No Worse than Any Other IV: Genesis 12:15

All Bible translations have mistranslated passages. That is a given. They are human productions after all. For this installment, we are going to look at a passage where the translations are mostly correct because they mistranslate their source text. That passage is Genesis 12:15.

The Masoretic Text version of the passage (without the vowels) is:

wtqḥ hʾšh byt prʿh

The King James Version translates:

and the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. 

This makes sense, but the question is whether it is translated correctly. The answer is yes, and no. The translation does not translate what the source text actually says, which would be: 

and the woman was taken Pharaoh’s house. 

The Masoretic Text is actually ungrammatical here and this is a result of a transmission error which dropped a single letter from the text. If we were to conjecturally correct the text, we would probably emend it to supply the missing preposition as follows:

wtqḥ hʾšh lbyt prʿh

Doing so would correct the grammatical error but would also be wrong. The Samaritan Pentateuch has the correct reading:

wtqḥ hʾšh byth prʿh

The use of the locative he here is an archaic feature of the language, particularly when it is used in construct as it is here. It supplies the missing preposition.

So the King James Version correctly translated the passage by tacitly correcting the grammar mistake in the Masoretic Text. I do not know what was going through the translators' minds, but it is possible that they did not even notice that there was an error in the grammar at that point in the text. They knew what the text must mean even if that was not what their source text actually said. From one point of view, their translation was wrong, but from another it was correct. 

How do the other translations fare?

ESV:  And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house.

NRSV:  And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house.

NIV:   and she was taken into his palace.

NLT:  and Sarai was taken into his palace.

NKJV:  And the woman was taken to Pharaoh’s house.

NIrV: So she was taken into his palace.

Not a single one of these versions translated the text that they said they were translating. The NIV, the NLT, and the NIrV are particularly bad.

 

From the Reader's Mailbag

I received a question from a reader asking if "the rest of the Lord" in Hebrews 4 is the same as the Sabbath rest (presumably in Genesis 2:1-3).

The short answer is the same word is used in Greek in both cases, though Genesis uses the verb form and Hebrews uses the noun.

There is a long answer that is more involved and complicated, uses Hebrew and comes to the opposite conclusion, but given that today is a day of rest I will not go into it.

Thoughts on the Story of Joseph

This last week I had the opportunity of discussing the biblical story of Joseph to a very polite audience. Some aspects of that story are more striking this time reviewing it.

One of the highlights of Joseph's story is his forgiving his brothers. But Joseph does not just blindly forgive his brothers. He remembered what they did to him. So, he tested them to see if their repentance was real. He first threw them in prison (Genesis 42:17) just as he had been cast into prison because of their actions. Then he took Simeon as a hostage (Genesis 42:24) and demanded that they bring their younger brother with them next time (Genesis 42:15, 20). Their younger brother was, of course, Benjamin, the only one of the brothers with whom Joseph shared a mother. In doing this, Joseph could see whether they would be willing to betray another brother for monetary gain (and perhaps revenge) the way that they had him. If they returned, he could see if they had been mistreating Benjamin. When they came back, he contrives to have Benjamin imprisoned indefinitely (Genesis 44:1-13) to see if they cared at all about his mother's children.

Three chapters narrate Joseph's tests of his brother's forgiveness (Genesis 42-44) before the one that narrates his forgiveness (Genesis 45). Joseph did not practice blind forgiveness.

Covenanting with the Word

Targum specialists will point out that many of the Targums avoid any anthropomorphisms that are there in the Hebrew texts. Thus, while the Hebrew text might talk of God having hands or feet or other attributes that humans do, the Targum will phrase it so that these are missing. This extends to interpersonal relations, such as covenants. Two strategies that the Targums use are substituting the expressions "the word of God" and "the presence of God" for "God".

This usage, which was present in the first century, has an influence on Christianity through the Gospel of John.

Some passages that illustrate this tendency, which leads to what appears in John, come from the accounts in Genesis:

And the Lord said: This is the sign of the covenant which I bring between my Word and between you and between every living soul with you forever and ever (Genesis 9:12 Targum Onkelos)

And I will set up my covenant between my Word, and between you and between your sons after you (Genesis 17:7 Targum Onkelos).

 One can see how such paraphrases feed into the Christian notions that the Word was God and that the covenants that Abraham made were with the Word, which the Christians interpreted as Jesus. For Aramaic speaking Jews of the land of Israel, the Christian interpretation would have corresponded with what they learned in the synagogue. The only question was whether they viewed Jesus as the Word of God or not.

A Strange Cut

Students of the Hebrew Bible are familiar with the fact that the expression for making a covenant is "to cut a covenant." Presumably this is because there was a sacrifice associated with the covenant and the death of the sacrificial animal was symbolic of the penalty that would be inflicted on a party that broke the covenant.

Targum Onkelos to Genesis 17:4, however, takes the expression "to cut a covenant" a bit farther than usual:

I will circumcise my covenant with you and you will be a father of many nations.

Genesis 17, of course, is the introduction of the covenant of circumcision, but this passage takes the expression a little further than we are used to.

Thoughts on Genesis 10

Genesis 10 is sometimes called the table of the nations. This is because many of the sons of Noah bear the name of entire nations. Because of this nineteenth century linguists named certain languages after certain of the sons of Noah. Thus we have Semitic and Hamitic language groups. A close look at the nations shows some strange connections (a table would be better):

Japheth's sons:

Gomer
Magog
Madai (Medes, lived in modern Iran, spoke an Indo-European language)
Javan (Greeks, lived in Greece and Asia Minor, spoke an Indo-European language)

sons of Javan: Elishah (Cyprus), Tarshish, Kittim (Crete), and Dodanim

Tubal
Meshach
Tiras

Ham's sons:

Cush (Ethiopia, spoke and African language)

One of Cush's sons is Nimrod who is over the Sumerian cities of Erech (Uruk),Babel, Accad and Calneh, the last three of which are Semitic speaking

Mizraim (Egypt, spoke a Hamito-Semitic language)
Phut (Punt or Somalia, presumably and African language)
Canaan (the Levant, spoke various Semitic languages related to Hebrew like Phonecian, Moabite, Ammonite)

Shem's sons:

Elam (in modern Iran, their language is unrelated to any other)
Asshur (Assyria, they spoke Assyrian, a Semitic language)
Arphaxad (perhaps the Kassites whose language is unrelated to anything else)
Lud (the Luwians, who spoke an Indo-European language)
Aram (they spoke a Semitic language)

As can be seen from the list, there is no connection between the languages spoken and which son of Noah they are listed under. As for race, that is even further from consistent. Genetics may be yet another matter.

It is possible to read too much into the lists in Genesis 10 and I think that has often been the case in the past.

Repentance for Cain

We typically think of Cain as one of scripture's first lost causes. The readings of the Targums provide some insight into Cain's situation before his turn for the worst. Abel's sacrifice had been accepted but Cain's had not. He was feeling dejected and like he was always under his younger brother's shadow. Genesis 4:7 reads as follows (the parenthesis shows a textual variant):

If you do good, it shall be forgiven you; and if you do not do good, (your) sin is retained until the day of judgment; recompense will be required of you if you do not do good; but if you do good, it will be forgiven you.

In the Targum for this verse (which reflects a first-century Judean understanding of the text) Cain is offered the chance to repent. The terms of repentance offered Cain are:

• He can do good. Doing good shows his repentance. Doing the right thing is what God asked Cain to do.


• Doing good brings a remission or forgiveness of his sins. The Aramaic term here, yištabêq, is the same verb used in the Aramaic version of Psalm 22:1 that Jesus quotes on the cross (the sabachthani in Matthew 27:46), and means to abandon, to desert, or to forgive. If we abandon our sins, God will abandon them as well. Forgiveness in Genesis 4:7 is God abandoning our sins and abandoning keeping track of them. They are not retained for the day of judgment.


• If he does not do good, his sin is retained and he is not rid of it, and it will come back to him at the day of judgment.

Cain was offered a clear choice. He could do good or not. Doing good would count as repentance and bring a remission of his sins. Or he could hold on to his sins.

Cain, however, chose not only to hang on to his sins but magnify them. His envy of Abel, who did well and was accepted, caused him to betray and murder Abel. When confronted with his iniquitous deed, Cain denied it, and rationalized it. He did not even try to repent of his treachery against his more righteous brother.

The Targum does not supply a motive for Cain's actions. The Book of Moses, however, does:

And Cain gloried in that which he had done, saying: I am free; surely the flocks of my brother falleth into my hands (Moses 5:33).

Cain thought that being rid of his pesky righteous brother would make him somehow free to pursue his own agenda. He also confiscated his brother's possessions that he had labored to acquire. They were now his to do with as he pleased. Cain sold his soul for a few flocks.

So in the end, if Cain was a lost cause, his own choices and his own sins made him so.

Living Souls

Genesis 2:7 in the Hebrew says:

And he breathed into his nose the breath of life and the man became a living soul.

The phrase "living soul" occurs throughout the Old Testament, mostly in the early chapters of Genesis, in Leviticus 11:10, 46, and Ezekiel 47:9. A "living soul" is a common trope in Egypt; the phrase occurs in Book of the Dead chapters 85, 130, 134, and 137A, as well as the Daily Temple Litrugy. By the Ptolemaic period, it also appears in Book of the Dead chapters 17, 127, and 153 and in the Document of Breathing Made by Isis.

The difference between the Egyptian use of the term and the Hebrew use of the term illustrates the problem with the verse. In Egyptian, a "living soul" always refers to a person. In Hebrew, it mostly refers to animals (as in Genesis 1:20-24; 9:10-16; Leviticus 11:10, 46, and Ezekiel 47:9), although it can include humans.

The Targum Onkelos, which is a first century Jewish interpretation of the text in Aramaic, reads just a bit differently:

And he blew into his nose the breath of life and it became a speaking spirit in the man.

The Targum alters the text so that man receiving the breath of life sets him apart from the dumb animals. Not just the ability to breathe is at issue, but the ability to talk. Communication becomes the important thing, rather than just inhaling and exhaling.