Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Israel Knohl on Psalm 110:3 (LXX: 109:3)

  

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)