Comments on Ambassador Watch: LXX-rated

The illustration on the stele of Hammurabi's code ...

2007-10-06T10:55:00.000+13:00

The illustration on the stele of Hammurabi's code was not intended to depict a literal event (Realism as a style of art only arose in the comparatively recent past, and most religious art has always been non-literal), but allegorically represents the King of Babylon's sacral role as embodiment of the gods' governance of the human race, and depicts Hammurabi's legislation as a divine gift from Marduk by means of his appointed representative. In the ancient Middle East, the king was viewed as almost an incarnation of the ruling god, or at least as a mediator. But it's not the same as the Jewish belief that God appearing to Moses and speaking to him face to face (with Moses in a role as a prophet or seer), communicating laws and ordinances. The Babylonians had their concept of a seer or prophet as the Hebrews had their concept, but the understanding of the king's role as representative or stand-in for Marduk (or whoever the city's tutelary deity was) was not that of a seer or prophet directly and audibly receiving laws from the god. (It's also tendentious to say it was "the Lord God" from whom Hammurabi received the laws -- "Lord God" is generally understood to mean the Jewish/Christian God, not one of the gods in the Babylonian pantheon, even if "Bel" literally means "lord." Hammurabi's worship of Marduk and the other Igigi was not viewed either by the Babylonians or the Jews as interchangeable with the Jews' worship of Adonai Elohim.)

Wait a minute Jordan, I just looked this up and th...

2007-10-06T05:41:00.000+13:00

Wait a minute Jordan, I just looked this up and there is an inscription on the stele of Hammurabi that shows the Lord God giving the laws to Hammurabi.

Thank you Jordan, for that explanation. Sounds rig...

2007-10-06T05:38:00.000+13:00

Thank you Jordan, for that explanation. Sounds right to me. It was Hammurabi's appointment by the Lord God (Marduk) to rule that gave me the idea that he was claiming the same thing as Moses.

Those names of people and places, "good grief, Cha...

2007-10-05T07:19:00.000+13:00

Those names of people and places, "good grief, Charlie Brown". We need an English translation of the English translation of the LXX.

Yeah, the Grecianised spellings of the Old Testament's Hebrew names can take some getting used to.

There is hardly any doubt that the Jews had a book of law (patterned after Hammurabi's law) before the Babylonian exile.

No, there's no doubt at all that the Jews had a book of law before the exile. There's no ground to say that it was patterned after Hammurabi's law, though. There are points of contact between element of the Torah and elements of Hammurabi's code, but it's not enough to say that the Jewish law was patterned after the Babylonian law. The differences between the Torah and Hammurabi's code are much, much prevalent than the similarities.

It was when the Jews returned that the fake history and the creation, flood, tower of Babel etc. fables were added.

Well, if the pre-exilic Jewish law could have had a Babylonian exemplar, why couldn't the Jewish stories of the creation and flood, etc., also have arisen and been influenced by Babylonian exemplars prior to the Babylonian captivity? There was a lot of cultural contact and interplay among the peoples of the Fertile Crescent back then, and the Jews themselves traced their ancestry to Mesopotamia, so it shouldn't be surprising if resemblances between Jewish lore and Babylonian lore would be found even several centuries before the Babylonian exile. Epigraphic evidence of Israelite kings first appear in Mesopotamia royal inscriptions and records in the 800s B.C. (starting with King Ahab, mentioned by Shulmanu-asaridu/Shalmaneser III, King of Assyria), and the Jewish royal annals preserved the record of the embassage of Marduk-apal-iddina (Merodach-baladan), King of Babylon, during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah in the late 700s B.C. All of that is well before Jerusalem fell to the armies of Nebuchadnezzar. There's just no reason why the stories in Genesis had to have arisen only after the Babylonian exile.

In case anyone doesn't know, Hammurabi also received his set of laws from "the Lord God".

You couldn't be more wrong. Nowhere in the Code of Hammurabi does it say that Hammurabi received his laws from "the Lord God," or from any god. In the preamble, there is reference to Anu, Bel, and Marduk making provision for the governance of the universe, and Hammurabi claims divine right to rule based on the will of Marduk. Then there is an incredibly long and tedious and boastful recitation of Hammurabi's titles and alleged achievements. Then the list of laws commences. But never does it say, "And Marduk said unto Hammurabi, 'Say to the black-headed people of Babylon . . .'" In the lengthy preamble, Hammurabi says Anu and Bel established him in power "to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind." But there is never even a suggestion that these laws came to Hammurabi by a direct divine communication. The code names many, many gods and goddesses, and invokes them to curse those who would disobey the laws of the code, but there's nothing about having received the laws by divine revelation.

That's just what we need, another bible version in...

2007-10-05T03:05:00.000+13:00

That's just what we need, another bible version in the world (he said, sarcastically). Actually, I tried reading some of it, ewwwww. Those names of people and places, "good grief, Charlie Brown". We need an English translation of the English translation of the LXX.

There is hardly any doubt that the Jews had a book of law (patterned after Hammurabi's law) before the Babylonian exile. It was when the Jews returned that the fake history and the creation, flood, tower of Babel etc. fables were added. Then, of course, there were the prophets . . .

The reason the bible has the illusion of consistency throughout is the fact that all later writings were extensions and elaborations of that first set of laws.

In case anyone doesn't know, Hammurabi also received his set of laws from "the Lord God".

Correction: make that "correction" . . . . :-D

2007-10-04T12:18:00.000+13:00

Correction: make that "correction" . . . . :-D

Correctin: Make that "we really shouldN'T use 'Ma...

2007-10-04T12:07:00.000+13:00

Correctin: Make that "we really shouldN'T use 'Masoretic' for any Hebrew Bible that dates to pre-medieval times"

It's always puzzled me that conservative Christian...

2007-10-04T12:06:00.000+13:00

It's always puzzled me that conservative Christians get all strident about the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, when it's clear that the New Testament writers wouldn't go near the thing. Instead they used the Septuagint (LXX) almost exclusively.

Apparently the Masoretic text (or to be more precise, the proto-Masoretic text) was only taking shape around the same time that the New Testament writers were writing, so it only stands to reason that the New Testament writers wouldn't use the Masoretic text. The Masoretic text as such didn't exist until a good while after the New Testament books had all been written. (St. Jerome's Vulgate relied on the Masoretic, or a proto-Masoretic, text -- we really should use "Masoretic" for any Hebrew Bible that dates to pre-medieval times, since the Massoretes didn't come along until the Middle Ages.)

Then along came the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it turns out that the LXX readings do in fact go back to the Hebrew. It seems that there were variant versions of the Hebrew scriptures, one set of which underlie the Masoretic tradition, so beloved of King James fanatics, and another which leads to the LXX.

That's a bit of a simplification, but yeah, that's basically correct. Actually there were other versions of the Hebrew scriptures that differed from both the LXX and the proto-Masoretic versions.

Jewish folk would also probably be pleased to have ownership of their scriptures - rooted in the Masoretic tradition - back again. The misuse and appropriation of the Tanakh has served to create tension between the two communities for centuries.

Well, the Septuagint tradition arose from the Jewish Diaspora, specifically the community in Alexandria, Egypt. It was the "official" Bible of Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora, and many of them viewed it as practically divinely-inspired. When the first Christians began using it to support their faith, non-Christian Jews weren't happy about it, and they finally opted to give up the Septuagint (which even Christians admitted was flawed in several places -- LXX Daniel is a real nightmare) and produce new Greek versions (i.e. Theodotion and Symmachus) that lacked some of the Church's favorite renderings of certain Messianic prophecies (including the well-known "parthenos" rendering of Isa. 7:14).

To paraphrase the song "Gimme that ol' time religion", if it was good enough for Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, how come it's not good enough for Spanky, Six-pack, Big Dave, Dave the Visionary, and the Cincinnati Sanhedrin?

If I'm not mistaken, William F. Dankenbring favors the Septuagint over the Masoretic, for the exact reason you state here.

some 5 years ago, I read an article by Frank Nelte where he posits that the LXX was compiled by a Church Father (Origen or Jerome?) from Greek translations extant at that time. Don't how credible this view is, nor how rigorous his scholarship was.

He must have been talking about the Hexapla of Origen. By the 200s A.D., the Septuagint text had acquired numerous scribal errors and had to be repaired, so Origen did just that.

Again, to be precise, when we refer to "the Septuagint," we cannot point to a single Greek text. Rather, we have several ancient Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament -- all of them of Christian origin, since the Jews had long since given up the Septuagint as tainted by association with Christianity, which the Jews rejected as heresy. Among those manuscripts one finds various textual differences, but they all point back to an older, pre-Christian Greek Old Testament. To be most precise, the Septuagint originally was just the Torah, the Pentateuch, translated during the 200s B.C. The other books were translated later, at various times and places, and then collected together. There seem to have been competing Greek translations of certain books (cf. the Book of Tobit, which exists in several recensions in Greek). So, while "Septuagint" has long been taken to refer to the entire Old Testament in Greek, it is most likely that the name was first applied just to the five books of Moses, and then extended to the whole Old Testament. I think scholars these days prefer to say "Greek Old Testament" rather than "the Septuagint," because Greek Old Testament takes into account the fact that "the Septuagint" is really a manuscript tradition rather than a single comprehensive manuscript.

the Jewish rabbis who canonized the Old Testament in I think 90 a.d.

You're referring to the old and discredited "Council of Jamnia" theory. Jamnia, or Javneh, was the location of a Jewish rabbinical school, not a "Council" in the sense of a Christian oecumenical council. During the late first century, Jewish rabbis debated and issued rabbinical opinions on the "canonicity" (as we'd call it) of various disputed books. It was thought that the decisions at Jamnia were the final "fixing" of the canon of Hebrew scripture, but the reality was (as usual) much more complicated and messy than that. First, the Jewish canon was largely agreed upon before Jamnia (Torah, Prophets, a several of the Writings). Second, although the rabbis at Jamnia expressed a negative judgment on various books such as Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) and Baruch, many Jewish teachers continued to regard those books as canonical long after. Again, Jamnia approved of Esther, but we know that most Jews continued to view that book as doubtful even as late as the 200s and 300s A.D. The Jewish canon really wasn't settled until the 300s A.D., around the same general time the Christian biblical canon was pretty much settled for most Christians.

if not, why not? because it's too Catholic. The Se...

2007-10-03T03:00:00.000+13:00

if not, why not? because it's too Catholic. The Septuagint contains the so-called apocrypha which the protestants eliminated from their Bibles. They sided with the Jewish rabbis who canonized the Old Testament in I think 90 a.d.(may have been the Masoretic text-I'm not sure) Meanwhile, as you said, the early church read from the Septuagint which contained what Catholic theologians/scholars would term the "deuterocanonical" books(same as apocrypha). Of course it was the Catholic Church that canonized the New Testament in the 4th century and when they did the deuterocanonical books were included. I have read most of them and think they're pretty amazing but they do include things like praying for the dead which protestants largely disagree with, among other things. The term apocrypha suggests that those books are outside of the canon but in reality are only outside of the Hebrew, Jewish, rabbinical canon. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this.

some 5 years ago, I read an article by Frank Nelte...

2007-10-02T19:08:00.000+13:00

some 5 years ago, I read an article by Frank Nelte where he posits that the LXX was compiled by a Church Father (Origen or Jerome?) from Greek translations extant at that time.

Don't how credible this view is, nor how rigorous his scholarship was.