Sunday, July 23, 2023

Annette Yoshiko Reed on Deuteronomy 32:8, 43

  

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)