The Hebrew of the Masoretic text of
Deut 32:8-9, which is paralleled by the Samarian Pentateuch, Targum, Peshitta,
and Latin Vulgate, reads as follows:
When the Most High (El Elyon) gave the
nations their inheritance and divided the sons of man, he established the
boundaries of the nations, according to the number of the sons of Israel. For the
portion of YHWH is his people, Jacob his inheritance. (MT Deut 32:8-9)
Manuscripts of the Greek translation
of Deuteronomy, by contrast, are almost unanimous in reading “angels of God” in
place of “sons of Israel.” This variant seemed puzzling until the discovery of
the Dead Sea Scrolls yielded Hebrew copies of Deuteronomy preserving yet another
reading. The versions of Deut 32:8b in 4QDeutj and 4QDeutq read
bene elohim or bene El for bene Israel, raising the
possibility that “sons of God” was the earliest recoverable reading, which
Hebrew tradents later changed to bene Israel and which Greek tradents
rendered as angeloi theou (“angels of God”), whether in the course of translation
or in an inner-Greek shift akin to that in LXX Gen 6:2.
What is most plausibly reconstructed
as the oldest known reading of Deut 32:8 also finds some counterpart in the version
of Deut 32:43 preserved in 4QDeutq—also with partial parallels in
LXX Deuteronomy. Where MT Deuteronomy reads “Nations, acclaim his people, for
he vindicates the blood of his servants” for the first part of the verse
(32:43a), 4QDeutq has “Rejoice, O heavens, with him, and worship
him, all elohim, for he vindicates the blood of his sons.” In the Greek,
one finds a combination of the two. In the part corresponding to the above-quoted
portions of 4QDeutq, moreover, there is an internal variation again
around what is rendered here as elohim: Codex Alexandrinus and several
miniscules read “all sons of God” (cf. “sons of God” in Codex Vaticanus), while
a number of other manuscripts have “all angels” instead.
The evidence surrounding Deut 32:43,
then, cautions us against assuming that the “sons of God” of Deut 32:8 were
already more angel than deity. It is possible that both may have meant something
more akin to what later tradents seem to fear—or at least encompassed this
possible meaning in a deployment of deliberate ambiguity akin to the examples
noted above. In the case of Deut 32:43, the version of 4QDeutq
elevates Israel’s God by depicting Him as the one who is worshipped by other
divine beings, while in the case of Deut 32:8, the appeal to other divine
beings functions to underline YHWH’s exclusive fidelity to Israel. Although the
tradition that culminates in the MT negates both options entirely, they were
clearly still part of the textual tradition surrounding Deuteronomy well into
the Second Temple period. (Annette Yoshiko Reed, Demons, Angels, and Writing
in Ancient Judaism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020], 75-76)
