(I toyed with the idea of calling this What Am I Doing? Part 1, but I already have more threads than I can keep current.)

I don’t get a lot of eschatology in my own study, so I rely on the studies of others.  I thought the prophecies of Isaiah 17 were fulfilled long ago.  Now that they have become current again I found an article—“WHEN WILL DAMASCUS BE DESTROYED?”—on Bible Prophecy – As Written online.  The author of the article was anonymous, so I’ll call him/her the Author.  But this essay will not be about eschatology.  I intend to use some of the Author’s article to clarify my own thinking about comparing the Masoretic text to the Septuagint.

“The Septuagint is a 3rd century BC Jewish translation of the Old Testament Hebrew into Greek,” the Author wrote.  “It became the commonly used Old Testament Bible during the New Testament period.”  Then the Author quoted another writer:

…the Septuagint is an actual translation from the Hebrew [Masoretic Text] into the Greek. It is the first translation of the Old Testament known. It was the Bible of Jesus and the apostles, the version from which most Old Testament quotations in the New Testament come, and the Bible of the early church…

The Origin Of The Bible, Philip Wesley Comfort, Tyndale House Publishers, Wheaton, IL, 1992, p. 294-95. 134/294-95

I’m not convinced that the Masoretic text was the Hebrew the rabbis translated.

“The Septuagint is a wonderful witness to the original Hebrew (Masoretic) text of the Old Testament since it agrees in the vast majority of places,” the Author continued.  “But which is to be preferred when they are at variance?”  Again, the Author quoted another writer:

Although there are numerous textual variations between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text [Masoretic], the great majority of these are minor…Yet even when the Septuagint differs and offers a better reading, nonetheless it never replaces the Hebrew as the standard form of the text. Because it is a translation, the Septuagint always remains secondary…

How We Got The Bible, Neil R. Lightfoot, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 1963, p. 149 1609/149

“The original Hebrew text, then, is preferred when it is at variance with the Greek text of the Septuagint.”

I agree that the original Hebrew should take precedence over a Greek translation, just as I agree that the original Hebrew or Greek takes precedence over an English translation.  What I question is conflating the original Hebrew and the Masoretic text, as if the two are one and the same.  Admittedly, this puts me in unwitting conflict with Jim Searcy:

Brother Jim is a born-again, strict, uncompromising, unapologetic, relentless, and fierce, confirmer and defender of the Authorized Version, the KJV Holy Bible, as the true, inerrant, more sure, God promised PERFECT written word of God. The KJV Holy Bible is that God promised MORE SURE word of God, written outside of linear time, and preserved from all attacks. The KJV Holy Bible stands against all attacks by the power of the Holy Ghost’s inspiration, and superintendence. The Holy Ghost was superintendent of the KJV Holy Bible. That One Same Spirit of TRUTH’s superintendence is what is MISSING from ALL modern translations, since God fulfilled His promise to give THE Holy Bible in the international language of the last days, the KJV Holy Bible. 

Jim will have no part of the play of vanity in having anything to do with the nonexistent “original autographs.” Brother Jim is bold to testify that we can and should KNOW by the Holy Ghost, that we do have the God Promised perfect bible in English. We should all be thankful to God that we can KNOW, that we have the word of God, that we have the word of God, in English. Knowing this is vital in order that our faith may be based upon God’s integrity and not man’s. English is now and will be the international language of the last days antichrist war on the saints. English will be the international language at the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, Yeshua THE Messiah, IMMEDIATELY AFTER the tribulation of those days.

The more I study the Greek underlying the English translation of the New Testament, the more I respect the translators of the KJV.  They seem to have worked harder than many modern translators to convey the detail of the Greek into English.  And I have Jim Searcy (and Strong’s Concordance) to thank for keeping me aware of the KJV translation.  The problem for me is that I often need a translation of the KJV English: Come and see the works of God: he is terrible in his doing toward the children of men.^[1]

Though many might agree with the statement above, I don’t think terrible best represents the Holy Spirit’s intent for the Hebrew word נורא (yârêʼ) or the Greek word φοβερὸς (Table2 below) in contemporary English.  This is not to say that it was a poor word choice four centuries ago.  Though awesome in the NET (Table1 below) and NETS (Table2 below) may not be the greatest word choice, it does convey the sense that the Holy Spirit did not mean that God is “extremely bad: such as, notably unattractive or objectionable, of very poor quality [or] strongly repulsive” in his doing toward the children of men.

As I wrote elsewhere I chose a more modern translation of the Bible when I was surprised to learn that “Wherefore art thou Romeo” didn’t mean what Bugs Bunny taught me.  According to the KJV translation James wrote: But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.^[2]  I might have suspected that wanting nothing meant lacking in nothing, given its association with perfect and entire, except that I had dulled my mind with hallucinogens, and I had a lot of artsy friends who dabbled in Zen Buddhism.  So wanting nothing seemed like the religious thing to do.

Also, it had irritated my Dad whenever we kids wanted anything from him, so I assumed God was like that, too.  Of course, at that time I searched the Bible for works for me to do as opposed to searching for eternal life.  I may have blipped perfect and entire and honed in on wanting nothing as something I could do to pay back Jesus for giving me another “chance to prove what I could do for God.”^[3]

The quantity of information removed from the Masoretic text or added to the Septuagint in Psalm 14:3 (13:3) troubled me.  It was not a simple copyist error, unless a drunk or stoned copyist used the copy-paste feature of a word processor.  It was not an alteration of vowel points to derive a Hebrew homograph more congenial to rejection of Jesus as the Christ.  It was a very deliberate act.  It cast my conception of “good conscience” in a very harsh light, though I suppose one’s conscience may have been salved some by the fact that similar verses exist elsewhere.

The rabbis who translated the Septuagint seemed blameless to me, which left Masoretes or Christians as potential perpetrators.  It gave me pause to revisit Jim Searcy’s assertion: “Origen rewrote both Old and New Testament to suit his antichrist and strange Gnostic leanings.”  Did he also add Paul’s “quotation” from Romans 3:13-18 back into the Septuagint?

I began to wonder if I knew enough about Gnosticism to even recognize it in the Greek of the Septuagint.  Boning up on Gnosticism I stumbled across an article—“Are There Traces of Greek Philosophy in the Septuagint?”—by Jacob Freudenthal, a German philosopher, educated at the rabbinical seminary of Breslau.

He briefly discussed the pro side of the question from work by Humphrey Hody, David Michaelis and August Friedrich Gfrörer, then the con side as it stood as of 1890, Zacharias Frankel and Eduard Zeller notably.  All used essentially the same procedure I was about to employ, using my new knowledge of Gnosticism to grok if certain passages of the Septuagint seemed to align with that notion.  Freudenthal took a different tack:

As there is no philosophy in a technical sense to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures, if the translators of the Septuagint actually were in contact with philosophical ideas, the choice of certain expressions for psychological, ethical and metaphysical notions, must clearly show difference between the original and the translation.

His proceeded to take twelve words—ψυχή, πνοή, νοῦς, φρόνησις, δόξα, λόγος, αἴσθησις, ἀρέτη, ἀνδρεία, μεγαλοπρεπής, πρόνοια and κόσμος—full of technical meaning in Greek philosophy or psychology and compare them to the Hebrew words they translated, to see if they were used with an understanding of Greek philosophy or psychology in mind.  I’ll quote his conclusion to an examination of ψυχή as an example:

We may therefore conclude, that if the Greek translators give to ψυχή the meaning of “person,” “slave,” “dead body,” “corpse,” they could not be familiar with the abstract meaning which the word obtained in later Greek, and they could not be conscious of the opposition between body and soul, which is sharply accentuated in Greek philosophy.

Freudenthal’s ultimate conclusion after examining all twelve words was that “the translation of the so-called Septuagint bears no traces of the inroad of Greek philosophy into Jewish Hellenism.”  This procedure, more than its outcome, encourages me to continue studying, with all due caution, just in case the Lord preserved the Old Testament by having learned rabbis translate it into Greek before many in Israel rejected Jesus as their Messiah.

A series of quotations follow.  Whether they prove to be “alternative facts,” I keep them in mind as I study.  What follows is from “Henry VIII, Oxford’s Hebraists and the Rabbis of Venice in the 16th Century,” Oxford Chabad Society – Serving Oxford Jewish Students online:

After enormous effort in trying to persuade Rome to support the annulment of his [Henry VIII] marriage…

 

…Richard Pace recommended Henry VIII to approach Oxford Hebraist Robert Wakefield (d. 1537/8) to help find support for his divorce from Rabbinic sources.[8] Wakefield began Hebrew studies in Tudor England and was appointed Regius Praelector of Hebrew[9] at Oxford in 1529, later becoming canon of Henry VIII’s college, now Christ Church College.[10]

…Thomas Cranmer, then a young tutor, also suggested that a body of evidence should be gathered from scholars from across Europe to support the Leviticus case for the annulment of the marriage. This included asking the Jews in Italy for their opinion of the laws of Leviticus.[13]

…Richard Croke who was in Bologna at the time travelled to Venice to consult the rabbis. It appears that this would have been also the time when Henry procured his 9-volume original set of Daniel Bomberg’s Talmud, subsequently deposited at Westminster Abbey, to assist his scholars with the effort to find original Jewish legal sources to support the annulment of the marriage.[21]

…Finally, the overall seeking for support of Italian Jews for Henry’s position came to an end when a Roman Jew was compelled to marry the widow of his brother, who died without children.[30] Without the support of the Jews of Italy, in June, 1530, the strategy changed to challenging the jurisdiction of the pope over England…

 

…Henry summoned parliament and removed England’s allegiance to Rome, abolishing the pope’s ecclesiastical powers in England through a number of statues.[5] Henry appointed Protestant Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury and on 23 May 1533, Thomas Cranmer declared Henry and Catherine’s marriage annulled…

…Although Henry of course was not subject to Jewish law, he clearly desired to live a life consistent with Jewish law on this subject, as evident by following [sic] the Oxford Hebraists to consult the rabbis on this subject that changed the course of British history for almost five hundred years.

What follows is from “The Masoretic Text: The traditional—sometimes imperfect—Jewish version of the Torah text,” My Jewish Learning online:

The Masoretic text refers to the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible used universally by Jews today. This version was codified around the ninth century by a group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes, whose name derives from the Hebrew word mesorah, meaning tradition…

In traditional Jewish thought, every single letter of the Torah is believed to be the direct word of God, so great care was taken by early copyists to preserve the text perfectly. Nevertheless, certain errors in transmission crept in over time, as evidenced by variations among several early texts of the Bible.

The establishment of the Masoretic text was therefore considered an enormous accomplishment by establishing an authoritative version of Jewish scripture. Today, making any changes to the text, regardless of how scholarly sound they might seem, would be considered sacrilegious.

What follows is from “Masoretic text: JEWISH BIBLE,” Encyclopaedia Britannica online:

Masoretic text, (from Hebrew masoreth, “tradition”), traditional Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible, meticulously assembled and codified, and supplied with diacritical marks to enable correct pronunciation. This monumental work was begun around the 6th century AD and completed in the 10th by scholars at Talmudic academies in Babylonia and Palestine, in an effort to reproduce, as far as possible, the original text of the Hebrew Old Testament. Their intention was not to interpret the meaning of the Scriptures but to transmit to future generations the authentic Word of God. To this end they gathered manuscripts and whatever oral traditions were available to them.

What follows is from “Jewish Concepts: Masoretic Text,” Jewish Virtual Library: Anything you need to know from Anti-Semitism to Zionism online:

Over the years as tradition was orally passed on and eventually written down, many disparities of the Torah emerged as countless scribes wrote numerous scrolls.

After being exiled from Israel, and as the Jewish Diaspora grew more widespread across the World, many Jews understood the importance of creating a single text of the Torah. This uniformity would enable the consistency of the Jewish faith outside the land of Israel. Specific scholars and scribes were chosen for this task, these men were called Masoretes. Masoretes derives its name from the word “masorah” meaning “tradition;” their ultimate goal was to uphold the traditions of the Jewish people. The Masoretes had to decipher the authentic word of God and eliminate the dissimilarities…

There were two schools of thought overt [sic] the rewriting of the Bible. There was the Eastern or Babylonian school and the other was a Western or Palestinian school. The Palestinian school had two branches of thought, the Ben Asher and the Ben Naphtali in Tiberias. In 930 C.E. Aaron ben Moses ben Asher produced the first complete Bible, called the Aleppo Codex, utilizing masoretic symbols and ordering. For several centuries, various Masoretes continued to influence the pronunciation and writing of the text. However, the first “official” Bible text that is still used today was the Great Rabbinic Bible, published in 1524-1525 by Daniel Bomberg (a Christian in Venice).

In 1611 the King James Bible was first published with the Masoretic text as the basis for the translation of the Old Testament into English. 

What follows is from “Does the Hebrew Masoretic text underlying the KJV have any errors?,” KJV Today online.

Many believe that the KJV is based on the Hebrew Masoretic text of the Second Rabbinic Bible, edited by Jacob Ben Chayyim and printed by Daniel Bomberg in 1525.  However, the KJV appeared to follow the First Rabbinic Bible, edited by Felix Pratensis in 1517-1518, as this first edition includes Joshua 21:36-37 and Nehemiah 7:68 whereas the second edition omits these verses.  Except for these two passages, the KJV appeared to follow the Ben Chayyim text.

A table comparing Psalm 66:5 in the Tanakh, KJV and NET, and a table comparing Psalm 66:5 (65:5) in the Septuagint (BLB and Elpenor) follow.  Again, Jim Searcy’s concerns will alter my procedure.  I’ve been using the Tanakh from the Jewish Virtual Library as a proxy for the KJV.  From now on I’ll Include the text of the KJV since differences might be very instructive.