Heb 1:6. - The Masoretic, Septuagint and Samaritan Pentateuch

Since I might reference the Septuagint at times in following posts, it may serve to post a primer on the subject, at least for those who don't have any exposure to these concepts.  I don't have the scholarly background to discuss this much in depth however so I'll stick to basics.

At some point in (relatively recent history) there existed copies of a Hebrew Old Testament and some other writings that we don't typically include in our Protestant Bibles, but which remain in other compilations.  This Hebrew text, however, looked somewhat different from the texts used to produce the translations we have universally in today's Bibles.  Two names are used to describe this original text: Vorlage (from German, meaning template or prototype) and Urtext (also from German, "original text").

The most obvious difference from today's text is that the Vorlage copies were written in "paleo Hebrew" script instead of the block lettering of modern Hebrew.  An example of this is as follows with the familiar modern letters at the top.

 

Historically, the paleo-Hebrew alphabet is closely related and probably derived from the ancient Phoenician alphabet.  With the captivity of the Israelites in Babylon (Chaldea) they became more accustomed to the Chaldean/Aramaic script, while still speaking Hebrew.  Upon their return to Israel around 500 B.C., Ezra the scribe/priest is credited with producing some of the first copies of the Jewish Holy Book in the modern style, refining the letters into something close to what we see today, rendering the Torah (first five books of Moses and the Law) again readable by people who no longer could read the earlier characters.

Despite these updates, paleo-Hebrew continued to be used, even and especially for scripture.  The last known use of it is on coins dates to 125 AD during the last Jewish rebellion against Rome.

Around the time of Ezra, Nehemiah 2 records problems with a Samaritan leader named Tobiah.  Samaritan tradition records that Tobiah took a copy of the Torah from the Ezra upon leaving, which is known as the Samaritan Pentateuch.  Presumably, however, this would not be the first texts the Samaritans had access to since the 10 tribes separated from the southern two (Judah and Benjamin) after Solomon's death.  It might, however, have been the best maintained at that point.  The remnants of the northern tribes intermarried with pagan Canaanites and other transplanted peoples producing the hybrid Samaritans so despised in Jesus' day.  They had their own system of worship centered on Mt. Gerazim instead of Jerusalem and later built a rival temple there.

Later, around 200 B.C., with so much of the modern world speaking Greek and the center of learning at Greek-controlled Alexandria in Egypt, many Jews grew up unable to read or well-speak Hebrew.  A task was undertaken to translate the entirety of the Jewish holy books from Hebrew into Greek.  Since between 70-72 translators are supposed to have been used, the text is called the Septuagint, abbreviated to the Roman numerals LXX.

Around 100 AD, around the time of the Bar-Kochba rebellion against Rome, it appears a concerted effort was made to produce a definitive Hebrew text in the newer character style, presumably copying from the older paleo-Hebrew editions, but possibly updating and correcting any issues in the existing modern Hebrew scripted texts.  I say possibly because while I am more convinced that this "Council of Jaimya" effort happened, some still contest it, arguing that what we have today goes back further.  Three new Greek translations are produced based on this text, confusingly also called Septuagints such that the original Septuagint is now commonly referred to as the Alexandrian Septuagint or LXXa.  Vowel characters (points) were stripped out of this newer text around this time.  A group of scribes that worked well into the first millenium AD called the Masoretes preserved through tradition the pronunciations of the words, as well as a numeric system that helped in the precision copying of the text and toward the later end of the millenium, they reinserted these vowel points for readability.  This text is now known as the Masoretic Text.

(For more: http://theorthodoxlife.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/masoretic-text-vs-original-hebrew/)

Up until around 235 AD, it seems the early Christian church universally referenced the Septuagint for their Old Testament.  At this date, a scholar named Origen, undertook to write a book called the Hexapla, which compared side by side the various four versions of the Septuagints and the early Hebrew Masoretic text, and attempted to reconcile them by producing another column to represent what he expected was probably the correct reading.  We're not sure how the LXXa was treated, but the resultant, reconciled column eventually became the standard for the Christian church going forward (with considerably lobbying from Origen and others).  Since Origen's version was heavily laden with Masoretic and Masoretic derived copies, it isn't surprising that the Masoretic text took over as the Old Testament to the exclusion of the Alexandrian Septuagint.  Most of our bibles are translated from this Masoretic text.

So we are left with three very different appearing versions of the Old Testament: copies of the Torah (first five books) in paleo-Hebrew called the Samaritan Pentateuch that survive through the few surviving religious Samaritans, a Greek Septuagint translation from around 200-100 B.C., and the Masoretic Text.  What we don't have is a codex (compilation) of whatever was the original Vorlage text in paleo-Hebrew, despite that each of these versions would claim to be exact representations of it (or at least the parts they include).

Why this is important is that there are differences between the versions significant enough to warrant discussion along the lines of "What was in the Vorlage?" The best we can do is try to construct a "retroversion", that is, in examining the texts that we do have, determine what the most likely reading would be.

All of this may seem academic, but let me give you an example of something that always bothered me that I didn't have a good answer for until now.


Heb 1:6 writes, apparently quoting:
"Let all the angels of God worship him"

In the margins we see Deut 32:43 with similarities in Ps 97:7

Deut 32:43 (NAS) has:

“Rejoice, O nations, with His people;
For He will avenge the blood of His servants,
And will render vengeance on His adversaries,
And will atone for His land and His people.”

The entire phrase about the angels worshipping is gone completely.  Alternate versions occasionally may read, "let the people strengthen themselves in him" before the part of avenging the blood of his servants.  It never set right for me.  Was the writer of Hebrews fudging his proofs the way a lazy student does on the high school paper without verifying his quote?  But the stakes are much higher with the Bible.

This is not nearly the only time a Messianic version appears different, perhaps misquoted, or even (here) not even close to the Old Testament when quoted in the New.  A doctrine of whether the Son is truly above the angels is quite affected by this.

From a Jewish perspective, it stretches credulity that we Christians accept as gospel truth what apostles say when they weren't even faithful to the scriptures they try to quote when showing how Messiah appears in the Holy Book.

The problem for the Masoretic is, this part of the verse does appear in the Alexandrian Septuagint for Deuteronomy 32.43: 
Rejoice, ye heavens, with him, and let all the angels of God worship him.

This is one of many reasons why it is generally accepted that the New Testament writers universally quoted from the Septuagint, rather than something that looked like the Masoretic text.  But still, the Septuagint could have been itself badly translated, which means the inspired apostles were quoting from an uninspired mistranslation, which calls into question whether they actually are inspired.

However, the Dead Sea Scrolls also say something similar to the LXX and the NT.
4QDeut (a copy of Deuteronomy from the 4th Qumran cave) has:
Rejoice, O heavens, together with him; and bow down to him all you gods, for he will avenge the blood of his sons...

Ok, that is significant.  We can at least confirm that in an early Hebrew version (probably dating from 250BC to 70AD), the change was likely not made with the translation to Greek.

This answers the critic who says the apostles are not being faithful to the Hebrew texts.  Whether or not some Hebrew texts omit this part, other Hebrew texts preserve it and the Septuagint is a faithful translation of them and faithfully quoted by the writer of Hebrews.

(The Samaritan version here, however, reads more similarly with the Masoretic.  I can't find anything that suggests that this appears there.)


(For more: Take a look at: 
http://mysite.verizon.net/rgjones3/Septuagint/spDt32-43.html
http://www.thedivinecouncil.com/DT32BibSac.pdf)

Here are other examples:

So that's really the issue.  For the most part, there's a lot of agreement in the texts.  Far be it for me to argue that the gospel is significantly changed in a Masoretic-derived Old Testament, because I don't believe it is, and to most it should make little difference.  It is in fact less of a change than it was when we stopped translating scripture from the Latin and went straight to the (Masoretic) Hebrew and Greek yet God still brought people to him through those older Bibles.

For everyday, essential Bible study this is a non-issue.  And I have an easier time concerning inspiration with the general trend of the Masoretic to exclude certain parts entirely, and incurring accidental copy errors, than with significant reworking of language to alter the teaching (a rarity).

When it comes to struggling to flush out a detail that is recorded in one verse differently across the versions, then it becomes a question of which one should you take?

For example, how long Job lived won't impact one iota my standing before God through Christ's atoning sacrifice.  But it's a question of curiosity and exposition, how long and when did he live.  In the Masoretic text, we read that after Job's calamity, he lived another 140 years, but we don't know how old he was when it started.  However, in the Septuagint (Job 16), he lives 170 years after the calamity and it adds that he lived a total of 248 years.  With the Masoretic, Job's age is a mere curiosity.  With the Septuagint, we know how long Job's life-span is, so we can place him in time with others who lived approximately as long as he did.  It opens more paths for scriptural exposition if we can place him in history.  He definitely came after Shem's sons, but he probably lived before Abraham (175 years), and perhaps after Peleg.  For all we know we could identify him with the earlier Jobab mentioned, rather than the later one commonly suggested.

For the Samaritan Pentateuch, Samaritans were not God's people, properly, and they mixed paganism with Judaism, intermarried and instituted a separate system of worship centered on Mt. Gerazim.  They would have had every reason to alter scriptures to defend their existence to the Jews.  Without God's blessing on their efforts, I don't think it's reasonable to treat their version as authoritative.  That said, as the earliest reflection of the Vorlage (being derived closely from a direct copy), it has value in at least confirming our expectations from other texts.

What the Septuagint has going for it is that the New Testament quotes almost (if not in fact) exclusively from it.  The Greek is the same, unlike comparing with the Masoretic.  Which means inspired apostles and writers considered it authoritative.

A suspicion is that, about the time of Bar Kochba's rebellion (132-135 AD) where he was considered the Messiah by many, and to a Jew of that day despising the Christians with their Jesus, pulling unfairly from the Hebrew scriptures for proofs, there may have been a subtle current to edit the verses to make popular Christian Messianic proof-texts less useful.  Combine that with dropping vowel points and the possibility of other mistakes dropping characters (like "100" number-letters from ages where often the Masoretic shows 100 less years for a person than the Septuagint), it is conceivable that the differences fall more against the Masoretic text for accidental and deliberate modification.  I know in this day and age, where we trust heavily in the unswerving precision of the Hebrew scribes to add to the defense that what we have is infallible (if the translations aren't infallible at least their sources are), it seems hard to process for both Jews and Christians that our modern bible includes parts that may have been deliberate alterations.

But there you have it: that the NT quotes don't match with the Hebrew text included in our Bibles, but they do match with the Greek translation of the Hebrew text which isn't included in our Bibles.  And they do match with earlier Hebrew manuscripts also not used in our Bibles.

In some cases this makes a difference in things like chronology, where both Luke and the LXXa assert that Shem's son Arphaxad had a son named Cainan, who had a son named Salah, where in the Masoretic and Samaritan, Arphaxad's son is Salah.  There may be reasons why he is dropped in the latter translations, or legitimately re-added when the Septuagint was made.  Also, when tracing the timeline back to Adam, the Masoretic records 1000 fewer years than the Septuagint.

From secular history and other external points, the longer timeline from the Septuagint seems to solve a lot of questions in reconciling the Biblical accounts with what scholars are seeing.

One problem I have so far with the Septuagint is that, adding up the years of the pre-Flood people, Methusaleh appears to live one year into the Flood before dying.  That can't be right.

My father who has examined this more than I, prefers the Masoretic and suggests that it is more common in the U.S. to side with the Masoretic whereas the opposite is true in Britain.

From what I understand, the Dead Sea Scrolls finds include two general sets of documents, those in paleo Hebrew, earlier, which tend to agree much more with the Septuagint, and those (later) in the modern script which resemble more closely the Masoretic.  The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has done much to validate the Septuagint and in many cases shows changes and especially parts missing from the Masoretic.

For more, read here:
http://www.setterfield.org/Septuagint_History.html (A interesting treatment in favor of the Septuagint)
http://www.bibleandscience.com/bible/sources/deadseascrolls.htm (comparing the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic and Septuagint texts)

My current inclination is that where two disagree, to go with the Septuagint.  I'm open to argument.

Addendum: Because there are cases where the Samaritan Pentateuch alternately agrees with the Septuagint reading or the Masoretic in various places.  Some suggest that it may not be as simple as all or many of the changes being made at 100AD.  It is possible, then that there may have been more than one textual variant of the Vorlage itself, even at the time of the Septuagint translation.  The Masoretic text could then be a more faithful copying of one of the texts not used for the LXX.  That doesn't exclude that alterations could have been made at Jamnia.  It just means some variances in the text predate Jamnia and possibly the LXX.

As a Christian, I give a lot of weight to the apostles and perhaps even Jesus quoting from either the LXX or texts that agree with the LXX.  When it came time to creating the translation, it may be significant as well that the Jewish translators (who wouldn't have had a Christian bias) chose their particular variant upon which to found their translation, as opposed to one possibly undergirding the Masoretic.

Without further records this is speculation.  The best I can do is weight one argument against the next and make a determination as to which sounds better.