In Josh
24:33, we read the following, based on the MT text ( וְאֶלְעָזָר בֶּן־אַהֲרֹן מֵת וַיִּקְבְּרוּ אֹתוֹ בְּגִבְעַת פִּינְחָס בְּנוֹ אֲשֶׁר נִתַּן־לוֹ בְּהַר אֶפְרָיִם):
And Eleazar the son of Aaron died, and they
buried him in a hill that pertained to Phinehas his son, which was given him in
mount Ephraim.
The LXX,
however, is much more sobering, showing how God is not neutral when it comes to
grevious sins, especially that of idolatry. The LXX (based on Judg 3:14) reads
in Greek:
καὶ ἐγένετο μετὰ ταῦτα καὶ Ελεαζαρ υἱὸς Ααρων
ὁ ἀρχιερεὺς ἐτελεύτησεν καὶ ἐτάφη ἐν Γαβααθ Φινεες τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ ἣν ἔδωκεν αὐτῷ
ἐν τῷ ὄρει τῷ Εφραιμ [1] ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ λαβόντες οἱ υἱοὶ Ισραηλ τὴν κιβωτὸν
τοῦ θεοῦ περιεφέροσαν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς καὶ Φινεες ἱεράτευσεν ἀντὶ Ελεαζαρ τοῦ πατρὸς
αὐτοῦ ἕως ἀπέθανεν καὶ κατωρύγη ἐν Γαβααθ τῇ ἑαυτοῦ [2] οἱ δὲ υἱοὶ Ισραηλ ἀπήλθοσαν
ἕκαστος εἰς τὸν τόπον αὐτῶν καὶ εἰς τὴν ἑαυτῶν πόλιν καὶ ἐσέβοντο οἱ υἱοὶ
Ισραηλ τὴν Ἀστάρτην καὶ Ασταρωθ καὶ τοὺς θεοὺς τῶν ἐθνῶν τῶν κύκλῳ αὐτῶν καὶ
παρέδωκεν αὐτοὺς κύριος εἰς χεῖρας Εγλωμ τῷ βασιλεῖ Μωαβ καὶ ἐκυρίευσεν αὐτῶν ἔτη
δέκα ὀκτώ
The NETS
provides the following translation:
And it happened after these things that
Eleazar son of Aaron, the high priest, died and was buried in Gabaath of
Phinees his son, which he gave him in Mount Ephraim. (33a) On that day the sons
of Israel took the ark of God and carried it around in their midst. And Phinees
served as priest in the place of Eleazar his father until he died, and he was
interred in Gabaath, which was his own. (33b) And the sons of Israel departed
each to their place and to their own city. And the sons of Israel worshiped
Astarte and Astaroth and the gods of the nations round about them. And the Lord
delivered them into the hands of Eglom, the king of Moab, and he dominated them
eighteen years.
Such is a
warning for our day too--if we embrace idolatry, God will condemn us to be
subjects to equally idolatrous kings and tyrants. We see this today with the
pro-abortion leaders in my native Ireland and elsewhere. Once God's people
(those who know better) allow for perverse doctrines and morals to be
acceptable, God will either actively bring about judgment or withdraw any
protection he has been given up until that point.
As for the
longer form in the LXX, we read the following in the Word Biblical Commentary:
This LXX closing ties directly into the beginning
of Judges, omitting some of the literarily difficult passages of that book.
Rofé has thus argued for its originality (cf. the opposite view of Rösel, VT30 [1980] 349) but on the basis that
it tried Joshua and Judges together as one book. Rofé assumes that Judg
1:1-3:11 was introduced at a secondary stage of the book of Judges.
The union of the two books is a matter of
strong debate, especially in light of the strong Deuteronomistic language in
key parts of Joshua where such strong Deuteronomistic marks do not appear in
Judges (see T.C. Butler, Judges, WBC
8 [Nasvhille: Nelson, 2009]. The complex literary theory of Rofé is supported
by Tov (Textual Criticism of the Hebrew
Bible, 330-31), who finds this to be a significant plus in the LXX that
bears “all the marks of originality.”
One evidence for this is the ability to
retrovert the Gk. into Heb., something that should be able to be done with most
if not all the Gk. since it supposedly started with a Heb. text. Retroversion
simply proves at best that the text was added in the Heb. tradition prior to
the Gk. translation, not that the retroverted Gk. plus is original. The add and
subtract literary theory of Rofé looks more like something created in a modern
newspaper or television newsroom than what could happen in ancient scribal
circles. Nelson concludes simply, “in each case MT represents the earliest
recoverable text” (281), which appears to be the correct interpretation (see M.
Rösel, SJOT16 [2002] 18.) Nelson
poses the interesting and quite possibly correct suggestion that both MT and OG
here represent readactional work rather than textual variants.
The new literary formulation shown at the
beginning of v. 33 and the repetition of the material in Judg 3:14 point
against the originality. The content and theme are that of Judges, not that of
Joshua. This it appears that the later tradition has tried to make the tie
between the two books explicit not only in Judg 2:6-10 but already in Jos 24. (Trent
C. Butler, Joshua 13-24 [2d ed.; WBC
7B; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2014], 337)
