At the same time, verse 3, “From the
womb of the dawn like dew your youth will come to you,” seems incomprehensible.
What might these words mean?
The solution is to be found in the
Septuagint translation (3rd-2nd century BCE), which renders this same verse
very differently. There, God says to the king, “At dawn from the womb I have
begotten you.” According to this version, the king was begotten by God.
Who, then, was the feminine partner
with whom God begot the king-Messiah?
Some scholars have suggested that
originally the verse read, “from the womb of the dawn, I have begotten you.”
According to this reading, the dawn served as a king of partner-in-marriage for
God. It had a human role, just as it played the role of parent in Isaiah’s
exclamation, “how are you fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of the dawn!”
(describing the fate of this evil king who had boasted, “I will ascend to
heaven above the stars of God”) (Isa. 14:12-13).
If this was the case, the king-Messiah
was born from the union of God and the dawn. Then it would appear that the
verse is implying that he was a kind of heavenly creature, like a star. God
begot the king from the womb of the dawn like dew. God created the king as dew comes
into being in the dawn.
If that was really the original form
of the verse, two questions have to be asked: First, what is the meaning of the
image of “a birth like dew”? And second, why did the verse change so dramatically
from its original meaning reflected in the Septuagint to the common Hebrew version,
to the point that today we cannot understand it?
In order to answer the first question,
we need the assistance of some ancient Egyptian texts, sometimes accompanied by
illustrations, describing the birth of kings. These were generally rulers who
had to find some justification for sitting on their thrones because they did
not belong to the royal family or because they were female. One of them was
Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt in the fifteenth century BCE. After the death
of her husband the pharaoh, Hatshepsut was appointed deputy queen in order to
preserve the monarchy until the pharaoh’s son, the heir-apparent, grew up and
took over. But Hatshepsut became fond of her role and wanted to occupy the
throne of the pharaohs like all the kings of Egypt. In order to justify the
unusual phenomenon of a woman ruler of Egypt, texts and illustrations were
produced describing Hatshepsut’s divine origins. One of the texts says that the
leading god, Amun, inseminated Hatshepsut’s mother with his dew, and that was
how the queen was born. (Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. 2,
75-100; 334; vol. 3, 12-19; Gardiner, “Coronation of King Hamerhab”) Of course,
the meaning was the god’s semen, but it was described as dew.
I suggest that the author of Psalm 110
may have known this Egyptian tradition, used it, and elaborated on it. There
were strong cultural relationships between Egypt and the kingdom of Judah. (For
example, several chapters in the book of Proverbs are based on an Egyptian book
of proverbs, the proverbs of Amen-em-ope). However, due to the theological gap
between Egypt and Judah, there was no place for complete and full borrowing. Here
in the psalm, in place of an actual union of the god and the queen mother, a
human being, the author depicted the God of Israel as fertilizing a divine
being, the womb of the morning.
Even if the author of this psalm did
not intend to describe the biological birth of a king as a son of God, this is
a very strange image. It could have disturbed the final editors of the Hebrew
Bible who lived in the early Rabbinic period (1st-2nd century CE).
Consequently, some changes were made in the text. As a result, future readers
would no longer be able to discern the original meaning of the text. (Israel
Knohl, The Messiah Confrontation: Pharisees Versus Sadducees and the Death
of Jesus [trans. David Maisel; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society, 2022], 84-85)
