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.

New Book: How Old Is the Hebrew Bible?

In How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (Yale, 2018), Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten provide an accessible treatment of some of the complex issues regarding inquiry into the history of the Hebrew Bible. In short, they are convinced that within the Hebrew Bible there is a traceable diachrony from Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH; texts dated to the monarchy) to Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH; texts dated to the Persian period). The book is only 221 pages. It is not intended to be a full or complete study of all of the evidence but it does present some intriguing arguments for its thesis.

My interest in the book goes beyond the linguistic to the textual critical. In chapter 4, the authors address “Textual History and Linguistic History.” They state the problem plainly, “Textual variation interferes with diachronic linguistics” (p. 47). However, the situation is not hopeless in the eyes of the authors. The Masoretic Text is “notoriously layered” (p. 48) and the MT’s vowel pointing at times does preserve evidence of a later grammatical development (cf. Isa 1:12; p. 49), but our authors conclude, “Textual criticism and diachronic linguistics complement each other. The judicious combination of the two approaches paves the way to a correct understanding of the text” (p. 50, and similar on p. 53 regarding the consonantal text).

So how do we know whether we are reading early or late Biblical Hebrew in any one narrative or book? Under “The Criterion of Accumulation,” the authors say that the comprehensive difference between CBH and LBH could hardly be the result of textual corruption. Rather, only an accumulation of late features can date a text as late (cf. ch. 3). That is, early texts may contain anomalous late linguistic features due to sporadic linguistic modernization. The authors final assessment of the Masoretic Text in this regard is worth quoting in full:

The fact is that the MT of Isaiah and the Pentateuch does not exhibit this modernizing profile. On the whole, the MT is a rather conservative and well-preserved text. Occasional modernizations exist, but they did not affect the MT to the extent of making the diachronic approach impossible (p. 55).

They close the chapter with a section on Textual Criticism and Redaction Criticism, which addresses the matter of different literary editions; that is, textual change not due to scribal mistakes and modernizing versions (pp. 56–57).

The authors conclude the chapter as follows:

When textual criticism is brought into the picture, it has the global effect of confirming the diachronic approach. The textual history of the Hebrew Bible provides an explanation for occasional “false positives,” late features occurring in a relatively early text. In addition, such late features in the CBH corpus can often be shown to have entered the text secondarily, as scribal mistakes, as occasional modernizations, or as products of textual growth. Textual criticism and historical linguistics  reinforce one another, and together contribute to a better understanding of the biblical text (p. 59).

I’m only part way through chapter 5 of the book, but overall, the authors are to be commended for their treatment and presentation of the matter of historical linguistics and its relationship to TC. I plan to write a follow-up post attempting to engage the authors on one of their examples from chapter 4 with a view to show how they think diachony and TC work together.

Hendel: The Shared Origin of Modern Textual Criticism and Inerrancy

This is now a few days late for Reformation Day, but Ronald Hendel, editor-in-chief of the Hebrew Bible: Critical Edition (HBCE), has just put an article online that should be of particular interest to ETC readers. The essay looks at the relationship between inerrancy and textual criticism in Protestant-Catholic debates during the Reformation and Post-Reformation. The main contention is that the same concern for a “perfect text” led to both modern textual criticism and the modern doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. 

I must say I was not convinced by the overall argument since it seems to me that both textual criticism and inerrancy as he describes them existed before his main sources. But Hendel is right, I think, to argue that the Reformation debates about Scripture (especially sola scriptura) raised new questions about inerrancy and textual criticism. One example we could cite is the debate about whether Hebrew vowel points are inspired and inerrant. (On which, see PJW’s thoughts here.)

Here is part of Hendel’s conclusion:

The dream of a perfect text in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a story worth telling—although I have only sketched the highlights—because the discipline of biblical scholarship still works largely within the conceptual space carved out by these controversies. In particular, the modern discipline of textual criticism and the orthodox Protestant doctrine of biblical inerrancy have a shared origin in early modern arguments about textual variants in the Hebrew Bible. Since then, textual criticism has become institutionalized as a non-theological practice, and most theologians are unaware of its inner workings. Yet the empirical realia of texts and variants were once central in theological discourse, providing a fulcrum for deep rifts in early modern culture. The conceptual changes were long lived....

The Catholic-Protestant controversy, based in part on the problem of textual variants, yielded the high doctrine of biblical inerrancy. As Philip Benedict sums up, “Controversy with Catholicism and the need to defend established positions had produced the doctrine of the literal inerrancy of the biblical text.” Text-critical issues were at the center of these fraught discourses about the perfect text. 

I would be interested to hear from readers on their take on the essay. You can read the PDF on Hendel’s Academia page.

As a side note, anyone looking for a good PhD topic (and whose Latin is good) could make a great thesis out of tracing the role of textual criticism in the 16th–17th century debates about Scripture.

Update

It looks like Hendel has a collection of essays (including this one) titled Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible coming out this month in SBL’s Text-Critical Studies series. The introduction is available here.

Has SBL Said Farewell to Reason?

Ronald S. Hendel, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, has recently published an opinion piece in the current Biblical Archaeology Review, “Farewell to SBL: Faith and Reason in Biblical Studies”, (available online here). According to Hendel, SBL "has changed its position on the relationship between faith and reason in the study of the Bible."

Here is an excerpt:

The problem is that the SBL has loosened its own definition of Biblical scholarship, such that partisan attacks of this type are now entirely valid. When I learned of the new move to include fundamentalist groups within the SBL, I wrote to the director and cited the mission statement in the SBL’s official history: “The object of the Society is to stimulate the critical investigation of the classical biblical literatures.”3 The director informed me that in 2004 the SBL revised its mission statement and removed the phrase “critical investigation” from its official standards. Now the mission statement is simply to “foster biblical scholarship.” So critical inquiry—that is to say, reason—has been deliberately deleted as a criterion for the SBL. The views of creationists, snake-handlers and faith-healers now count among the kinds of Biblical scholarship that the society seeks to foster.

Hendel concludes with his personal "farewell to the SBL" – he has let his membership lapse.

Subsequently SBL has published an official reply to Hendel on the SBL website, "Discussing Faith and Reason in Biblical Studies," specifically offering clarifications on four of Hendel's claims (as SBL understands them):

1) The SBL has diluted its standards of critical scholarship, as evidenced in the 2004 change to the Society mission statement.

2) ASOR and AAR stopped meeting with the SBL “due to petty disputes among the leaders of these groups.”

3) Since the AAR decision to discontinue joint meetings, the SBL has loosened its standards as to the types of organizations that can be included at the SBL Annual Meeting.

4) The current SBL environment, which includes instances of proselytizing activity as well as veiled theological denunciations of certain individuals or groups, is hostile to a critical approach to biblical studies.

Finally, SBL invite members to respond to the issues to this e-mail address suggesting the following type of issues for discussion:

* To what extent do you believe that the Society successfully balances its commitment to scholarly integrity while maintaining an atmosphere in which all voices may be heard (specific, first-hand examples are encouraged)?

* Should the Society establish a standards-based approach to membership? That is, should there be a set of minimum standards, qualifications, or achievements for SBL membership?

* If you favor a standards-based approach, what specific standards would you advocate for SBL membership?

Joseph Kelly (kolhaadam) sums up the story providing a lot of links to other bloggers' responses (Jim West, John Loftus, Doug Magnum, Jim Davila, John Hobbins, Michael Bird, Carl Sweatman, Stephen Carlson, Robert Cargill and Chris Brady). Apparently, there is now also a Facebookgroup urging that the SBL should put the word "critical" back into their purpose statement.