When Elyon gave estates to
nations,
when He split up the sons of man,
He set out the boundaries of peoples,
by the number of the Sunday gods. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3
vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:729)
by the number of the sundry
gods. The Masoretic Text here reads lemispar beney yisraʾel, “by the
number of the sons of Israel.” It is hard to make much sense of that reading,
though traditional exegetes try to do that by noting that Israel/Jacob had
seventy male descendants when he went down to Egypt and that there are, at
least proverbially, seventy nations. This translation adopts the reading of the
text found at Qumran (which seems close to the Hebrew text used by the
Septuagint translators): lemispar beney ʾelohim. This phrase, which
appears to reflect a very early stage in the evolution of biblical monotheism,
caused later transmitters of the text theological discomfort and was probably
deliberately changed in the interests of piety. In the older world-picture, registered
in a variety of biblical texts, God is surrounded by a celestial entourage of
divine beings or lesser deities, beney ʾelim or beney ’elohim, who are
nevertheless subordinate to the supreme God. The Song of Moses assumes that
God, in allotting portions of the earth to the various peoples, also allowed
each people its own lesser deity. Compare Moses’s remark about the astral
deities in Deuteronomy 4:19. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols.
[New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:729)