Nicolas Wyatt rendered Deut 32:8-9 thusly:
When the Most High dispersed the nations,
when he scattered the sons of Adam,
he set up the boundaries of the peoples
in accordance with the number of the sons of Bull El.
But the allotment of Yahweh and his kinsman,
Jacon the portion of his inheritance.
Wyatt offers the following commentary on this passage:
There are of course various explanations of this obscure text, though
some are unnecessary complications by commentators ancient and modern. It seems
to me that the similar passage from Ugarit clinches the matter as to whom are
being enumerated, the descendants of Jacob or the gods of the pantheon. It is
surely the latter. Bull El (tr il) is a common title of El in the
Ugaritic corpus, and Joosten’s elegant solution to the problem of the reading
in the fourth column (the MT běnê yisrā’ēl, the LXX αγγελων θεου) renders further discussion superfluous on this
score.
But a fresh translation still leaves us with exegetical problems. Where
does Yahweh stand in this scenario? For many, he is one of the (seventy) “sons
of Bull El,” and therefore a subordinate deity. This strikes me as a perverse
understanding of the text. The relationship between the two gods, El and
Yahweh, may be briefly summarized, though not, I hope, at risk of oversimplification.
In many passage the two divine names are interchangeable (e.g. explicitly Gen
14:22; 16:13; Exod 6:2-3; implicitly Gen 32:31; 35:11-15; 49:25), indicating
not just the equivalence, but the identification of the gods. The exodus is credited
in Exodus 15 (but note v. 2cd!) to Yahweh, but in Num 23:22 and 24:8 to El: the
exodus narrative now effectively identifies them, though there may have been
distinct strands to the prehistory of the tradition. In Hosea’s polemics
against the northern kingdom, 8:4-7 is a sustained attack on the bull-cult of
Jeroboam, which I have explained as a reversion from Yahwism to an earlier “national”
or perhaps local cult of El. So Tur-Sinai’s proposed correction of 8:6 from the
acontextual kî miyyiśrā’ēl to kî mi šôr ‘ēl, where the consonantal
text is identical except for the ś, š shift, which is apparent only wit
ha pointed text, is to be preferred as giving consistency to the passage and
reinforces Joosten’s account of Deut 32:8.
If Yahweh is not subordinate to El in the Deuteronomic passage, we must
understand El (= Yahweh) divides the number of the nations according to the
number of the pantheon (seventy, the “sons of Bull El”) in Israel corresponding
to the sons of El’s consort Athirat in Ugarit), but reserves Israel for himself,
Yahweh (= El). There are thus seventy-one nations and seventy-one gods. This is
a way of expressing the doctrine of election: Israel is supernumerary to the
seventy nations. But as with the Ugaritic example, it leaves us with an anomaly,
that the real number and the symbolic number are at variance. Mot no longer
features, of course, and we may either infer that Asherah is present
(seventy-two deities) or that she too is now pensioned off, in which case
Yahweh-E must be logically an androgynous parent (seventy-one deities representing
the seventy nations and supernumerary Israel). The underlying seventh in both these
examples appears to be a universal number, denoting all the gods. I suspect
that as with the matter in the Ugaritian context, the ambiguity over the number is
deliberate, inviting a sense of uncertainty, and the preserving an element of
secrecy regarding Yahweh’s true identity. (Nicolas Wyatt, “The Rumpelstiltskin
Factor: Explorations in the Arithmetic of Pantheons,” in Some Wine and Honey
for Simon: Biblical and Ugaritic Aperitifs in Memory of Simon B. Parker,
ed. A. Joseph Ferrara and Hebret B. Huffmon [Eugene, Oreg.: Pickwick
Publications, 2020], 102-4)
