Deuteronomy 33:2 in Textual and Linguistic Perspectives

In my last post, I introduced the book How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? Essentially, the book argues that diachronic/historical linguistics explains the changes we see in the language of the Hebrew Bible from Classical Biblical Hebrew to Late Biblical Hebrew. The authors (Hendel and Joosten) included a chapter on Textual History and Linguistic History in which they show how the two disciplines work together. In particular, a text’s history can show scribal mistakes, modernizations, and textual growth, and diachronic analysis may explain some of these changes.

At the beginning of the chapter, they provide the “famous example” from Deut 33:2, with which I want to interact in this post:

Ketiv: ֹמִימִינוֹ אשׁדת לָמו “From his right hand ‘sdt for them”
Qere: ֹמִֽימִינוֹ אֵשׁ דָּת לָמו “From his right hand fire was a law/there was a fiery law for them”

The ketiv אשׁדת is difficult to understand; perhaps its meaning was lost. The qere reveals a different word division, but דָּת (“law”) raises a question for the historical linguist. The word is only otherwise attested in LBH (e.g. Esther and Ezra) and this would be the only case of a Persian loanword in the Pentateuch. But the authors conclude that the linguistic difficulty is superficial, for the text is problematic. The MT itself indicates that דָּת is only one possibility, since it is only the qere, the way the text is read. The ketiv is אשׁדת, a reading admittedly “that is hard to understand” (in fact the lexicon is still puzzled over its meaning). The authors then cite the Septuagint (ἐκ δεξιῶν αὐτοῦ ἄγγελοι μετ᾽ αὐτοῦ “at his right hand angels with him”) and the Peshitta (ܡܢ ܝܡܝܢܗ܂ ܝܗܒ ܠܗܘܢ “from his right, he gave to them”), “neither of which seems to reflect the qere“ (p. 48). The authors then conclude:

The qere may reflect a late midrashic interpretation of an earlier text that was at some point no longer understood. The expression אֵשׁ דָּת (fire of the law) does not represent the earliest text of the verse, and as such does not provide a solid basis for historical linguistics (p. 48).

Now, the authors may well be right in their conclusion and they may have a ready defense for their thesis in this instance, but I suggest they have too simplistically solved this problem. The fact is the qere does have early support in the Jewish revisers:

Aquila: ἀπὸ δεξιᾶς αὐτοῦ πῦρ δόγμα αὐτοῖς (“from his right, fire was an ordinance for them”)
Symmachus: …πυρινὸς νόμος… (“...fiery law...”)

Jerome’s Vulgate also reflects this reading (in dextera eius ignea lex) but probably depends on Symmachus for it. Both Jewish revisers are earlier sources than the Peshitta, and their reading of the text reflects an earlier tradition. I’m not saying Aquila, Symmachus, and the qere preserve the more original text. Rather, Aquila and Symmachus show the antiquity of the qere אֵשׁ דָּת which may or may not be the original text. “The late midrashic interpretation” of the authors would now have to be pushed back to the period of some of our earliest evidence for the text.

Here is the tension: is textual criticism guiding linguistics or linguistics guiding textual criticism? What is intriguing here according to the authors is that the qere reflects a later midrash, and part of the leverage for this conclusion is that דָּת would be the only Persian loanward in the Pentateuch, a very important datum, to be sure. We have a good example here of both disciplines attempting to inform one another. The problem now is that there’s more evidence for the antiquity of the qere than the authors presented, and therefore, the TC question has to be reopened.

The ketiv אשׁדת is unintelligible at present and the error of word division could go in either direction, which leaves room for the qere to be the more original text (“fiery law” could be an original, poetic description for the theophanic giving of the law on the mountain; Exod 20:18; Deut 4:15). If the ketiv is the more original, then we avoid the diachronic problem as the authors have framed the matter. If דָּת of the qere is the more original reading, then we have an isolated instance of a word from a later period in an otherwise CBH text. This isolated instance would not date the text of Deuteronomy to a later period because one instance does not satisfy the “Criterion of Accumulation.” Rather, one late word in an otherwise early text might simply be chalked up to a later scribe’s modernization. The qere could represent early updating of the text or the more original text (added late? or דָּת is an older word than we thought?). The ketiv is a rather difficult, if not impossible (corrupted?), text. Perhaps, the LXX and Peshitta attempted to render a corrupted text, which then gives appearance of a difficult one?

We won’t solve the matter today, but I found this example to be interesting for the authors’ case of diachrony because the text history remains unclear. In any case, Hendel and Joosten provide a fascinating and helpful contribution to the ongoing dialogue on the history and formation of the Hebrew Bible.