the LXX/Apocrypha, Paul situates νόμος within a narrative arc bending from Abraham to Messiah. This paper builds on Wright (1991), Martyn (1997), Ciampa (1998), Cummins (2001), and Williams (2019) and argues that within the Abraham-Messiah narrative arc, Messiah is the agent of God’s δικαιοσύνη, not νόμος. Subsequently, νόμος defines neither the identity or ethical rule for the Jew-Gentile Galatian congregation. Instead, πνεῦμα and the cross occupy this role. By paying attention to agency and the Abraham-Messiah narrative arc deployed by Paul, I argue that the genitive descriptor in Galatians 2:19, “διὰ νόμου…ἀπέθανον,” refers to the covenant mechanism for cursing per Deuteronomy 29:1-30:10 (LXX), and that the dative referent, “…νόμῳ ἀπέθανον,” refers to the redefinition of identity and ethics for God’s renewed-covenant people.