I'M NOT SURE of what "long Covid" is supposed to be. I know I'm still pretty worn out by what happened in my second go-round with it. Damned carnivores are going to get us all killed. I think I'm getting better though that might just be boredom with convalescence. One of the downsides of it is that I've missed the early-voting date in my state and it means I'll have to go to the polls tomorrow. I haven't been to town since before I got sick. I've lost weight, enough so people comment I've gotten too thin.
I have been using the time to do more reading of Scripture, this time Genesis using the Jewish Publications Society's Jewish Study Bible with its fascinating take on the text and the equally fascinating Five Books of Moses translated and edited by Everett Fox. The details of the commentary are often quite interesting.
For example, this one which speculates on why the sun and moon are described the way they are as they are being created.
God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night, and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth, to dominate the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.
Genesis 1:16-17
The Study Bible commentary says:
The sun and moon are created only on the fourth day and are not named, but referred to only as the greater light and the lesser light. This may be an implicit polemic against the worship of astral bodies (see 2 Kings 23-5).
Which is a lot more interesting to think about than the popular atheist snark about the beginning of Genesis. The JPS Study Bible notes are some of the best commentary on Genesis I've come across though there is so much that anyone can know only a tiny amount of it. It's certainly a better take on it than you'll get from either Christian Fundamentalists or from atheists. Though, of course, there being enormous differences of opinion on what Scripture means, no one in their right mind would agree completely or entirely with what any one of them says. You shouldn't read commentary with the expectation that it's giving you the hard facts, though any good one will have many factual references, you have to look on it as a series of ideas about the text, in the best commentaries, well informed ideas but not in the same way you would read a basic physics text.
In the introduction to Jeremiah (I've gone back to read that book in the Jewish Study Bible, unfortunately we don't have Fox's edition of it) it surprised me by noting:
But though the Greek version (the Septuagint) contains many of the same oracles and narratives as the Hebrew version, it is approximately one-eighth shorter (something noted by Brueggeman in one of his lectures) and its content appears in a markedly different order, for instance the oracles concerning the nations appears as chs 46-51 in the Hebrew version, but in the Greek version they appear as chs 25-31 with a different sequence of nations. Because the text of the Greek version corresponds with fragments of a Hebrew version of Jeremiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, many interpreters argue that the Greek version of the book represents an early edition of Jeremiah that was later expanded and rearranged to form the present Hebrew edition of the book. Other fragments of Jeremiah that correspond to the Hebrew Masoretic Text also appear among Jews for several centuries following the lifetime of the prophet. This of course points to the likelihood that writers other than Jeremiah or Baruch had a hand in the book's composition.
I'm left wondering about the relationship between the current Masoretic text of the Hebrew Scriptures and the other available versions of it, the Greek Septuagint, that from the Samaritan tradition, etc. I've come to wonder what reason there is to consider any of them as more "original" and so others less worthy of consideration than the other.
Anticipating the usual Christmas season turmoil, from a Christian viewpoint that issue is important for the use made of such verses as the one in Isiah about whether a child like the Messiah would be born to a virgin, as in the Greek or to a young girl in the Masoretic text, Isiah 7:14. Presumably those who translated the text into Greek, by tradition some eminent Greek speaking Hebrew scholars, they would have been familiar with both the Hebrew and the Greek they spoke as their everyday language and knew the difference between a virgin and a young girl. I think the most obvious reason to suspect for them translating it that way is because the text they translated from said it that way, though it's impossible to know that.
The current often repeated popular claim that the difference is a dishonest forgery on the part of Christians, an evergreen of the Christmas season, is absurd, since there were no Christians around when the Septuagint was produced and it would seem to have been quite popular with religious Jews around the entire area. That anti-Christian snark and the resulting resentment of some particularly traditional Christians in the face of that accusation is unnecessary and stupid and superficial.
I think what we have are divergent textual traditions and no way of knowing which is right. Since the Gospel writers likely used Greek as one of their common languages, the reason that the entire New Testament is written in it, it was natural that they would have known and used as authoritative the Greek version, especially the author of Luke and Acts. If not for the original text of the New Testament, certainly in later generations, the Greek versions of the older Scriptures would have been more available to them than the Hebrew version(s). What the actual prophet of Isaiah 7:14 said about the virginity or not of the mother of Immanuel, who can know? Here's the text in what I gather the editors have selected as its context from the Study Bible:
10 The LORD spoke further to Ahaz: 11 " Ask for a sign from the LORD your God, anywhere down to Sheol or up to the sky." 12 But Ahaz replied, "I will not ask, and I will not test the LORD." 13 "Listen, House of David'7 The LORD will cause to come upon you and your people and your ancestral house such days as never have come since," [Isaiah] retorted, "is it not enough for you to treat men as helpless that you also treat my God as helpless?1 14 Assuredly, my LORD will give you a sign of His own accord! Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel. 15 (By the time he learns to reject the bad and choose the good, people will be feeding on curds and honey.) 16 For before the lad knows to reject the bad and choose the good, the ground whose two kings you dread shall be abandoned. 17 The LORD will cause to come upon you and your people and your ancestral house such days as never have come since Ephraim turned away from Judah-that self same king of Assyria!
And as is pointed out in their preface, Isaiah is one of the most complex books of Scripture, it's especially opaque. The commentary in the Study Bible on this particular issue says:
1 4: Young woman (Heb '"almah"). The Septuagint translates as "virgin,"leading ancient and medieval Christians to connect this verse with the New Testament figure of Mary. All modern scholars, however,agree that the Heb merely denotes a young woman of marriageable age, whether married or unmarried, whether a virgin or not. 1 5-17: The message the sign represents is two-fold: God is with Judah, both to protect it (v. 16) and to punish it (v. 17).
And, to be fair to the commentators, this is their commentary on the larger context of the whole section:
10-1 7: Apparently Ahaz chooses to rely on the intervention of the Assyrian king (cf. 2 Kings 16.7--9
I'd say in context of the wider passage - and exactly what it means is certainly open to different interpretations, whether or not his mother was a virgin when he was conceived, before the boy "Immanuel" is of age to discern good and bad the kings that Ahaz fears will not be around and their realms will be empty. I don't know in context if that might mean Assyria and Babylon but their dynasties had certainly fallen by the time of Jesus but that time was well off from when Isaiah is dated by modern scholarship. I don't know what other identifications of the two dreaded kings have been made, maybe by Christmas I'll have found out.
As to the differences between the Greek and the Hebrew, I would point out that it's clear there were pre-Christian Jewish scholars (perhaps as many as seventy of them) who apparently had either a different text which had a different word they translated as "virgin" into Greek or they translated the same word to mean "a virgin" and it's irresponsible to think they would not know what they were doing either in the Hebrew language that they'd have to have been expert in or the Greek they almost certainly knew as a maternal language.
There is, of course, no way to know since we don't know what the text they were using to translate said.
I would point out that if the Prophet meant merely "a young woman of marriageable age, whether a virgin or not," you could ask what kind of a sign was that? How would you decide which young woman who had a baby in the regular way was being referred to among the myriads of such young women who would unremarkably give birth? There had to be something unique or at least unusual about the one who embodied the sign, maybe the name of the baby was to be what would, in the view of the wider world, set her and her child apart, so as to constitute a sign. If so where is that recorded? Perhaps that might be why the eminent Greek speaking Jewish scholars of the time choose the one alternative meaning that would make it so very unusual and perhaps unique. Of course even if it meant a virgin would give birth that wasn't necessarily Mary the mother of Jesus in Luke, if the pre-Christian Jewish scholars who made the translation used that word, it's certain that they wouldn't have meant her.
More generally, since the reading of Scripture as much as anything else is used to support often wildly divergent ideas, I don't see how anyone is going to
stop Christians using the Hebrew Scriptures as prophesies of the life of Jesus or from those who disagree with that disagreeing with it. Both can and should be respectful of the others while they differ and disagree. It's not as if the Rabbinical use of the Scripture arrives at a single, agreed to meaning of it. The diversity of opinion is a widely acknowledged glory of that tradition, I certainly admire it. God is too big to fit into one person's mind or any denomination or tradition or even the imaginary construct of the entire collective mind of all human beings of all time.
We are all, to refer to Walter Brueggemann's phrasing, all guilty of treating Scripture as if it contained "a package of certitudes" when it certainly does not. That is especially true of the Prophetic books, perhaps Isiah more than any other. In that it shares a lot in common with every other body of literature which is made common use of by those who come after the original author. Even something as simple-minded as Huckleberry Finn produces controversial disagreement. I think that's just the way human beings read and think, at least those who do read and think. I think it's worth arguing about it, I don't think it's worth getting nasty or violent over it - not unless the readings of it support nastiness and, especially, violence, then I'm all for having it out with the nasty and violent. The merely snarky, the pop-academic and internet crowd, are a lazy, cowardly form of the nasty and violent, they'd run for cover as fast as one of Trump's white-collar lackeys if faced with physical opposition or risk.
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