Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Gary Coombs" <gcoombs AT shadowmountain.org>]

12/30/01

Ted:

I don't believe the Septuagint is generally considered to be more 
authoritative than the Hebrew Old Testament but I believe there are occasions 
where the Septuagint has a reading that must have been in the Hebrew text 
originally but is not found in the extant manuscripts.  The one example I can 
think of is Hebrews 1:6 "Let all the angels of God worship Him.."  This 
Appears to be a quite from Deuteronomy 32:43 in the Septuagint but was not in 
the extant Hebrew manuscripts, nor is it in our English Bibles in Deuteronomy 
32:43.  I understand that a dead sea scroll fragment of the Hebrew Old 
Testament does have these words.  

Since the Word of God is inerrant and yet Hebrews 1:6 appears to quote 
Deuteronomy 32:43 from the Septuagint even though the reading cannot be found 
in Hebew outside of a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls, it seems to me that 
we should include "Let all the angels of God worship Him" in Deuteronomy 
32:43.  

Another related point.  Are translations of the Hebrew Old Testament and 
Greek New Testament the Word of God or simply translations of the Word of 
God?  I would say that since Jesus considered the Septuagint the Word of God 
we can do the same with our English translations.  

Having read the entire Septuagint with the exception of the Apocrypha (I have 
only read a little of the Apocrypha) I think that the translators were more 
careful in their translation of the Five books of Moses than they were the 
prophets or the writings.  I would like to know whether others concur with 
this.  I have not done a formal comparison and my knowledge of Hebrew is 
horribly deficient but this is the sense I got from my reading.

Gary Coombs
Southern California Bible College and Seminary
El Cajon, California

  

>>> "Theodore H. Mann" <theomann AT earthlink.net> 12/29 9:03 PM >>>
Greetings Friends:

From earlier posts I have learned that the Greek OT predates the earliest
copy of the MT by a number of centuries.  I'm interested to know how OT
textual critics weigh these two sources.  That is, for example, is the
Greek OT generally considered more authoritative because it is closer in
time to the autographs than the later MT?

Many thanks from a novice (obviously).

Ted Mann

  

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