On Pain of Death
Then Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel; and under His feet there appeared to be a pavement of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself. Exodus 24:9-10 NASB
Saw – There’s just one little problem. “‘But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live’” (Exodus 33:20). Apparently God forgot to mention this to the seventy elders. Or maybe He granted an exception. The text of 33:20 seems incompatible with 24:10. Rabbis in the second century B.C.E. recognized this problem, and they fixed it. The LXX doesn’t read this way. It says “they saw the place where the God of Israel stood.” According to the LXX, they didn’t see God. They just saw the “place.” Problem solved.
Well, not quite. What this means is that the LXX translation of the Hebrew “corrects” the text according to a preconceived theological bias. Eric John Wyckoff points out that this isn’t the only correction made in the LXX in these few verses:
In the closing scene of the Sinai narrative, Moses and a group of priests and elders experience a visio Dei and eat and drink on the mountaintop (Exod 24:9-11). The MT indicates twice that they actually “see God” (w. 10, 11), with no further explanation. Along with several other departures from a strictly literal translation, the LXX reports instead that they see God’s “place.” How did these variations find their way into the Greek, and which among them constitute theological exegesis embedded in the text? What concerns do they reflect, and by what criteria could they have been justified? Do they modify the passage’s literary function and theological claims?[1]
But if the LXX consulted a different source than the MT, is this really “correction”? Could it be that the original source that the rabbis used when they produced the LXX actually read “where God stood” rather than “saw God”? Since we do not have the manuscripts that were the source of the LXX, we will never know if this is the case, but it seems more likely given the theological context of the rabbis in the second century B.C.E. that they massaged the text to eliminate the problem. In that case, what we have here is theological exegesis disguised as translation.
Why does this matter? It’s just a minor detail in the story. The reason it matters is that it indicates a willingness to alter the text based on theological bias; something that seems to have occurred in other places as well. The impact is that no one objected. The integrity of the text wasn’t as important as the theology. And if that was the case for Jewish rabbis in the second century before the Messiah, what makes us think that same linguistic program wasn’t operating in the Jewish communities after the ministry of the Messiah? The method is Jewish despite our naïve belief that texts were meticulously copied with exactitude. Apparently theological corrections were made when necessary and still considered divinely inspired. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Why change if the believing community is still predominately Jewish? Just fix things along the way so that the message is consistent and clear. If the Messiah doesn’t return as expected, alter the text to fit the circumstances. No more Pauline apocalyptic urgency. Now the Gospels aren’t quite so frenzied. Circumstances dictated revision. No one objected. Two thousand years later we no longer read Paul as if he were a man holding the Bible in one hand and a sign proclaiming the end of the world in the other. How did that happen?
Topical Index: LXX, exegesis, translation, apocalyptic, Exodus 24:9-10
[1] Eric John Wyckoff, “When Does Translation Become Exegesis? Exodus 24:9-11 in the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 74, 2012, p. 675.
