The NRSV of
this pericope reads:
Remember the days of old, consider the years long past; ask your father
and he will inform you, Your elders will tell you. When the Most High gave
nations their homes and set the divisions of man, he fixed the boundaries of
peoples in relation to Israel's numbers. For the Lord's portion is his people,
Jacob his own allotment.
One will
note that this differs from the KJV; the Masoretic Text (MT) underlying the
KJV OT reads "sons of Adam/Man," while the DSS has the reading
"sons of god" or, as ANE scholars understand the term,
"gods."
In the
second edition of The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford, 2014), we read the
following note on page 419:
Most High, or “Elyon,” is a
formal title of El, the senior god who presided over the divine council in the
Ugaritic literature of ancient Canaan. The reference thus invokes, as do other
biblical texts, the Near Eastern convention of a pantheon of gods ruled by the
chief deity (Pss. 82:1; 89:6-8). Israelite authors regularly applied El’s title
to Israel’s God (Gen. 14:18-22; Num. 24:16; Pss. 46:5; 47:3). [with reference
to the variant in the DSS “number of the gods”] makes more sense. Here, the
idea is that the chief god allocates the nations to lesser deities in the
pantheon. (A post-biblical notion that seventy angels are in charge of the
world’s seventy nations echoes this idea.) Almost certainly, the unintelligible
reading of the MT represents a “correction” of the original text (whereby God
presides over other gods) to make it conform to the later standard of pure
monotheism: There are no other gods! The polytheistic imagery of the divine council
is also deleted in the Heb at 32:42; 33:2-3, 7.
