Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 1:40 PM, George Athas wrote:
> The textual evidence is ambiguous for the final two words in 32.8. MT has 
> בני ישראל
> (‘sons of Israel’) while 4Q37 at Qumran reads בני אלוהים (‘sons of God’ or 
> ‘sons of gods’).
> The LXX reads αγγελων θεου (‘angels of God’), which is often the way it 
> translates ‘sons
> of God’. So there is good textual evidence that the MT is perhaps itself an 
> interpolation
> rather than the original reading.
>
> If that is the case and 4Q37 represents something closer to the original, 
> then one can
> see why it is proposed that the poem originally saw Yahweh as one of the 
> sons of El.
> Whether it’s a correct interpretation of the verse or not is a different 
> matter, but it’s
> not an uncommon understanding.
>

An updated discussion of the various textual witnesses is found in:
http://books.google.com/books?id=_V8T_5T5HOQC&pg=PA156
"The provenance of Deuteronomy 32", by Paul Sanders, p. 156

As for other claims here, it is simply not true that "except for these
two verses, YHWH
appears as an all powerful, sovereign, sole deity" as Uri Hurwitz
claimed.  The closest
we have to this is 32:21 "They have roused me to jealousy with a
non-god."  However,
throughout the verses of the poem, Y' is consistently described as the
god of Israel,
and the possessive is used throughout to indicate the close
connection.  There are
also other statements Deut 32:12 and Deut 32:16 use the adjectives "foreign" 
to
describe the other gods.  While "foreign gods" can mean "idols" in
other context, its
original meaning must be an implicit recognition of the other gods'
existence.  )l nkr
literally means "a god of a foreign land."  Also, when the text does
describe the
non-god that Israel worshipped it uses the term "$dym" in Deut 32:17.  Now, 
$dym
is a term for a type of a diety in Canaanite myth.  Thus in the Book
of Balaam, we
have "Sit, I will tell you what $d[...],  go see the actions of the
)lhn", which is actually
the same parallelism as in our verse ($dym-)lhm).  A similar term $dy
is used in
the Bible as an epithet of God.  We can even go a little further and
reread the verse
with different pointing, so that -h of )lh is actually a possessive
pronoun: They
sacrificed to $dym, not his god."  The "they" here is all in a single
waw or two, so that
the verse can be reread as: yzbx l$dym l) )lh, )lhm l) yd(m.  (It also
resolves a problem
in the original reading, where $dym a plural is described as l) )lh, a
singular).  If this
approach is taken, the verse later on in Deut 32:2 makes more sense:
"l) )l" is not
talking about a non-existent god, it is talking about a god that is
not of Israel, building
up on "l) )lh" "not his god."  In the same way, "l) (m" doesn't mean a
non-existent
nation, rather it means a foreign nation.  Even if "l) )lh" did
originally mean a "non-god"
it does not destroy the force of other suggestions.  Israel could have
worshipped false
idols as well as otherwise legitimate but foreign gods.  So I think
even the most clearest
cases in the song of assertions of God's supremacy over other gods are
actually not
very clear at all, open to interpretation.  While most of the Bible
seems to portray a
different picture, it is not odd to find singular examples of such
recognition -- Judges
11:24 is a very explicit example that appears to recognize the
legitimacy of Kamosh.
Thus, it is generally recognized that pre-exilic religion in Israel is
better described (in our
modern terms) as monolatry/henotheism than as monotheism.

There is a second issue, and that is the textual problem of "Israel"
in the verse
itself.  How many Israelites were there?  There were 12 children of
Israel,  there
were 70 who passed into Egypt, there were a great many later on.  When God
granted the borders of the land to the nation of Israel, there was 1 (Abraham)
or 0 (Jacob/Israel wasn't born yet).  Most traditional commentators try to
explain this one way or another: there were 12 sons of Canaan, there were 70
nations in the table of nations, like the number who went to Egypt, etc.  
These
approaches do not respond to the polytheistic/henotheistic implication, which
was less visible to the Jewish commentators, and which was not very welcome
by the Christians either. The polytheistic implications were enough to bother
already the translators of the LXX as can be seen from their choice to change
"sons of God" to "angels of God."  Even those today who read the intent of the
author as monotheistic in our sense of the word, do not deny the polytheistic
background of his message.  This is probably the case for Heiser's reading as
well.

So, to respond to the original question, these verses are an example, in the
current spelling and pointing of the text, how pre-monotheistic beliefs were
transformed into monotheistic ones.  Whereas the polytheistic background is
clear to anyone who has studied the Ugaritic mythology, and also to the
translators of the LXX and the redactors of the MT, this polytheistic (or
henotheistic) background was transformed into a monotheistic one in the
poem as we have it today.  It's really hard to say that these verses were not
part of a "pre-Torah" myth because they very clearly were (more accurately,
these verses reveal a pre-monotheistic background).

Yitzhak Sapir