Genesis
31:53
Genesis 31:44-45 deals with the covenant that Jacob and Laban
made before they separated. After piling a heap of stones and setting up a
pillar, Laban speaks to Jacob about the importance of the heap and the pillar
and says that God will judge between them if either one will do or plan harm
against the other (31:51-53). The Mt, SP, and LXX contain an interesting text-critical
variant which discloses (a) later addition(s) with a theological aspect. The MT
and the SP are expansive in relation to the LXX. The Vulgate and the targumim
follow the MT, while the SP has a separate reading:
|
Gen 31:53 SP |
Gen 31:53 MT |
Gen 31:53-54a LXX |
|
אלהי אברהם ואלהי נחור וישבע יעקב בפחד אביו יצחק |
אלהי אברהם ואלהי נחור וישבע יעקב בפחד אביו יצחק |
53 ὁ θεὸς Αβρααμ καὶ ὁ θεὸς Ναχωρ κρινεῖ ἀνὰ μέσον ἡμῶν |
|
The god of Abraham and the God of Nahor will judge between us—the
god of Abraham. Jacob swore by the Fear of his father Isaac. |
The god of Abraham and the god of Nahor will judge between us—the
god of their father. Jacob swore by the Fear of his father Isaac. |
53 The god of Abraham and the god of Nahor will judge between us. |
It is possible that the MT plus אלהי אביהם, “the god of their
father” as well as the SP plus אלהי אברהם, “the god of Abraham” are later
additions, while the shorter LXX preserves the more original text (although it
is not completely original, as we will see). This is suggested by the following
considerations. The pluses are very poorly connected to the sentence or at
least ill placed. One receives the impression that they were originally intended
as marginal glosses or supralinear additions that were later inserted into a
wrong place. The more natural location would be immediately after the word
Nahor, although it would still be somewhat awkward. In any case, the plus
provides a clarification for what exactly was meant by the two references to
HEB in the preceding text. This leads us to the motive: Why were the
clarifications needed in the first place?
The sentence before the plus seems to imply that the god of Abraham
and the god of Nahor were two different deities (אלהי אברהם ואלהי נחור), which
would denote a polytheistic background. Otherwise one would expect the reading
to be אלהי אברהם ונחור “god of Abraham and Nahor.” The pluses in the SP and the
MT avoid this problem by specifically defining who this god was. In the SP, he
is said to be the god of Abraham, thus explicitly a single god. The MT plus is
more subtle, as it refers to the father of Nahor and Abraham, who were brothers
and had the same father. This would provide an explanation to the reader why
the text first refers to two gods; the addition in the MT insinuates that the
gods of Nahor and Abraham must have been the same god, because they had the
same father. The addition in the SP makes this explicit.
A polytheistic background is further substantiated by the plural
verb ישפטו “they will judge” in the MT. It is notable that the SP as well as
the Greek solve the problem by rendering the verb in the singular ישפט and κρινει “he will judge,”
thus identifying the two gods. The plural is probably original, for it is unlikely
that the verb would have been secondarily changed to a plural. Apparently all
MT, SP, and LXX readings have solved the implied polytheism of the original text
in different ways. Some Greek manuscripts have yet another but separated
secondary reading: Instead of: ο θεος ‘Αβρααμ και ο θεος Ναχωρk “the god of Abraham and the god
of Nahor,” manuscripts of the group 44-125 read ο θεος ‘Αβρααμ και Ναχωρ, “the god of Abraham and Nahor.”
By omitting the second references to god, the text effectively identified the
gods of Abraham and Nahor as the same god. These different and at least in part
independent editorial interventions highlight that there was a theological
problem with the original text. Since the LXX version was also edited by changing
the verb into singular, none of the preserved readings contains the original text
in full. The change of the plural to singular in the LXX may have taken place
in the translation process, for a translation could have instinctively assumed
that the text must refer to a single god. One should further note that the MT
and SP pluses may be connected, for otherwise it is difficult to explain why
both have solved the problem in a similar way by reducing the expansion in a
very awkward location in the sentence. It is very possible that the SP reading
is dependent on the MT but contains a further development. By the change of the
letter י with the letter ר—intentionally or by accidentally misreading it—it became
even clearer that only one god was meant. In any case, all these variant readings
can be explained as attempts to avoid the theological problem in the original text.
(Richard Müller and Juha Pakkala, Editorial Techniques in the Hebrew Bible:
Toward a Refined Criticism [Resources for Biblical Study 97; Atlanta, Ga.:
SBL Press, 2022], 51-52)
