Bible Difficulties (7 page)

Rather, they pounce on them and bite them through with their teeth. Furthermore, this spelling of the word for "lion" (
'ari
) is rendered more than doubtful by the fact than in v.13 (14MT) the word "lion" appears in the normal way as
'aryeh
. It is most unlikely that the author would have used two different spellings of the same word within three verses of each other. Far more likely is the reading supported by most of the versions:
ka'ru
("They [i.e., the dogs or evildoers] have pierced" my hands and my feet). This involves merely reading the final letter yodh as a waw, which would make it the past tense of a third person plural verb. This is apparently what the LXX read, for
oryxan
("they have bored through") reflects a
karu
from the verb
kur
("pierce, dig through"). The Vulgate conforms to this with
foderunt
("they have dug through"). The Syriac Peshitta has
baz`w
, which means "they have pierced through/penetrated." Probably the '(aleph) in
ka'ru
represents a mere vowel lengthener that occasionally appears in the Hasmonean manuscripts such as 1QIsa and the sectarian literature of the second century B.C.

Another pair of easily confused letters is
d
(daleth) and
r
(resh). It so happens that at all stages of the Hebrew alphabet, both the old epigraphic and the later square Hebrew, these two always looked alike. Thus we find that the race referred to in Genesis 10:4 as the "Dodanim" appears in 1 Chronicles 1:7 as the "Rodanim." It is generally thought that Rodanim is the better reading because the reference seems to be to the Rhodians of the 26

Asia Minor coastline. A rather bizarre aberration in the LXX rendering of Zechariah 12:10 is best accounted for by a confusion of
r
and
d
. The MT reads, "They shall look upon me whom they have pierced [
daqaru
]." But the Greek version reads, "They shall look on me, because they will dance in triumph over [me]." The incongruous "dance"

comes from misreading
daqaru
as
raqadu
, which involves reading the
d
as
r
and the
r
as
d
, all the same word. But Theodotion preserves the correct reading by rendering
exekentesan
("they pierced through").

One of the most interesting and involved cases of letter confusion is found in the LXX rendition of the name of the pagan god mentioned in Amos 5:26. The MT spells this name as
kywn
("Chiun," KJV), but the LXX gives it a
Raiphan
, implying
rypn
as their reading of their
Vorlage
. Now it so happens that in the period of the Elephantine Papyri (fifth century B.C.),
k
(kaph) was shaped very much like
r
(resh), and
w
(waw) greatly resembled
p
(pe). This meant that
kywn
could be mistaken as
rypn
. If the
Vorlage
read by the LXX looked like
rypn
, the translators had no way to correct it to the better reading because it was a foreign, heathen name. But we now know from the Akkadian spelling of the name of this god, associated with the planet Saturn and pronounced
Kaiwanu
, that
kywn
was the true, historical spelling of the name back in Amos's day. The interesting feature about
Raiphan
, however, is that it is so spelled in Stephen's quotation of Amos 5:26 appearing in Acts 7:43. As he addresses a mixed audience of Greek-speaking and Aramaic-speaking Jews, and representing as he does the Greek-speaking Dispersion of the Jews, he quotes from the LXX, rather than going back to the original Hebrew. For missionary purposes most of the apostles quoted from the LXX, simply because that was the only form of the Old Testament available to the Greek-speaking population of the Roman Empire. If they were to "search the Scriptures" to see whether Paul and the other Christian evangelists were treating the Old Testament fairly, they had to check in the LXX version to confirm the apostolic message as the truth of God.

On the other hand, there are some instances where the LXX seems to preserve a better reading than the MT, though this happens but rarely. In the Jerusalem church council narrated in Acts 15:17, James quotes a clinching argument for the divine warrant authorizing the addition of Gentile converts to the church without forcing them to become Jewish proselytes. He builds on the promise of Amos 9:11-12, which he quotes as "that the remnant of men may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles [
ethne
, "nations"]

who bear My name." The received text reads as follows: "So that they may possess the remnant of Edom, and all the nations that bear My name." If that was the reading of the Hebrew text in the middle of the first century A.D., then James would have been rejected as grossly misquoting Scripture; for the whole point of the passage according to James was that the "remnant of men" were going to "seek the Lord." But if the only valid reading was
yiresu
("possess"), rather than the
yidresu
implied by the LXX ("that they may seek"), then James' argument would have been totally beside the point. The progress of the textual corruption is easily reconstructed. If we assume that the original text read
le
maàn yidresu 'oto (w) se'erit 'adam
("that the remnant of men may seek him"), then we can see that the word
'adam
("men") might early have been misread as
'edom
("Edom") since in the earlier orthography they would have been identical in appearance. The
yidresu
may have looked like
yirresu
, especially after
d
(daleth) acquired a short tail in the period of the Lachish Ostraca (Jeremiah's time); and the copyist may have thought he was looking at a dittograph that needed correction to
yiresu
--which in turn might well be 27

construed as equivalent to
yi(y)resu
(from
yaras
, "to possess"), inasmuch as the second
y
would hardly have appeared in writing according to the older orthography. The
'et
of the MT, which is the sign of the direct object, may have been miscopied from an original

'oto(w)
, which failed to come through with the intended final
w
(waw). All this variation could have resulted from misreading only two letters:
r
for
d
, and a final
w
inadvertently dropped from
'oto(w)
. The mere fact that James's Jewish fellow elders, steeped as they were in the Hebrew Scriptures, offered no objection on the ground of misquotation is very powerful evidence that the LXX was true to the original Hebrew text at this point.

8.
Homoeoteleuton

This Greek term means "having the same ending" and identifies the loss of text than can result when the eye of the copyist inadvertently passes over all the words preceding a final phrase that is identical with that which closes the sentence immediately preceding, or immediately following. Having taken his eyes off the
Vorlage
in order to copy down what he has just read, he turns back to it and sees the words he has just finished writing down. Supposing that he is ready to move on to the next sentence, he fails to observe that he has left out all the words preceding the second appearance of the repeated phrase. For example, in Isaiah 4:4-6 the copyist who wrote out 1QIsa encountered verses that had two occurrences of
yomam
("by day"). The complete text should read as follows: "Then Yahweh will create over the whole area of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, even smoke and the brightness of a flaming fire by night; for overall the glory there will be a canopy. And there will be a shelter to give shade from the heat by day, and refuge and protection from the storm and rain." Now when the eye of the scribe jumped from the first "by day" to the second "by day", he left out fourteen Hebrew words in between. Unfortunately this could happen even in the more carefully preserved text-tradition of the MT itself. One notable instance occurs in Psalm 145, which is an alphabetic acrostic. Each successive verse begins with the next letter of the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet. Now it so happens that the MT of v.13 begins with
m
(mem), that is, the first word is
malkuteka
("your kingdom"). But then v.14 begins, not with
n
(nun, the following letter in the alphabet), but with
s
(samekh, the letter following after nun):
somek YHWH lekol-hannopelim
("Yahweh upholds all those who fall down"). Where is the verse in between? Fortunately it has been preserved in the Greek of the LXX; and by translating this back to Hebrew, we come out with the probable original line:
ne'eman
YHWH bekol-de barayw wehasid bekol-maàsayw
("Yahweh is faithful in all his words and gracious in all his works"). The recurrence of
YHWH be kol
("Yahweh in all") soon after
YHWH le kol
("Yaweh to all") was enough to throw the scribe off; and some time after the LXX translation of Psalter had been completed, the verse beginning with
n
became entirely lost in the Masoretic text.

9.
Homoeoarkton

This means "that which has a similar beginning" and involves a similar loss of intervening words, as the eye of the scribe jumps from one beginning to another. A striking example may be found in 1 Samuel 14:41, where the MT reads, "And Saul said to Yahweh, Ò God of Israel, grant a perfect one [i.e., a perfect lot].'" The situation 28

demanded a discovery of God's leading in a time of national crisis. But according to the LXX version, Saul prefaced this request for a correct lot by a lengthy petition, saying,

"Why have you not answered your servant today? If the fault is in me or my son Jonathan, respond with Urim; but if the men of Israel are a fault, respond with Thummim." The spelling of "a perfect one" (
tamim
) and "Thummim" (
tummim
) would have been the same in the consonantal text of the Hebrew
Volage
. (It should be explained that the Urim and Thummim were the two precious gems contained in a special compartment of the breastplate of the high priest and were to be used in ascertaining God's will when a choice was to be made between two alternatives.) Saul and his army, pursuing the defeated Philistines, needed to know whether God would have them continue the pursuit for another day; but God withheld giving them any clear guidance.

Therefore Saul concluded that someone in his army must have transgressed against the Lord, and he was ready to resort to the casting of lots to find out who the culprit was. It so happened that Jonathan, unaware of Saul's vow invoked on anyone who would partake of food before the Philistines had been completely destroyed, had come across a comb of wild honey in the wood; and so he had quickly snatched up some of the honey to his mouth. Thus it came about that he who was the greatest hero of the hour--for he had started the rout of the Philistines against overwhelming odds--was about to be marked for death. But the eye of the Hebrew scribe unfortunately jumped from the first
'elohe
yisra'el
("O God of Israel") to the second one, passing over no less than twenty-six Hebrew words in between. But here again the LXX supplies us with all the missing words in Greek, and from these we can reconstruct them in Hebrew, as has been done in the critical apparatus of Kittel's edition.

10.
Accidental omission of words

Homoeoteleuton and homoeoarkton account for the omission of substantial numbers of words. Here, however, we are considering the loss of an occasional word, where similar phrases are not the source of the difficulty, but where some ancient version, such as the LXX, furnishes us with a clue that a word has been lost in the received Hebrew text.

Sometimes this omission occurred before the third century B.C., and so not even the LXX can retrieve it for us. Such an instance is 1 Samuel 13:1, which in the MT says,

"Saul was...years old when he began to reign." The numeral has dropped out completely, and there is no way of ascertaining what it was. Many textual critics suggest other passages where a word has dropped out; but this falls into the class of mere conjecture and remains a matter of opinion, nothing more. We had best content ourselves with the objective data of the received text and the early versions. In the absence of special guidance from God, no such suggestion has any higher value than mere guesswork.

11.
Variants based on vowel points only

As we have already seen, the Hebrew Scriptures existed only in the form of consonants all during the Old Testament period and indeed until well into the seventh or eighth century A.D. There is no clear evidence of the use of vowel indicators until the age of the Masoretes. A similar delay in the insertion of vowel points is demonstrable for Syriac and Arabic as well. But there was a very definite oral tradition preserved by the scribal order 29

as to how the consonants were to be vocalized. From the LXX we can learn much as to the earlier pronunciation of Hebrew in the third and second centuries B.C., for there are many proper names spelled out with Greek vowels. As a matter of fact, a scholar named Origen in the third century A.D. prepared a vocalization of the Old Testament by the use of a Greek transliteration in column 2 of his
Hexapla
; but unfortunately rather little of that has been preserved.

The late origin of vowel points, which were not systematically inserted into the consonantal text until the Masoretic period, means that we must rely heavily on the oral tradition of the Jewish custodians of the Old Testament original. We can safely assume that in the vast majority of cases their voweling is true to the meaning of the original author. But there remain a small percentage of arguable passages where a slightly different pointing might significantly affect the meaning. In general, of course, Hebrew is perfectly understandable to those who regularly speak Hebrew, even though there are no vowel points indicated. Virtually all documents in Israel today are printed in consonants only, and there is never any dispute as to the sound or meaning of the words so written.