Romans: Paul's citing of the Old Testament

koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

15 August 2010

The Old Testament was necessary to properly understand the salvation of Jesus Christ from A to Z. Jesus was the expected Messiah of the Old Testament and thus the fulfillment of the promises of the Old Testament had to be properly exegeted in order not to misunderstand and misidentify Jesus Christ as the First Advent Messiah. The Second Advent Messiah will be the same. Jesus Christ. He came first as a lamb and will come as a lion at the Second Advent. The double aspect of the Messiah's role was well engrained in Judaism. But, Judaism created two Messiah's, one who is a priest and one who is a king or ruler. The believe one will come before the other at the end of time. Almost correct but not. That is why careful analysis of the Old Testament is very important. You need to know when a phrase is literal and when it is figurative so that you do not make the error of assigning something as literal when it is figurative or figurative when it is literal. Academic honesty must flow in your whole being so as not to deny the truth coming from the canon of God, called, the Word of God. If your religion, confession, belief was wrong, and they made a mistake in the past on a passage of the Bible, you need to adjust your thought on it. It is imperative. Laxity about this aspect may lead you to denounce eventually the whole scripture as a guide for your life. That is agnosticism and atheism, whether you go to church or not. That is what secularism implies in the post-modern age, denying an objective outside source of authority over your life. Everything should be subjective and relative for you to decide if it is beneficial for modern humanity or not, thus post-modernism.

The Old Testament was written by Jews but does not belong to them. It is God's Word. They are under the same constraints as Christians or any other person who wish to interpret it. Reading it on your knees, in faith, open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit which guide us in reading it.

Romans 9-11 and in chapter 15 Paul used the Old Testament in a special way. Paul is like a walking lexicon and he lists all the cases in Romans 3 around the topic that none are righteous. Paul could find 14 statements or prooftexts in the Old Testament all saying that no one is righteous. He listed them all in a long chain.

Psalm 14:1-3; Psalm 53:1-3; Ecclessiastes 7:20; Psalm 5:9 and 140:3 [in Romans 3:13]; Psalm 10:7 [in Romans 3:14]; Isaiah 59:7-9 [in Romans 3:15]; Proverbs 1:16 [in Romans 3:16-17]; Psalm 36:1 [in Romans 3:18].

Alfred Edersheim made a study of chain citations from the Old Testament and found that Jews used it in preaching in synagogues and also in the Talmud (A. Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah Vol. I page 449). The Talmud used the lines: the law says, the prophets say, the writings say but Edersheim felt that Paul never used this structure. The Hebrew word for this is haraz.

The meaning of words is for Paul very important.

The phenomenon of conflating citations is used by Paul but with the Rabbis rarely, although examples can be found in the Talmud, Sanhedrin 38b.

Conflating citations means that there is cut and paste from a fuller text. Citations are selected by Paul in order to carry the theme forward.

Paul knew the Old Testament very well.

Hebrews 10:5

In Hebrews 10:5, Paul was citing the Old Testament. Paul was citing from Psalm 40:6-8.

"Offering and sacrifice I did not want.

A body you prepared for me".

A number of observations are necessary here. Firstly, the Hebrew text reads "ears" not "body". Secondly, the root of the verb seems to read karayit, which primarily means "to cut" but also "prepare" since that is also the meaning or semantics intended in 2 Kings 6:23 as William Shea indicated in an article in AUSS 19 (1981): 64.

Many English translators of the Hebrew of Psalm 40:6-8 actually used the words "ears you have cut for me". We can rest assure that Paul's Greek translation reading "prepared" is not out of step in any way with the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew semantics.

The third point we want to raise regarding this citation is that Paul is not following the so-called LXX exactly and precisely as it is delivered to us in present day. There are many explanations for these differences of Paul and the socalled LXX.

a. Paul is not citing the LXX precisely because he is citing from memory.

b. Paul is not citing the LXX precisely since he on purpose adapted and changed the readings.

c. The manuscript that Paul was using is not the socalled LXX but some manuscript very similar.

d. The current socalled LXX is what we are saying it is, socalled, since the original LXX was exactly like the original Hebrew, but the corruptions happened with the librarians of Alexandria during the days of Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 BCE.

Our experience with Paul makes (b) impossible since it is not part of Paul's habit to change the Bible or Word of God. He rather would make something explicit that is implicit but he will not pull out of the Bible what is not there.

So what happened here? Firstly, we have no exact proof ipso facto that the original Greek translation made by the LXX in 284 BCE read soma = body or otia = ears. Secondly, there is a literary device called sinekdogee, in which a part is used for the whole, or one is used for many, less important is used for the more important. Paul interpreted it as an understandings technique. A part of the body stands for the whole body. That means that ears = body for Paul.

Emmanuel Tov of the Hebrew University, who is a textcritic and have wrote books for this science, wrote an article (E. Tov, "Did the Septuagint Translators Always understand their Hebrew Text?" De Septuaginta edited by A. Pietersma, C. Cox [Benben Publications, 1984]: 53-70).

A number of observations should be made here. Tov was never confronted in those days with the idea that what we understand the LXX to be today, was indeed never the original form of the LXX. That means that the byzantine LXX that survived from the fragments remaining from the copies that Constantine odered to be copied in haste and with speed in 350 CE, which is codices A, B, Aleph, D are in fact full of errors due to the speed they were copied and secondly, they are copies of what was already present in the library of Alexandria during the days of Antiochus Epiphanes with the copies of the books of Homer as M. Fraser indicated in his Volumous work on the Ptolemaic Library of Alexandria.

This means, that Tov should not ask this question whether the translators understood their Hebrew text, but the question whether what he is sitting in his hands as LXX is indeed the original LXX? Franke of the Victorian period has clearly indicated that the text that we have is corrupt. We all know it actually. It is kind of strange for Tov to live with the romantic misperception that the socalled Brook-Maclean, or Ralphs, or Göttingen Edition is indeed the original LXX.

What is the story at the library of Alexandria a century after the production of the original Septuagint by careful Jews who came from Jerusalem to assist in the project? A can of worms. Not when the translation was made originally, but one century later, since M. Fraser told us that the books of Homer were copied with additions, elisions, restructuring and harmonizations. These are all the elements that we find currently in the byzantine Greek LXX. So with the degenerative status of the texts in the middle to end of the second century BCE, the Greek Bible also suffered. So in the days of Jesus, two forms were available, one which was exactly as the original and another a corrupt form.

Hebrews 1:6

"And prostrate yourselves to Him, all the angels of God".

Here it is a combination of Psalm 96:7 and Deuteronomy 32:43. It is not exactly the present LXX. The word angels inserted here is from Psalm 96:7 but the rest of the sentence is the same as the LXX form. We must qualify though, that Deuteronomy 32:43 is not the same as this citation, but in the complete elaboration of the Septuagint form, all the parts mentioned here can be found. But, again, what Septuagint, the one that has gone through Christian hands and preserved by them, or the original one of 284 BCE. The original one did not survive. An interesting case dating to the date of the corruption of the LXX, Antiochus Epiphanes (164 BCE) is the Hebrew fragment of Deuteronomy 32:43 from cave four (see BASOR 136 [1954]: 12-15). It reads the sentence as "and prostrate yourselves before him all gods". The fact that this Hebrew text predates the socalled byzantine survival of the LXX [our corrupt form] does not say anything. First, these texts were placed in the caves because they belonged to a library that may have had connection to the Library at Alexandria and its problems. So that this fragment of Deuteronomy from Cave 4, many have been also part of this process of textual corruption that the Librarians of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (164 BCE) were known for. There was the degenerative quality of text at Alexandria, are we to conclude that Qumran is evidence of similar degenerative quality of texts in Palestine, if the texts from Qumran are not from Egypt, Rome, Antiochia, Caesarea? If Paul is using the LXX, it is only for convenience and when he change the form he does so with the literal Masoretic text, strictly abiding with the form, from a similar theme but in another pericope elsewhere in Scripture. One cannot say that Paul was not aware of the Hebrew as we find it in the Masoretic tradition. That would be grossly wrong.

Hebrews 8:5

"Make all according to the type that was shown to you on the mountain".

The LXX of the byzantine period and that we have today does not include the word "all". The form of the word "that was shown to you" is also different in the LXX than in the citation of Paul.

We need to get away from the idea that the writers of the New Testament worked with the Septuagint or LXX as we have it today. That is not correct. Let us make this theory: Is it possible that the changes that Paul made using Psalm 40 supra for example in changing ears to body, on the basis of sinekdogee was well known to the translating, copying scribes of the days of Constantine, so that they actually wrote what Paul said into the renderings of Psalm 40, aligning it consciously or subconsciously to Paul in the book of Hebrews? After all, we do not have earlier texts to compare the earlier versions of the Septuagint with the fourth century codices. Those manuscripts are very limited and brings us sometimes no closer than 250 CE. Still 500 years after the original.