austendw wrote: ↑Wed May 03, 2023 2:48 am
Secret Alias wrote: ↑Mon May 01, 2023 7:46 pm
Gmirkin (in typical fashion) found a word in the MT that he says was influenced by Greek. But the word appears in neither the Samaritan Pentateuch or the LXX. In short a fail.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the word
does show up in the Samaritan version.
Here's the Masoretic:
כְּלֵי חָמָס, מְכֵרֹתֵיהֶם
KJV translates this as: "
weapons of violence their kinship" but "kinship" here is very off and the RSV, NIV render it, correctly as "weapons of violence are their swords"
Here's the Samaritan:
כלו חמס מכרתיהם
Tsedaka translates this as "
they finished the evil of their tools". (He emphasises "they finished" because
that's the expression that differs from the Masoretic version)
So, the textual difference is that for the MT's
כְּלֵי, meaning "instrument", the Samaritan gives
כלו, meaning "they finished" - a confusion that is all too obvious (and common) as the Hebrew
yod and
waw are so similar in handwritten script.
However the word we are discussing is
מְכֵרֹתֵיהֶם (mᵊḵêrōṯêhem) - from מְכֵרָה (mᵊḵērâ) - and it is
exactly the same in both versions. Because it is a
hapax legomenon, the translators clearly had problems with it - kinship, swords, tools.
However the LXX, renders this clause as:
συνετέλεσαν ἀδικίαν ἐξ αἱρέσεως αὐτῶν.
The first word
συνετέλεσαν agrees with the Samaritan כלו, and means "finished, completed" or some such. However, when we get to the disputed word, LXX gives "
ἐξ αἱρέσεως". The NETS translation renders this as "they perpetrated injustice by their choice / course of action." The Latin Vulgate somewhat follows this reading with:
Consummaverunt iniquitatem adinventionis suae/propositi sui" - which translates as "They completed the iniquity of their invention/purpose". Possibly, the LXX originally read "
συνετέλεσαν ἀδικίαν ἐξαἱρέσεως αὐτῶν."
What is vexing about all this is that in Genesis 22:6,10 (the near-sacrifice of Isaac) Abraham's knife is, in Hebrew, מַאֲכֶלֶת (ma'ăkeleth) - which all English translations give as "knife", and LXX, just to be perverse, has no problem translating (along with two other instances) as
μάχαιρα (mákhaira). Barring the different stress (on the first syllable rather than the second), the Greek word
μάχαιρα (mákhaira) is all but identical to the Hebrew מְכֵרָה (mᵊḵērâ). So it's a bit of a mystery why in Genesis 49:5 the LXX didn't opt for the similar sounding word in a context where it would have been quite comprehensible. It's true that in some circumstances
μάχαιρα meant some sort of
knife, which is how it appears in Homer. Aristophanes uses it in exactly the same sacrificial context as Genesis 22, but the word was also frequently used to mean a type of
sword, so it surely would have been plausible in Genesis 49. I guess the answer is that the LXX's Hebrew
vorlage must've been corrupt and it's meaning had become garbled. Someone somewhere may have an idea what Hebrew similar to מְכֵרָה could have given rise to the Greek
ἐξαἱρέσεως... but I don't.
In any case, there seems no doubt that the Hebrew
is a loan-word from the Greek, being the name of a particular, single edged sword. But before Gmirkinites (you should pardon the neologism) get too excited about this, a quick google shows that the
makhaira was an extremely popular weapon used by the Etruscans in the West, the Greeks, and to the East, the Achaemenid Persians. Here's an essay about
A One-Edged Curved Sword from Seyitömer Höyük which discusses this weapon in detail. As examples are depicted on vases from as early as the 5th Century BCE and appear in Greek literature even earlier, there is no reason to insist that a Biblical writer could only have become aware of the
machaira in the 3rd Century BCE via Hellenistic literature. It is entirely feasible that the word entered their vocabulary at any time from the 5th Century onwards (just as people might now talk of an Uzi without knowing anything at all about the origins of the weapon or the word).
Here's an
essay that discusses the variants for Genesis 49:5-7.