Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Obviously, strictly speaking the bible as a collection of books is a set of
polytheistic documents. This is indisputable. But for Isreal there is only
one God worth praising, Yhwh the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

James Christian

2010/2/28 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
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