The Legend of the Septuagint

And then somebody else says, no, the angels transformed into flames of fire and had sex with the women.

I don’t know how flames having sex with women is any better than angels having sex with women.

Have you read literature from the first century?

No! No, I try not to.

Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How is your day going, Dan?

Day’s going good. It’s a good day to be alive. Just being alive is probably preferable to the alternative.

Yeah, I feel the same.

It’s hard to know. Frankly, I’ve never not been alive that I can remember, so it’s hard to know. But things are going well. And I’m excited to talk about the things we’re going to talk about. The first thing we’re going to talk about, and you guys have to stick with us, even though this is going to be a lot of things that you might not instantly recognize, because it’s really fun and it’s really interesting. It’s the Letter of Aristeas. And, you know, I didn’t know what that was. You, if you do know what it is, you are better educated about this than I am, and that’s fine. Good.

But there are going to be connections though to things that you probably do know about, so you should be able to gain some purchase on this.

Yeah, if you watch this show, the word Septuagint— or listen to the show— the word Septuagint is one that you’ll understand, and we’re going to dive into that whole thing. Yeah, and apparently a bunch of lies about where it came from. Anyway, and then after that, in the second part of the show, we’re going to be talking about some passages from Exodus and how you’re supposed to deal with it if somebody, if two people think they own the same thing.

Yeah, if something gets lost or stolen or something and two people both claim it was theirs, what do you do? We got this one weird trick from Exodus 22 , and I’m really interested in the way that people mistranslate what’s going on there.

In order to try to make it sound a little less problematic from a theological point of view. Oh, cool.

We’re going to get problematic. That’s going to be fun.

Yep. Okay.

All right. Well, with that said, let’s dive into our What Is That? So this week’s What Is That? I mean, we could call it the Septuagint, just what is that part? But, but we’re starting with this letter of Aristeas.

And, uh, and it’s a letter that you made me read, and I, I resent you for that a little.

Did you read the whole thing?

Well, I skimmed a few parts, I’ll be honest.

So no. Okay.

No, no, why would I do that? It’s long.

No, it was long. Yeah, it is. Uh, and there’s a, there’s a lot of stuff in there that you’re like, why would anyone care about this, right?

And I’m not going to read the names of all the elders. I’m just not. I’m sorry.

Yeah, no, no, there’s no, no need for that. But If you haven’t heard of the Letter of Aristeas, and for whatever reason you’re listening to our show, you probably have heard the word Septuagint.

Right.

Which is a reference to the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. And some people might wonder, where does Septuagint come from? Well, it comes from a Greek word for 70. Sept might sound familiar. Right. And the notion that the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible has something to do with the number 70 actually derives from the tradition that we find in the Letter of Aristeas.

Indeed.

So you have seen the results, the outcome, the workings of the Letter of Aristeas if you have seen the word Septuagint before.

Though, objection, your honor. Septuagint does refer to the number 70. That’s not the right number.

Right. The right number would be 72, because— and this is just, you know, in the ancient world, you just kind of spitballed some things.

We’re just going to round it up, it’s fine. Round down, we’ll round down.

Down, we’ll round down. Yeah, you squint at it, it works. But, um, the Letter of Aristeas is a letter that purports to tell the history of where we got the Septuagint from. And, and the idea fundamentally is that there were 72, Hebrew scholars, 6 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel, that traveled down to Alexandria, Egypt, and translated the Pentateuch, so the first 5 books of Moses, into Greek. And technically, in its narrow sense, the Septuagint is really just the translation of the first 5 books of Moses. But commonly scholars and lay folks use Septuagint to refer to the whole Hebrew Bible translated into Greek. Okay. So if you’ve heard that tradition before, that there were 72 scholars who translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, or the Pentateuch into Greek. That’s where it comes from. And this letter claims to be from a dude named Aristeas to his brother Philocrates.

And so this is not a Jewish person, this is a Greco-Roman person, and he claims to be a And here’s where I betray the fact that I’ve only ever read this word. Is it courtier or courtier?

Courtier.

Courtier. Okay. Claims to be a courtier of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Now this was a ruler who reigned from like the early to mid-3rd century BCE. Okay. Like 280, 245-ish, somewhere in there.

Uh, it’s very clearly not historical. It was probably written somewhere around 100 years after, uh, Ptolemy II, uh, was, was done reigning.

So it does read a little suspiciously like it’s telling you a story rather than like, I’m telling you my story. It becomes this, I’m telling you, sit down children and listen as I tell—.

Gather round and you shall hear.

That’s right, that’s right.

Yes. And, you know, we talked about how long it is.

Like, I don’t know who wrote letters this long in this time period. And, you know, because the person who’s reading or listening to this letter is going to be like, get on with it. But basically the story is this: the ruler Ptolemy wants to collect 500,000 volumes of literature from around the world in the library in Alexandria. Famous library. Everybody knows about it. So they’re getting stuff together. Everybody’s doing a bang-up job. And then Demetrius of Phalerum, who’s—.

Sorry, you said 500,000 volumes of literature. Where did I read that it was 500,000 volumes?

Oh no, 500,000. Excuse me.

500,000. I just wanted to make sure that we were—.

Yeah, that was just a brain fart on my part. Yeah. Begging your pardon, I apologize.

Yeah, ‘cause 500,000, frankly, not that impressive.

No, not that impressive. 500,000, excuse me. And so Demetrius of Phalerum, who is the king’s librarian, he comes to the king and says, “Yes, yes, we’re doing great. We’ve got more than 200,000 books, oh king, and we’ll get there. We’ll be all right.” But he says, “It has also been reported to me that the laws of the Jews are worthy of transcription and of inclusion in your library.” And the king says, “What is there therefore to prevent you from doing this?” Okay, then go do it, man.

Why are you telling me this?

And he says, “For everything that you need has been provided to you.” But Demetrius said, “Translation is still required, for in Judea they use their own characters, just as the Egyptians use their own arrangement of letters, inasmuch as they also have their own language. The Judeans are supposed to use Syrian.” “This is not so, but they use another style.” And I think Syrian is probably intended to refer to Aramaic, but I could be wrong about that. And so after Demetrius tells the king about this, the king contemplates these things and he says, “You know what? We’re going to write to the high priest of the Judeans and we’ll figure out how to get this done.” And so ultimately what happens is Aristeas and others go to Jerusalem and talk them into sending along 6 Hebrew experts from each of the 12 tribes of Israel, because, you know, all of the 12 tribes of Israel were still integrated and still everybody knew what tribe they were from and everything, right, in this time period.

And they travel back to Alexandria and the king throws this 7-day feast. And I love this part of the story because every night they’re at this banquet and the king is just like, “Regale me with your Judean tales.” “Tell me all the tales of your Jewness.”

Let’s have some more Jew tales.

I love those. And the idea is to basically kind of defend the Jewish laws and customs as rational, as philosophically defensible. So when it comes to the things that don’t make much sense, at least according to how we think about these things philosophically, so when it comes to why there are certain seafood that is inappropriate to eat, they go into like, well, that’s because they have so many legs and this is a symbol of this kind of thing and that’s inappropriate and so forth. And so every question that comes up, the 72 elders have a philosophically informed and rational response. And so part of the letter is a defense of the rationality of the Jewish customs.

Well, I mean, if there’s going to be a group of people who will have thought deeply about everything that they’re taught, everything in their scriptural heritage, it will be a bunch of rabbis. They will have thought about all of this stuff.

Yeah. And if you look up the Letter of Aristeas, you can get a decent translation online. It’s a little outdated. If you want a really good one, Benjamin Wright III’s The Letter of Aristeas from the Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature by De Gruyter, I think, is the best current translation and commentary on it. But it’s broken up.

And the letter’s originally in Greek?

The letter, yes. Yes, was. It claims to have been a translate— or no, yeah, I’m pretty sure it was— claims to have been originally written in Greek because it’s from the dude Aristeas who’s in Alexandria. But it’s divided into paragraphs, and you’ve got the intro is like paragraphs 1 through 8. And then you hear about Demetrius and the Royal Library project in paragraphs 9 through 51. So that’s a lot of paragraphs to say the king wanted to fill the library and they needed the Jewish law. Like, it goes into excessive detail. You might even say a plethora of paragraphs.

Do you know what a plethora is?

And then the embassy to Jerusalem is paragraphs 52 to 82. And then we’ve got the description, and then we, you know, you’ve got another almost 100 paragraphs describing Jerusalem and the temple and praising the law. And then we have the selection of the 72 translators, and they name them, uh, which is, which is, you know, riveting.

Just a lot of fun. Just real good reading right there. Yeah, for sure.

And then, uh, 187 to 300, that’s where we get our, uh, our philosophical symposium over the course of this 7-day banquet, and where we get the questions about ethics and governance and wisdom. And basically, they demonstrate to the king just how awesome Jewish customs and ideas of ethics and governance and wisdom are. And then they basically lock them on the island of Pharos. So that’s the famous lighthouse in Alexandria and all that. And so everybody gets their own room, 72 men over the course of 72 days, each one of them translates the entire Pentateuch on their own, and at the end they come back together and they compare all 72 translations and they all match word for word.

Amazing.

Yes. So, and, and they never could have planned that, you know. It’s like, well, you’re all gonna all do it yourself, just entirely independently of each other, and take as long as you need, and miraculously, it all takes 72 days and every word matches identically. And then paragraphs 308 to 321, this is where we get kind of the thesis of the whole letter. This is kind of where everything culminates. They read the translation publicly to the Jewish community in Alexandria. So this is hearkening back to your earlier Jewish ideas in the Persian period, you have Ezra reading the law out to everybody. So it’s kind of alluding to that.

Oh, interesting. I didn’t catch that allusion. I just— Yeah.

It just seemed like, “Gather all the Jewish people. We are now going to have— They all now have to suffer through the entirety of the Hebrew Bible.

Yeah, well, it— and it’s just the Pentateuch, so luckily they didn’t have to listen to, uh, everything. The Psalms would have been—.

The Psalms would have been a lot to slog all the way through.

Yeah, um, so we get a lot of, uh, they read the legislation. It says, because the legislation is sacred and has come about through God, and God struck some of those who did undertake it and they ceased to attempt. So they’re saying like this, they tried to do this before and it didn’t work, and this is the one time it worked, which means it must be approved by God. The fact that it took 72 days, the fact that it matched word for word, all of this is an indication that it has been approved by God.

And so it would have been very similar anciently. But the idea is, look at all this divine approbation of this translation. The translation is good and it’s okay. And so this is a way to defend and to validate Greek-speaking Jewish people, Jewish folks in Alexandria particularly, but anywhere who spoke Greek, the lingua franca, and maybe didn’t speak Hebrew well enough to read the scriptures, or didn’t speak Aramaic well enough to read the scriptures in the Targumic translations. And so it’s a way to say it’s okay to be Jewish and to speak Greek and to encounter the scriptures in Greek as well. So that’s one of the rhetorical points of the end of the Letter of Aristeas. But also you get the curse against anybody who would add to or take away from, which itself is alluding back to Deuteronomy 4 , where you have the same thing about cursing anyone who adds to or takes away.

And you get the same thing at the end of the Book of Revelation , right? A curse for anyone who adds to or takes away from any of the words of this book, which is another way to say, hey, this is all God’s doing, so it’s got to stay exactly as it is.

It does strike me as interesting that every one of them was adding to somebody else’s book. So it just feels like, aren’t you cursed then? You added. Why can’t I add? I don’t know. Yeah.

We see this tradition being reflected in Philo of Alexandria. So he was a Jewish philosopher, politician who was born probably around 15 to 20 BCE and lived to around 50 CE. So actually lived across the entire life of Jesus of Nazareth. But he talks about the tradition and narrates parts of the Letter of Aristeas. Josephus talks about this tradition. Like, it is pretty widespread. And so for a long time, that was understood to be the actual historical origins of the Septuagint. And no doubt the Letter of Aristeas helped spread the authorization, the legitimacy of the Septuagint around the Greek-speaking Jewish world. And who knows if that tradition is a reason that people like Philo and Josephus could consider themselves, you know, legitimate authoritative voices within Judaism, because it might not have been as acceptable to be a Greek-speaking Jewish person in the 1st century CE if not for this letter defending the Septuagint.

Let me ask you this. Do we have a sense of why this letter would be needed? Is it just because of that, somehow as a means of legitimizing Greek-speaking Jews? Or is it— it seems like it wants to have a reason that it exists.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s probably one of the main reasons. There’s also the argument that because a large chunk of the letter is a philosophical defense of the rationality of Judaism, it might also be, you know, whether it’s the primary or secondary or tertiary rhetorical goal, just making Judaism sound reasonable and philosophically defensible to a Greco-Roman audience might also be in the mix. Interesting. So I’m sure there are a variety of different things going on, but you do seem to— the letter does seem to be speaking to Jewish people, but also to non-Jewish people. And so it is an apologetic letter to some degree, both internally and maybe externally as well. Although maybe the defenses of the philosophical rationality of Judaism are really internally oriented as well.

Maybe it’s intended to convince folks who are like, “No, we’re different. We’ve got to be isolationists,” or we’ve got to be something like that. Maybe it’s an attempt to say to them, “No, we should be integrated into the broader world because we fit with the way they think and talk about things.” So this time period would have been— this is probably occurring somewhere within a couple of decades of the Maccabean Revolts. And a big part of that was to what degree is Judaism integrated into broader Hellenistic society? And I think you would say the author of the Letter of Aristeas is kind of on the more integration side of things rather than on the less integration side of things that folks like the Essenes at Qumran would’ve been, who were very much separatists and isolationists.

Right.

So yeah, so I don’t think we know for sure what the main thrust of the reasoning is, but I think there are a number of possibilities that kind of accrete around this apologetic rhetorical goal, whether it’s exclusively internal or internal and external.

Well, and I suppose that by saying 6 of each of the tribes came to do this thing, it’s basically saying this should be acceptable to all of you, to every Jew should find this an acceptable endeavor, this translation, because we all agreed to it. You know, at this point, you know what I mean? Like, I’m telling a story of how this was done by us, for us, with our, you know, with the consent and even the approbation of the leaders of our groups.

Yeah. And this is something that was desirable to the outside world. This is something that— and most scholars, for a long time, this was considered historical. A lot of people just assumed that this was the way things went down, or that this preserved some kind of social memory of the broad outlines of how this went down. And it was really in the 1600s and 1700s that there were scholars who were like, “Yeah, no, this is all myth. None of this happened.” And I think that’s more or less the consensus view today. There are certainly scholars who will say this was written a century later and this is mostly made up, but it’s not outside the realm of plausibility that the king might have requested this. And I would be on the side of scholars who would say it seems more likely that the Septuagint was translated based on internal impulses and motivations, that it was needed among Jewish folks.

And when you look at the translation of the first 5 books of Moses, it’s very clear they were not all translated at the same time because they’re— and not by the same people. There are very different translation techniques across the different books of the Pentateuch. For instance, Genesis, which was clearly the first one translated, has a pretty free yet faithful style. In other words, the translation is pretty good, but the result is closer to idiomatic Greek literary stylings in Greek than it is to like a wooden, uh, very Semitic-sounding translation. And as you go through Exodus and Leviticus and the other texts, the translation style gets less and less free and more and more literal, so that by the time you get to Deuteronomy, the translation is much less good literary Greek and much more— you, you have more occurrences of Semiticisms in the translation, and you even have more transliterations of Hebrew words.

So it’s definitely a project that occurred over a long period of time, and it’s definitely different translators who are working on it.

But probably not 72 of them.

Probably not 72 of them, correct. And I think that there’s a theory out there that the translation of at least the Pentateuch, I don’t know if the theory, I don’t remember if the theory includes the whole Hebrew Bible, but the idea is that it was basically a tool that was supposed to function as kind of an interlinear. I don’t know what that means. An interlinear would be where you have both the source language and the target language, and it would basically be for you to compare.

Right.

And so there’s a theory out there that it wasn’t intended for Jewish folks who spoke Greek and did not speak Hebrew, but for folks who could speak both languages and wanted to be able to compare and see how the Greek would compare to the Hebrew. I think they call that the interlinear theory. It was big when I was at Oxford. My thesis there was on the Septuagint, textual criticism of the Septuagint, so I was a lot more involved in Septuagintal studies back then, but that was also going on 17 years ago. So I don’t know if the interlinear theory is still considered viable.

Now remind me, I have vague memories of things that we have talked about in the past.

I don’t. You’re doing better than me.

But one of the things that we’ve talked about is sort of the lineage of our English translations. That came from the Latin, which then came from the Greek. Am I right? All of our translations basically descend from the Septuagint.

Is that correct? Not quite. Okay. So the Septuagint was definitely the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible for Christianity up until Jerome toward the end of the 4th century CE.

Oh, right, right, right.

Okay. And there were Latin translations that existed prior to Jerome, and they stuck to the Septuagint. In fact, when I talk about Exodus 21:22-25 , which is where we have this idea that I keep bringing up that a fetus was treated more as a property than a person, they call it the Vetus Latina, the Old Latin version, which is the pre-Jerome translation, which was directly dependent on the Septuagint.

And so we’ll incorporate–

Because we don’t have any Hebrew before Qumran, we don’t have Hebrew versions that predate the Septuagint. Is that right? Something like that, right?

Yeah, yeah. The oldest versions of the texts that we have come from Qumran, and they’re very, very fragmentary. I think somewhere between 20 to 25 percent of the entire Hebrew Bible is represented, which is not a large portion of it. And you see different kinds of traditions in there. You see some of the Septuagint readings in some of the Hebrew. You see some more Masoretic Text readings in the Hebrew. The Septuagint would have been translated right around the time the Qumran manuscripts are beginning to be transcribed. So the translation of the Septuagint is about contemporaneous with those manuscripts. But because we have the entire Hebrew Bible in later manuscripts of the Septuagint, for the longest time, that was the oldest version of most of the overwhelming majority of the Hebrew Bible to which we had access. So it was like, we have the Masoretic Text from 900 to 1000 CE. That’s our oldest manuscript.

“Or we’ve got the Septuagint, which is almost 1,000 years older in the earliest manuscripts, but it’s a translation.” So the Septuagint has always been text-critically important. And even today, there are lots of places where translations are going to give preference to the Septuagint. And the Dead Sea Scrolls in their own way have demonstrated that there are many places where, yeah, the Septuagint is very clearly based on a variant Hebrew source text and not just the translator going, “la da da.” “Ah, I’m going to do whatever I want here,” which is kind of how some people thought the variants crept into the Septuagint. And certainly that is what’s going on in some places, but most of the time they’re faithful renderings of their source texts. So it gets really, really complex when you get into the weeds of Septuagint textual criticism. But the Letter of Aristeas is an important tradition that influenced how a lot of people thought about the origins of the Septuagint down to today.

There’s people today who are like, yeah, that’s definitely what happened. Not scholars. Most scholars are in agreement that that’s definitely not what happened. But, uh, but if you– even if you’ve never heard of the Letter of Aristeas, if you’ve heard of the tradition that 70 or 72 scholars translated it all at the same time, then you’ve heard the story from the Letter of Aristeas. Uh, and, and I think, I think it’s, it’s helpful to know where that story comes from. And, uh, and hear the scholarly perspective on it.

Absolutely. Well, there you go. I think that’s brilliant. I think that’s a very interesting thing. But let’s move on to our chapter and verse. And like I say, this week’s chapter and verse, it’s Exodus 22 . And that is– is this part of the Covenant Code?

It is part of the Covenant Code. You are correct, sir. Uh, we’re gonna, we’re gonna start in, uh, in the English it’s verses 7, 8, and 9, although in the Hebrew it’s verses 6, 7, and 8. This is one of the chapters where there is a distinction, uh, in the versification.

So just get—just getting all wacky-doo.

Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. Okay, uh, and, and this is a, this is a fun little prescription of, of what to do. I’m gonna read from the updated edition of the NRSV-UE. I’m just gonna go through, uh, verses 7, 8, and 9, and then I think I’ll read another translation and we’ll see if you can see what’s—.

See if you can spot a difference.

Yes. Okay, so from the NRSV-UE: When someone delivers to a neighbor money or goods for safekeeping and they are stolen from the neighbor’s house, then the thief, if caught, shall pay double. If the thief is not caught, the owner of the house shall be brought before God to determine whether or not the owner had laid hands on the neighbor’s goods. In any case of disputed ownership involving ox, donkey, sheep, clothing, or any other loss of which one party says, ‘This is mine,’ the case of both parties shall come before God. The one whom God condemns shall pay double to the other. So it sounds an awful lot like, uh, like a bit of an ordeal.

Well, it sounds tricky because, uh, because traditionally when you come before God, he doesn’t—God is not explicit. He done it. Like, yeah, we generally—at least in my experience when I was a religious person, I never saw that happen. So, right, uh, it does seem like what the heck is happening. What are we even talking about?

Yeah. So it’s—but the idea of most ordeals is like you come before God and you swear an oath. And the idea seems to be hopefully the threat of divine punishment is such that the person who knows they’re guilty will shrink from the challenge, will be unable to actually swear the oath.

And we’ve seen this kind of thing before, and it always tickles me because it’s like, have you ever met a human?

Because, do you know people?

They are very happy to swear an oath, even to God, that is not true.

If they’re willing to steal from their neighbor, they’re willing to swear an oath that they didn’t. Trust me.

Yeah. Yeah. So if this law was ever put into practice, I got to imagine that the overwhelming majority of the times, God didn’t condemn either party because both of them were like, yeah, mine.

Well, also, like, what do you like? What does that even mean? I’m hoping that we are going to get to what does—what it means to say God condemns one or the other.

Well, that, that brings up what we’re—I’m hoping it’s a Ouija board.

That’s my main hope is that you’re moving it.

You’re moving. No, I’m not. Um, okay, so I’m gonna read from the NET. This is the New English Translation.

If a man gives his neighbor money or articles for safekeeping and it is stolen from the man’s house, if the thief is caught, he must repay double. If the thief is not caught, then the owner of the house will be brought before the judges to see whether he has laid his hand on his neighbor’s goods. ‘In all cases of illegal possession, whether for an ox, a donkey, a sheep, a garment, or any kind of lost item about which someone says, “This belongs to me,” the matter of the two of them will come before the judges. And the one whom the judges declare guilty must repay double to his neighbor.’ So there are a lot of little differences here, and then there are a couple of big differences.

That’s a very different idea. Yeah.

Introducing this judge’s idea is—I mean, A, makes way more sense in terms of like practically what we’re talking about. That, that part that I can understand, that makes total sense to me. That’s what, that’s what we do now. When there is, when there is a dispute, we bring them before a judge. The—.

I think the issue—well, I’ll explain an issue with why I think judges is problematic, and then we’ll get into why there’s a difference in the translation.

The thing is, the judge isn’t going to have any evidence that’s going to allow him to make a logical determination about who’s guilty and who’s not. The idea is basically—.

We’re specifically talking about one person’s word against another.

Exactly. And so elsewhere in the Bible, you need God to be able to decide between two parties when it’s just one person’s word against another. You have no witnesses, you have no material evidence.

Is because the verb about, about, uh, whom the Elohim condemn is conjugated in the plural. So, so if you If you want to say God, then you are ignoring that the verb is plural. Okay. So bring them before God, whomever God condemns. Well, it can’t be that because condemn is in the plural, not the singular.

Well, okay, so we’ve brought up the word Elohim plenty of times on this. Yes. And you have mentioned that it can be plural or it can be singular. But what you haven’t ever mentioned is that it could mean judges.

It can’t.

Yeah. So, so the notion that it can mean judges is, is just not there. That’s not what it means in Hebrew. But you had some early Jewish literature that did translate it as judges. Oh, because they didn’t like the fact that this was plural. So it wouldn’t mean God, it would mean be brought before the gods. And whomever the gods condemn. And that made a lot of folks uncomfortable, which is, which is, you know, that’s not difficult to understand. Yeah, that’s understandable. And so there was, there was kind of this time period, uh, around the time when the New Testament was being written where there was a lot of hand-wringing over what was going on here. And we see this in early rabbinic literature where they’re, they’re trying a bunch of different ways to figure out what’s going on here. And it actually goes back to like Genesis 6 with the Bene Elohim, the children of God who had sex with the human women, and the children of God in Job 1 and Job 2 . And there are a bunch of places where we have these weird references to gods and children of God. And a tradition developed that this could refer to— that the word Elohim here could be referring to angels, or it could be referring to humans. And so the Genesis 6 idea is, well, maybe this was angels, and then people were like, angels can’t have sex with humans, what’s going on here?

They’re not— you know, it wouldn’t even fit. What, um, you know, you struggle to figure out how that works. And this is what’s going on with Jude in relation to Sodom and Gomorrah, where they were like, and in like manner they, um, pursued, uh, you know, sarkos heteras, the different flesh. Ew, those gross humans wanting to have sex with angels. And you have some Jewish literature where they were like, no, angels just appeared when men were having sex with their wives and they were kind of like, ooh, and, and, um, yeah. And that made it so the women conceived these, these giant offspring and stuff like that. And then somebody else says, no, the angels transformed into flames of fire and had sex with the women.

You know, and I just didn’t know how flames having sex with women is any better than angels having sex with women.

Have you read literature from the first century?

No, no, I try not to.

But another tradition developed that Genesis 6 was a reference to the line of Seth, that it was humans. And so a tradition developed that Elohim could refer to humans, and it was supposed to refer to either particularly powerful or particularly important humans. And so one interpretation became that it referred to judges. And this is—.

That was a long and circuitous road that we got to that.

Yeah, well, and there’s so much more to it because, you know, you got Psalms 82 as well, which is bizarre. And you’ve got John 10 where Jesus says, “Ain’t you guys read Psalms 82 where it says you are gods? " And that’s probably appealing to a tradition that understands the Israelites at Sinai to be the ones who are referred to as gods upon reception of the law because they become immortal and blah, blah, blah. So that’s a post-biblical renegotiation of what’s going on here. And a lot of people, even down to today, are kind of like, that’s our interpretation. That’s what we like because it makes the problem go away.

It doesn’t make the problem go away. It is just a way to avoid the problem and deny it exists because Elohim just doesn’t mean judges. It means God, gods, or divine in the adjectival sense. And something that I find fascinating, I read you the NET translation, the New English Translation, and the New English Translation is actually, I think, a very interesting translation because it’s translated from scratch afresh.

Oh. Yes. And this is a passage where they got really sloppy. In this one passage, they got really sloppy because I want to read the note that they have for where they translate judges.

Says the word is ha-elohim. S. R. Driver, and Driver was a Semitist, a biblical scholar from a long time ago, says the phrase means to God, namely the nearest sanctuary, in order that the oath and the ritual might be made solemn, although he does say that it would be done by human judges. So basically Driver’s idea is, so you got to go to the sanctuary, you got to be in God’s presence but it’s going to actually be supervised by human judges.

So going before God just meant you got to go to church, you got to go to the synagogue or the whatever it is, the tabernacle, the whatever, the place where God theoretically is the goddiest.

Yeah. That the reference is to Adonai God is the view also of F. C. Fensham in a paper called New Light on Exodus 21:6 and 22:7 from the Laws of Eshnunna. Compare also the ASV, the NAB, the NASB, the NCV, the NRSV, the NLT. Others have made a stronger case that it refers to judges who acted on behalf of God. See Cyrus Gordon, “Elohim in Its Reputed Meaning of Rulers, Judges,” and Anne Draffkorn, “Ilani Elohim.” Both of those are Journal of Biblical Literature articles, one from 1935, the other from 1957. So the editors are basically like, we think it means judges, here’s why. Here’s the problem. Both of the articles that they cited pretty definitively conclude it does not mean judges.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that is sloppy.

That’s incredibly sloppy. Yeah. So I’m going to start with Cyrus Gordon from 1935. The article is entitled “Elohim in Its Reputed Meaning of Rulers, Judges,” and it starts the very first definition under Elohim in Brown-Driver-Briggs. That’s, uh, an old lexicon. Is rulers, comma, judges. And then it goes on from there. Uh, the next page you’ve got a paragraph that says, it is my contention that here Elohim does not mean God as the Septuagint translates, “Nor judges,” which is the interpretation of the Peshitta and Targum Onkelos, followed by Rashi and Ibn Ezra, by several of the English versions, and by the lexicon. The literal translation “gods,” plural, found in the Vulgate and Luther’s version is better suited to what appears to be the real meaning of the passage in the light of newly discovered material. And then he goes on to talk about the Nuzi tablets and how there is this ritual where when you don’t have evidence of something, you swear to the gods, which are supposed to be divine images like teraphim.

You basically go in front of the court’s little shrine and you go, wasn’t me, I swear it. And, you know, and then you pay your fine or whatever and you go. So Cyrus Gordon is black and white. It does not mean rulers or judges. And then Anne Draffkorn from 22 years later publishes her paper, “Ilani Elohim,” and starts off talking about, “Oh, it means God or gods, could be idols. There’s a small group of such marginal occurrences in which the noun had been traditionally interpreted as judges,” and then goes on to cite Cyrus Gordon. And basically her paper is saying Cyrus Gordon was right. And here’s more information on this. So in the concluding paragraph, the penultimate paragraph, she says, “The choice to become—” And she says it definitely means gods, and it’s because of all these reasons.

And explains that, and she’s actually talking about the choice to be in Exodus 21 . I’m actually, I just realized I’m looking at Exodus 21 . The footnote from the NET is actually about a parallel verse that uses Elohim that’s translated judges in Exodus 21 . I apologize, I’ve overlooked that, but it’s the exact same argument, and the footnote in Exodus 22 says see footnote here. Okay, right. Okay, so sorry. And so Anne Draffkorn says, all in all, the explicit statement that the master shall bring him to the gods may now be seen against a valid social and legal background.

Nobody’s going to fact-check me. What are we doing here?

Yeah. This happens from time to time in the NET. There are other places where this happens as well. Sometimes the representation of the debate and the evidence that they provide is pretty good. Sometimes it’s terrible. Wow. Like here, where they basically just wanted to translate it according to the conservative Christian tradition, and they needed a reason to defend that translation, and they were like, well, we’ll— well, we’ll just say some people think it’s this, some people think it’s that. We’ve decided it’s this. Here are a couple of papers why. Yeah, they completely— they fumbled the bag here big time. Wow. Because those two papers argued directly against the conclusion that they cited them for. So, and let me— I’ll just read real quick what’s in Exodus 21 . And this is about enslavement. This is that wonderful part of Exodus 21 that gets read at Christmas time every year, where if you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for 6 years, but in the 7th year he will go out free without paying anything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then we get to verse 5, but if the servant should declare, I love my master, my wife, and my children, because remember, if he goes free, the kids stay with the master. You know that old, that old children’s tale from Christmas time. Right, right. Yes, delightful. If he declares, I love my master, my wife, and my children, I will not go out free, then his master must bring him to the judges, and he will bring him to the door or the doorpost, and his master will pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall serve him forever. So we’ve got Elohim there underlying the judges. So we got Exodus 21:6 where we have Elohim, and this is more ambiguous because there’s no verb here that is in the plural or the singular. So Elohim could mean God, could mean gods, could mean judges, and the NET is just saying, “We’re gonna go with judges ‘cause screw you, that’s why. You know, here’s a couple of papers we know you’re not gonna read.

We didn’t read them. " Yeah. And then this is pretty parallel to what we have in Exodus 22 , where again, you’re bringing people before HaElohim.

Yeah. So, okay, basically all of the translations either say God or judges. You’re saying it should say gods. So, so, well, so what are we doing here then if we’re taking them before the gods? Before gods. Is it just the same? Is it just the same? Are we just doing the same thing, but there’s more gods that live there now?

So this is probably it. The Covenant Code is the earliest legislative layer in the entire Hebrew Bible. And it’s coming from— it’s prior to Josiah. So it’s prior then to the Adonai Alone movement. So we’ve got sanctuaries everywhere. This is prior to Sennacherib’s destruction of all the cult sites everywhere except for Jerusalem. So the Jerusalem Temple is not the only place where you can go to worship God or the gods. And this is probably a time when, in fact, I think if you go down to 22:26, 7, 22. Yeah, 22:28 in the English. It’s 27 in the Hebrew. The King James Version says, thou shalt not revile the gods nor curse the ruler of thy people. And more other translations will say, you shall not revile God, right?

But like, you’ve already got laws about that, right? So why would you be saying don’t revile God? And then And don’t revile one of your rulers either. So this is a time period when Asherah was probably being worshiped alongside Adonai. And you had teraphim, penates, divine images. You basically had little statuettes in your house that were channels for divine agency and stuff like this. You see this in the story of— I don’t know who all— we should cover this story. When David needs to escape, what does Michal use as a decoy for David sleeping in his bed? One of the teraphim.

Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn’t we talk about this?

Oh, you know what? I think we did, actually. We did, we did. Where it puts goat hair on the— Yeah, the teraphim.

You just grab one of your gods and throw a wig on it, and then you’re good to go.

And so these would’ve been— and this is what Rachel steals when she and Jacob are leaving Laban. And he comes chasing after her like, “You got my gods! What are you doing?” And Rachel sits on them and goes, “Sorry, my time of the month,” to abscond with the household gods. These are basically, you know, representatives of deities. And so there would’ve been your city ones as well. And these were the ones who had authority over, you know, multiple different households. And so the idea would’ve been, for the slave who wants to, you know, “I love being enslaved to this family,” you go to the household gods and you perform the ritual in front of the gods, and that gets their thumbs up. If it’s a matter between two different households, you gotta go to the city gods and you gotta swear the— and you gotta, I don’t know, take the chalk and do one of your LeBron James, throw it up in the air, and you say, you know, I didn’t steal the thing, or the thing belonged to me, or something like that.

That’s my weed whacker, always has been. So yeah, I think that’s the idea, that these are material media that represented these divine agents, and so you had to swear before them, and the hope was that you believed in this stuff enough that you would be too scared not to. So I think that’s probably what’s going on here. And so yeah, I think a literal translation here would be “bring them before the gods.” And unfortunately, unfortunately, most of the people who are translating Bibles these days want to sell the Bibles that they’re translating. And so you’ve got the tyranny of the market. They are going to translate what is going to make their Bibles sellable.

Well, as soon as someone points a billionaire in our direction who doesn’t have an agenda, we’ll— we’ll make sure that the, the Dan McClellan version, the DMT, comes out. The DMV. No, no, no. I’m going to make you translate it. You have to translate it.

Well, yeah, I don’t just want to do a version.

I want a translation, baby.

Well, I’m working on it. So, but yeah, it’s— well, maybe I’ll do a Kickstarter.

So, well, we’ll put together a team. We— you don’t have to do all the work. We’ll get a whole team.

I have talked to people at SBL. I’ve got a number of folks who are interested. Yeah. In working on something.

Yeah. The text-critical version. Anyway, fascinating stuff. Really fun. I like the idea of little gods around. Just stack them. Have them in your home. Fill your home with little gods. I would—

Look, I’m gonna share one last little story. Okay. I was working on my doctoral dissertation, which has a lot to do with this divine agency material media stuff.

Right, right, right, right.

I was sitting in a recliner in my living room in the house I’m currently sitting in right now, contemplating this idea of people using these images to transmit agency to ward off evil and all this stuff. And my daughter, and this literally happened, I’m not making this up, my daughter at the time was 6 or 7, comes downstairs and says, “Arranged all my dolls around my bed to protect me tonight from bad dreams.” And I was like, “Ah, it’s the, you know, there’s nothing new under the sun.” No, this has been going on for millennia. Yeah, it’s the exact same idea. So yeah, why wouldn’t we be? The only difference is anciently it was like, well, you know, off to the Barbie dolls to swear your oath that it was your weed whacker all along.

So, or you’ll be in trouble. All right. Yes. Whom the Barbie dolls condemn must pay double.

I still think it’s a Ouija board. You have not convinced me otherwise. All right. That’s it for today. Thank you all so much for joining us. If you would like to become a part of making the show happen and get access to the early ad-free version of every episode, as well as the, uh, the after-party, which is cool stuff that we talk about. We, we answer your questions, uh, and, and, you know, you’ll get previews of what’s to come for the show, all sorts of fun stuff over there. Uh, please go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and sign up. Become one of our favorite people. Thanks so much to Roger Goudy for editing the show, and we will talk to you again next week. Bye, everybody. Data Over Dogma is a member of the Airwave Media Network. It is a production of Data Over Dogma Media LLC. Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.

The Legend of the Septuagint

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology