[b-hebrew] 1Q287 and the Tanakh at Deut. 32:43
Yigal Levin
leviny1 at mail.biu.ac.il
Sun Feb 1 01:03:05 EST 2009
Hi Ted,
This depends what you mean by "the Masorah". Yes, the masorets worked during the "Christian Era", but for the most part they worked under Muslim rule, and probably had little first-hand contact with the Christian Bible. The real question is, how much "editing" they did to the text that they were working with. Most scholars assume that the consonental text was a "received" text (which is what "masorah" means) which had more-or-less been standardized within the Jewish community a long time before. Actually, our best indication of the time by which the MT was already the "standard" Jewish text is the Vulgate, which Jerome translated from the Hebrew text that the Jews of his time (5th century) were using.
The way I picture it is that the MT, the LXX and the DDS all represent textual traditions that were used by Jews during the Second Temple Period. There may have been more than these three - there were certainly different variations of each. The MT is basically what was left after most of the Jewish community and its centers of learning were destroyed in the revolts of 66-73, 116-117 and 132-135, both in the Land of Israel and in the western Diaspora.
Yigal Levin
----- Original Message -----
From: TedBro at aol.com
To: leviny1 at mail.biu.ac.il ; b-hebrew at lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2009 6:24 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] 1Q287 and the Tanakh at Deut. 32:43
Hi, All:
Interesting discussion...
<<Yigal Levin wrote: As to why neither version appears in the MT - probably scribal error, simply
"skipping" a line.
Recall that the Massorah dates from the Christian era. Thus another possible explanation for missing Christian proof texts is that the Massoretes, like everyone else, had biases and when selecting readings from various manuscripts for inclusion in the MT, favored those less favorable to the Christians.
Peace,
Ted Brownstein
In a message dated 1/31/2009 7:25:47 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, leviny1 at mail.biu.ac.il writes:
Dear Gary,
Let's please not be cynical. Your question is more about the NT than it is
about the Hebrew Bible.
In any case, it is widely assumed that the writers of the NT used the
Septuagint (or something like what we call the Septuagint) as their "Old
Testament", so it would be only natural for them to quote the Septuagint
version of this verse, which does include the phrase "Be glad, O heavens,
together with Him, and do obeisance to Him, all angels of God". The Qumran
version, at least according to Abegg, Flint and Ulrich's The Dead Sea
Scrolls Bible, is ".... all you gods". If I had to guess, I'd assume that
the Qumran version is earlier, and that the Greek version(s) that we have
today, which are all based on manuscripts that are later than Qumran,
actually "cleaned it up" by replacing "gods" with "angels of God". As to why
neither version appears in the MT - probably scribal error, simply
"skipping" a line.
Yigal Levin
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