Understanding the Differences Between the Septuagint and Masoretic Traditions

Explore how the two most influential text traditions from earlier Hebrew traditions, the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, each shaped, expanded, and condensed their inherited texts to serve their communities, and how the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that textual diversity was the norm rather than the exception.

74 min read

Introduction

The Septuagint and the Masoretic Text are the two most influential witnesses to earlier Hebrew traditions, yet neither represents a single, pristine original. Comparing them reveals how both traditions actively shaped their inherited texts, adding, removing, and altering details to address the theological and communal concerns of their audiences.

Neither Pure Nor Original

When modern readers open a Bible, they are typically reading a translation of one of two text traditions, each with its own long and complex history. The first is the Masoretic Text, the Hebrew tradition preserved and standardized by Jewish scribes between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries of the Common Era, though its roots stretch back much earlier. The second is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of earlier Hebrew traditions begun in Alexandria around the third century before the Common Era. These two traditions agree on far more than they disagree, yet where they diverge, the differences can be significant, sometimes altering the meaning of entire passages.

The instinct when encountering these differences is to ask which tradition preserves the “original” text. For centuries, that question dominated scholarship. Jewish and Protestant traditions tended to treat the Masoretic Text as the authoritative Hebrew original, while the Septuagint was often viewed as a secondary, sometimes unreliable translation. The reverse argument also appeared periodically, with some scholars contending that the Greek preserves readings older than the standardized Hebrew. Neither framing captures what the evidence actually shows. The Masoretic Text is better understood as the product of a long effort to standardize what had been a diverse textual landscape, not as a uniquely authoritative witness to an earlier original ^[1]. The Septuagint, meanwhile, was produced during a period when multiple forms of these texts circulated freely, preserving readings and traditions that were lost once the Hebrew text was standardized and all competing forms fell out of use ^[2].

The differences between these two traditions take many forms. The Septuagint sometimes includes material absent from the Masoretic Text, from brief explanatory phrases to entire paragraphs. At other times the Septuagint omits passages found in the Hebrew, whether to resolve contradictions, smooth over theological difficulties, or streamline a narrative. In still other cases, both traditions preserve the same passage but with altered wording that shifts its meaning in subtle or dramatic ways. Crucially, every one of these operations also runs in the other direction. The Masoretic tradition likewise adds, removes, and alters material relative to what the Septuagint and other witnesses preserve. Neither tradition has a monopoly on editorial intervention, and neither can claim to transmit an untouched original.

Cataloging the differences between these two traditions is relatively straightforward, but knowing how to interpret them is far more difficult ^[3]. The two traditions diverge in word choice, in the order of verses or whole passages, and in additions and omissions both small and large. A given variant might reflect the translator’s own interpretation, a different Hebrew manuscript used as the source text, a scribal error at some stage of copying, or a deliberate editorial decision made long before the translation was produced. The same range of explanations applies to differences in the Masoretic Text. In many cases, the evidence does not permit a definitive answer, and responsible scholarship holds multiple possibilities in view.

What the evidence does make clear is that these earlier Hebrew traditions were not transmitted as a single, fixed text for most of their history. Manuscript evidence from the Judean Desert shows that for at least four centuries, from roughly the third century before the Common Era through the first century of the Common Era, multiple different forms of the biblical text circulated in the land of Israel ^[4]. The Septuagint and the Masoretic Text are the two most prominent survivors of that era of diversity, but they are not the only ones. The Samaritan Pentateuch, various Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Aramaic Targums all preserve readings that sometimes agree with one tradition, sometimes with the other, and sometimes with neither. Rather than two competing versions of a single original, what the evidence reveals is a landscape in which multiple forms of these texts circulated simultaneously, each shaped by the communities that copied, translated, and transmitted them.

Specific passages where the Septuagint and Masoretic traditions diverge illustrate the range of editorial activity at work in both. In some, one tradition adds material absent from the other, while in others, material is removed or lost. Still others involve alterations that shift the meaning of a passage in theologically significant ways, demonstrating that both traditions were living texts, shaped over centuries by scribes and translators who were not merely copying words but interpreting and transmitting a tradition for their own communities ^[5].

Citations

[1] Nissinen, Martti Textual Plurality and Changing Contexts, in Scriptures in the Making: Texts and Their Transmission in Late Second Temple Judaism (pp. 373) Peeters, 2020
[2] Law, Timothy Michael When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (pp. 43) Oxford University Press, 2013
[3] Dines, Jennifer M. The Septuagint (pp. 131) T&T Clark, 2004
[4] Tov, Emanuel The Use of Scripture Texts in Different Communities in Ancient Israel, in Stones, Tablets, and Scrolls (pp. 427) Mohr Siebeck, 2021
[5] Law, Timothy Michael When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (pp. 44) Oxford University Press, 2013

Introduction

How the Dead Sea Scrolls Changed the Conversation

Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, scholars working on differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text had no independent Hebrew evidence to arbitrate between them. When the Greek differed from the Hebrew, the default assumption was that the translators had taken liberties with their source, whether through incompetence, theological motivation, or simple paraphrase. The Masoretic Text, as the only surviving Hebrew tradition, functioned as the baseline against which everything else was measured. The Septuagint was treated as a translation to be corrected, not as a witness to a different and potentially older form of the Hebrew text.

The scrolls recovered from the caves near Qumran upended that framework. Among the roughly nine hundred manuscripts found in the Judean Desert, approximately two hundred and twenty were copies of texts that would later become part of the biblical canon. These manuscripts dated from the third century before the Common Era through the first century of the Common Era, making them a thousand years older than the earliest complete Masoretic manuscripts. What they revealed was not a single, stable text but a wide range of textual forms coexisting in the same community at the same time ^[1].

Efforts to classify this diversity have gone through several stages. An early and influential model proposed that three text families could be traced to three geographic centers, with the ancestor of the Masoretic Text originating in Babylon, the Hebrew source behind the Septuagint in Egypt, and a third tradition related to the Samaritan Pentateuch in Palestine. This theory offered a tidy explanation but did not survive closer scrutiny, since all three types turned up together at Qumran, in Palestine, alongside manuscripts that did not fit any of the three categories ^[2]. A more comprehensive classification identifies at least five distinct groups among the Qumran biblical manuscripts, with texts resembling the Masoretic tradition accounting for roughly thirty-five percent, texts written in a distinctive Qumran scribal style making up about twenty percent, texts that cannot be aligned with any known tradition comprising another thirty-five percent, and smaller groups close to the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Hebrew source of the Septuagint each representing about five percent ^[3].

The implications of this diversity were far-reaching. Certain books of the Septuagint had long been known to differ dramatically from the Masoretic Text, and Jeremiah was the most prominent case, with the Greek version roughly thirteen percent shorter and with its chapters arranged in a different order. Before the scrolls, many scholars attributed these differences to the translators. The discovery of Hebrew fragments at Qumran that matched the shorter Greek version rather than the longer Masoretic one proved that the translators had been working faithfully from a different Hebrew source text, not abbreviating on their own initiative ^[4]. Two distinct literary editions of Jeremiah had circulated simultaneously in Hebrew, and only one of them survived to become the standard Masoretic text.

This pattern repeated across multiple books. Hebrew fragments from Qumran occasionally agreed with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text, occasionally agreed with the Masoretic Text against the Septuagint, and in many cases agreed with neither, representing independent traditions that had no surviving descendant in any later manuscript family. The picture that emerged was not one of a single original text that had been variously corrupted, but of a living literary tradition in which multiple editions, expansions, and arrangements of the same books coexisted for centuries ^[5]. The Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, rather than representing a flawed translation and an authoritative original, turned out to be two survivors of a much larger and more diverse textual ecosystem. The scrolls did not resolve which tradition was more original; they demonstrated that the question itself rested on a false premise, since no single original had ever existed in the way earlier scholarship assumed ^[6].

Citations

[1] VanderKam, James and Flint, Peter The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (pp. 120–121) HarperSanFrancisco, 2002
[2] Hendel, Ronald Assessing the Text-Critical Theories of the Hebrew Bible after Qumran, in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls (pp. 287–292) Oxford University Press, 2010
[3] Tov, Emanuel Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (pp. 114–117) Fortress Press, 2012
[4] VanderKam, James and Flint, Peter The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (pp. 146) HarperSanFrancisco, 2002
[5] Lemmelijn, Benedicte Textual Criticism, in The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint (pp. 716–717) Oxford University Press, 2021
[6] Tov, Emanuel The Use of Scripture Texts in Different Communities in Ancient Israel, in Stones, Tablets, and Scrolls (pp. 427–428) Mohr Siebeck, 2021

Where the Septuagint Adds

The Septuagint translators sometimes expanded their source texts, adding explanatory details, harmonizing with other traditions, or making narratives feel more complete. These additions reveal the interpretive priorities of the Greek-speaking Jewish communities that produced and used these translations.

The Longer Ending of Job

Job 42:16-17

16 After this Job lived 140 years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. 17 And so Job died, old and full of days.

LXX Job 42:17-22

17 And Job died an old man and full of days. 17a And it is written that he shall rise again with the ones whom the Lord shall raise up. 17b This man is described by the Syriac book as dwelling in the land of Uz on the borders of Edom and Arabia. And his name before was Jobab. 17c And, having taken an Arabian wife, he fathered a son, whose name was Enan. And he himself had as father Zerah, from the sons of Esau. And his mother was Bosorra, so that it made him fifth from Abraham. 17d And these were the kings who were ruling in Edom, which territory also he himself ruled: first, Bela, the son of Beor, and the name of his city was Dinhabah. And after Bela, Jobab, who was called Job. And after this, Husham, who was serving as leader from the territories of Thaiman. And after this, Hadad, son of Bered, who destroyed Midian in the field of Moab, and the name of his city was Avith. 17e And the friends who came to him were Eliphaz, of the sons of Esau, king of the Temanites; Bildad, the tyrant of the Shuhites; and Zophar, the king of the Naamathites.

The Masoretic Text of Job ends with a formulaic notice of a long life and a peaceful death. The Septuagint, however, does not end here. After the notice that Job died old and full of days, the Greek text adds a brief statement affirming that Job will rise again with those whom the Lord raises up, followed by a much longer genealogical appendix that fundamentally reframes who Job was and where he belonged in Israelite history.

The appendix opens by claiming it derives from an Aramaic source, then identifies Job with Jobab, the Edomite king mentioned in Genesis 36:33. It traces Job’s ancestry through Esau back to Abraham, making him five generations removed from the patriarch, and locates his homeland on the borders of Edom and Arabia. It then lists the kings who reigned in Edom before and after Job, and identifies his three friends as rulers of neighboring regions. The effect is to take a character whose origins the book of Job leaves deliberately vague and anchor him firmly within the genealogical and geographic framework of Israelite tradition ^[1].

This addition addresses a problem that readers of Job had long recognized. The book itself provides almost no information about its protagonist’s ethnicity, ancestry, or historical period. He lives in the “land of Uz,” a location not precisely defined elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, and none of the narrative details place him within any known chronological framework. For communities that increasingly read their scriptures as a unified whole, this ambiguity was unsatisfying. The genealogical appendix resolves it by integrating Job into the narrative framework of Genesis, using the Edomite king list to give him both a specific identity and a clear connection to Abraham’s lineage ^[2].

This kind of genealogical gap-filling was a widespread practice in Jewish literature of the Hellenistic period. The Book of Jubilees, composed around the mid-second century before the Common Era, systematically supplied names and lineages for figures that Genesis left anonymous, giving wives to Cain, Seth, and other patriarchs in order to complete the genealogical record and trace a pure family line back through the generations ^[3]. Hellenistic Jewish historians went even further. The writer known as Pseudo-Eupolemus, working in the second century before the Common Era, transformed Abraham into a world-historical figure by connecting him genealogically to Enoch and to the legendary culture-heroes of Phoenician, Egyptian, and Babylonian tradition, grounding the patriarch in a web of cross-cultural lineages that far exceeded anything in Genesis itself ^[4]. The impulse behind the LXX Job appendix belongs squarely within this pattern, where legitimacy and significance were established by connecting a figure to Abraham and situating them precisely within biblical geography and chronology.

The appendix is generally understood to be a later addition rather than the work of the original Greek translator, composed sometime between the mid-second century and the mid-first century before the Common Era. At least two other texts from roughly the same period deploy the identical identification of Job with Jobab, confirming that this was a circulating tradition rather than an isolated invention ^[5]. The appendix does not appear in the Masoretic Text, the Syriac Peshitta, the Qumran Targum of Job, or the later Rabbinic Targum, making it unique to the Greek tradition. Its dependence on the Greek text of Genesis rather than the Hebrew further suggests it was composed within a Greek-speaking Jewish community, likely in Egypt, where the Septuagint served as the primary form of scripture ^[6].

The longer ending of Job is a clear case of a tradition expanding a received text to address perceived gaps. The book of Job as preserved in the Masoretic Text leaves its protagonist’s identity open, which may well have been an intentional literary choice. The Greek tradition, by contrast, chose to fill that silence, connecting Job to the patriarchs and grounding his story in a recognizable historical framework. The original Greek translation of Job also moves in the opposite direction in other parts of the book, omitting roughly one-sixth of the Hebrew text, condensing repetitive arguments, and toning down some of Job’s more provocative speeches ^[7]. The same textual tradition that abbreviated the body of the book felt the need to expand its ending, and these two impulses together reveal a translator and community actively shaping the text rather than passively reproducing it ^[8].

Citations

[1] Reed, Annette Yoshiko Job as Jobab: The Interpretation of Job in LXX Job 42:17b-e, Journal of Biblical Literature 120/1 (pp. 31–55) Society of Biblical Literature, 2001
[2] Rogers, Jessie The Testament of Job as an Adaptation of LXX Job, in Text-Critical and Hermeneutical Studies in the Septuagint (pp. 399–400) Brill, 2012
[3] Coblentz Bautch, Kelley Amplified Roles, Idealized Depictions: Women in the Book of Jubilees, in Enoch and the Mosaic Torah (pp. 365–366) Eerdmans, 2009
[4] Gruen, Erich S. Hellenism and Judaism: Fluid Boundaries, in The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism (pp. 121–122) De Gruyter, 2016
[5] Doran, Robert Aristeas the Exegete, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2 (pp. 855–857) Doubleday, 1985
[6] Dhont, Marieke Style and Context of Old Greek Job (pp. 12–13) Brill, 2018
[7] Cox, Claude E. Job, in T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint (pp. 385–387) Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015
[8] Cox, Claude E. Old Greek Job 42: Intertextual Connections between the Epilogue and the Prologue, in Septuagint, Sages, and Scripture (pp. 180–189) Brill, 2016

Where the Septuagint Adds

Importing Wisdom into Proverbs

Proverbs 26:11-12

11 Like a dog that returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly. 12 You have seen a man wise in his own opinion— there is more hope for a fool than for him.

LXX Proverbs 26:11-13

11 As a dog when he comes upon his own vomit and becomes detestable, so is a fool who in his own wickedness returns to his own sin. 11 a There is a shame that brings on sin, and there is a shame that is glory and favor. 12 I saw a man who seemed wise to himself; however, a fool has more hope than he has.

Between the proverb about a dog returning to its vomit and the warning about a man wise in his own eyes, the Septuagint inserts an extra verse with no equivalent in the Hebrew. It reads: “There is a shame that brings on sin, and there is a shame that is glory and favor.” This is not an original composition by the translator but a direct quotation from Sirach 4:21, a work composed by the Jewish sage Ben Sira in the early second century before the Common Era and translated into Greek by his grandson sometime after 132 BCE ^[1].

The insertion functions as a bridge between the two surrounding proverbs. The verse about the dog and its vomit (26:11) depicts the fool who repeats the same disgraceful behavior, while the next verse (26:12) warns against self-satisfaction, suggesting that a proper sense of humility is preferable to being wise in one’s own estimation. The added line from Sirach draws on a distinction central to Ben Sira’s teaching, where shame can be either destructive (leading to sin through social pressure or cowardice) or constructive (producing honor through modesty and self-awareness). Placed between these two proverbs, the Sirach quotation invites the reader to see them as connected, treating the fool’s repeated folly as the sinful kind of shame and the humble person’s self-correction as the honorable kind ^[2].

This addition is one of roughly one hundred and thirty extra lines found in the Septuagint of Proverbs that have no equivalent in the Masoretic Text ^[3]. The Greek Proverbs differs from the Hebrew not only in these additions but also in a dramatic rearrangement of entire sections. Chapters 24 through 31 appear in a substantially different order, with the sayings attributed to Agur and the teaching of King Lemuel’s mother relocated so that all non-Solomonic material is grouped together, emphasizing Solomon’s role as the dominant voice of the collection ^[4]. These are not minor scribal variations but evidence of two distinct editorial visions for how the book of Proverbs should be organized and read.

Whether these differences originated with the Greek translator or were already present in the Hebrew manuscript from which the translation was made remains debated. The case for a different Hebrew source text is strong, since many of the transpositions and additions cannot be explained as translator decisions alone, and the overall pattern suggests two parallel editions of Proverbs that circulated independently ^[5]. The Sirach quotation at 26:11a, however, is among the additions most likely to have entered the Greek text during its transmission rather than being part of an older Hebrew edition, since it presupposes the existence of the Greek Sirach translation. One scholar has argued that this very quotation helps establish that the Greek Proverbs was composed no earlier than the last quarter of the second century before the Common Era, making it one of the few additions in LXX Proverbs that can be dated with some confidence ^[6].

The presence of Sirach material inside the text of Proverbs is a reminder that the boundaries between these wisdom collections were more fluid than later canonical lists would suggest. For the communities that produced and used the Septuagint, Ben Sira’s teaching belonged to the same literary world as Proverbs, and incorporating a line from one into the other was not a corruption but an act of interpretation, linking older and newer wisdom traditions into a continuous conversation.

Citations

[1] Wolters, Al Proverbs, Septuagint Commentary Series (pp. 250–251) Brill, 2020
[2] Fox, Michael V. Proverbs 10–31: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Yale Bible 18B (pp. 594–595) Yale University Press, 2009
[3] Fox, Michael V. Proverbs 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Yale Bible 18A (pp. 348) Doubleday, 2000
[4] van der Kooij, Arie Proverbs, in T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint (pp. 348) Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015
[5] Tov, Emanuel Recensional Differences Between the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint of Proverbs, in The Greek and Hebrew Bible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint (pp. 419–431) Brill, 1999
[6] Cuppi, Lorenzo Proverbs, in The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint (pp. 362) Oxford University Press, 2021

Where the Septuagint Adds

Adding the Binding of Isaac to Isaiah

Isaiah 3:25

25 Your men will fall by the sword, your strong men will die in battle.

LXX Isaiah 3:25-26

25 And your most beautiful son, whom you love, shall fall by dagger, and your strong men shall fall by dagger and shall be brought low. 26 And the cases for your adornment shall mourn, and you shall be left alone and shall be dashed to the ground.

The Masoretic Text of Isaiah 3:25 speaks in general terms about military defeat, warning that “your men” will fall by the sword and “your strong men” will die in battle. The Septuagint transforms this verse in a specific and pointed way. Instead of unnamed men falling in a generic disaster, the Greek reads “your most beautiful son, whom you love, shall fall by dagger.” The plural has become singular, the anonymous soldiers have become a beloved child, and the language now unmistakably echoes Genesis 22:2, where God commands Abraham to take “your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac” and offer him as a sacrifice.

Three distinct changes produce this effect. The Hebrew plural “your men” becomes the singular “your son.” The son receives a superlative qualifier, “most beautiful,” which functions much like the “only son” of Genesis 22 by singling out one figure from all others. The relative clause “whom you love” is also added, directly borrowing the language used to describe Isaac in the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, ^[1]. None of these elements are present in the Hebrew. Taken together, they transform a prophecy of national military loss into an echo of the most wrenching moment in the patriarchal story, the near-sacrifice of Abraham’s son.

How the translator arrived at this rendering is debated. One possibility is that the Hebrew text presented genuine difficulty. The word translated as “men” in modern editions may have been unclear to the translator, and faced with an uncertain term, he turned to a passage he already knew well in Greek, importing the language of Genesis 22:2 as a way to fill the gap ^[2]. This habit of reaching for previously translated Pentateuchal passages when encountering difficult Hebrew was a well-documented feature of the Isaiah translator’s method ^[3]. The translator worked in a tradition where the Torah was the foundational text, and language from Genesis or Deuteronomy could serve as a kind of interpretive anchor when the prophetic Hebrew proved obscure.

A second possibility is more deliberate. The translator may have intentionally incorporated the language of the binding of Isaac into this judgment oracle, connecting the prophetic warning to a larger theological narrative about the fate of Abraham’s descendants. If the military casualties described in Isaiah 3:25 are not just anonymous soldiers but the beloved sons of the covenant, then the national disaster takes on a deeper meaning, becoming a reversal of the Abrahamic promise rather than a mere military defeat ^[4]. On this reading, the translator has pulled the Isaianic judgment into the framework of the patriarchal narratives, making the suffering of Zion’s daughters a mirror of Abraham’s anguish.

Whether the change arose from linguistic difficulty or theological intention (and the two are not mutually exclusive), the result is a verse that reads very differently in Greek than in Hebrew. The Masoretic Text presents a straightforward prophecy of military disaster. The Septuagint presents a text layered with patriarchal memory, linking prophetic judgment to the binding of Isaac and transforming a general warning into a specific, emotionally charged image of a beloved son lost. It is one of the clearest examples of how the Isaiah translator did not simply render Hebrew into Greek but interpreted his source text through the lens of other scriptures ^[5].

Citations

[1] Baer, David A. It’s All About Us! Nationalistic Exegesis in the Greek Isaiah, in As Those Who Are Taught: The Interpretation of Isaiah from the LXX to the SBL (pp. 43–44) Society of Biblical Literature, 2006
[2] van der Vorm-Croughs, Mirjam The Old Greek of Isaiah: An Analysis of Its Pluses and Minuses (pp. 364–365) SBL Press, 2014
[3] Troxel, Ronald L. LXX-Isaiah as Translation and Interpretation: The Strategies of the Translator of the Septuagint of Isaiah (pp. 145–148) Brill, 2008
[4] Baer, David A. It’s All About Us! Nationalistic Exegesis in the Greek Isaiah, in As Those Who Are Taught: The Interpretation of Isaiah from the LXX to the SBL (pp. 46) Society of Biblical Literature, 2006
[5] Seeligmann, Isac Leo The Septuagint Version of Isaiah: A Discussion of Its Problems (pp. 113–114) Brill, 1948

Where the Septuagint Removes

The Septuagint also omits material found in other traditions, whether to resolve perceived contradictions, smooth over theological difficulties, or streamline narratives for a new audience.

Removing Isaac as Abraham's Only Son

Genesis 22:1-2

1 Some time after these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am!” Abraham replied. 2 God said, “Take your son—your only son, whom you love, Isaac—and go to the land of Moriah! Offer him up there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I will indicate to you.”

LXX Genesis 22:1-2

1 And it came about after these matters that God tested Abraam and said to him, “Abraam, Abraam!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 And he said, “Take your beloved son Isaak, whom you love, and go into the high land, and offer him as a whole burnt offering on one of the mountains, whichever I mention to you.”

The Masoretic Text of Genesis 22:2 builds toward the name Isaac through a series of increasingly specific identifiers. God tells Abraham to take “your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac.” Each phrase narrows the field until the devastating final word makes the command unmistakable. The Septuagint preserves the emotional arc but changes one element. Where the Hebrew reads “your only son,” the Greek reads “your beloved son,” replacing a term of exclusivity with one of affection. This substitution occurs not just here but in all three places where yahid appears in Genesis 22, at verses 2, 12, and 16 ^[1].

The reason for the change is not difficult to identify. Isaac was not, strictly speaking, Abraham’s only son. Ishmael, Abraham’s firstborn through Hagar, had been sent away in the previous chapter but was very much alive, and God had explicitly promised that Ishmael too would become a great nation. Calling Isaac Abraham’s “only” son creates a tension that later interpreters noticed. A tradition preserved in Genesis Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic commentary, imagines Abraham pushing back against each of God’s narrowing identifiers. When God says “your son,” Abraham replies that he has two sons. When God says “your only son,” Abraham responds that each son is the only son of his respective mother. The dialogue continues until God finally says the name Isaac, resolving the ambiguity ^[2]. The Septuagint translator appears to have felt the same tension and resolved it differently, by replacing “only” with “beloved,” a term that carries the emotional weight of the Hebrew without making an exclusivity claim that the broader narrative does not support.

The Hebrew word yahid is itself more complex than a simple synonym for “only.” It occupies a semantic range that encompasses both uniqueness and belovedness, overlapping with a closely related Hebrew word meaning “beloved” or “precious.” Some scholars have suggested that the translator may have read this alternate word in his source text, whether by misreading or because his manuscript actually contained the alternate form ^[3]. Others argue that the choice was deliberate, reflecting a tradition in which this Hebrew word was understood not primarily as a numerical term (“one and only”) but as a relational one (“the especially beloved”), designating the child whom the parent was obligated to give up in the most extreme test of devotion ^[4].

The consistency of the translation across all three occurrences in Genesis 22 suggests intentionality rather than error. If the translator had simply confused two similar Hebrew words on one occasion, the mistake would likely not repeat so uniformly. The pattern indicates a considered interpretive decision, one that resolved a logical problem in the text while simultaneously deepening its emotional register. By describing Isaac as “beloved” rather than “only,” the Greek text shifts the emphasis from Abraham’s loss of his sole heir to his sacrifice of the child he most loves, a distinction that proved enormously influential in later tradition ^[5].

This translation choice rippled far beyond Genesis. The Greek word for “beloved” became closely associated with the binding of Isaac in Jewish and early Christian reading, and when the same word appears in the New Testament at the baptism of Jesus (“This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased”), early audiences would have heard an echo of the Akedah, connecting the identity of Jesus to the figure of Isaac on the altar. The Septuagint translator’s decision to render “only” as “beloved” rather than “unique” thus shaped not only how Genesis 22 was read in Greek but how an entire theological vocabulary developed around the concepts of belovedness, sacrifice, and divine sonship ^[6].

Citations

[1] Brayford, Susan Genesis, Septuagint Commentary Series (pp. 329–331) Brill, 2007
[2] Arnold, Bill T. Genesis, New Cambridge Bible Commentary (pp. 203–204) Cambridge University Press, 2009
[3] Bruce, F. F. Hebrews, New International Commentary on the New Testament (pp. 308–309) Eerdmans, 1964
[4] Levenson, Jon D. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (pp. 30–31) Yale University Press, 1993
[5] Janssen, Rosalind The Akedah Servant Complex (pp. 53–55) Durham University, 2009
[6] Levenson, Jon D. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (pp. 200–201) Yale University Press, 1993

Where the Septuagint Removes

The Septuagint also omits material found in other traditions, whether to resolve perceived contradictions, smooth over theological difficulties, or streamline narratives for a new audience.

Removing Samuel's Divine Authority

1 Samuel 4:1

1 The word of Samuel was given to all Israel¹. The Ark of the Covenant is Lost to the Philistines. Then the Israelites went out to fight the Philistines. They camped at Ebenezer, and the Philistines camped at Aphek.

LXX 1 Samuel 4:1-2

1 And it happened in those days that foreigners assembled for battle against Israel, and Israel came out to meet them in battle, and they camped at Ebenezer, and the foreigners camped at Aphek. 2 And the foreigners lined up for battle against Israel, and the battle turned, and a man of Israel fell before the foreigners, and they struck down in battle in the field four thousand men.

The Masoretic Text of 1 Samuel 4:1 opens with a phrase that sits awkwardly before the battle account that follows. After the story of Samuel’s call in chapter 3, the Masoretic Text includes a brief statement about Samuel’s word reaching all Israel, then shifts without transition to the Israelites marching out to fight the Philistines. The Septuagint handles this passage very differently. It omits the phrase about Samuel’s word entirely, and instead the account begins with the Philistines assembling for war, placing the initiative for the conflict with the foreign army rather than with Israel.

The phrase the Septuagint omits closely parallels the prophetic formula “the word of the Lord came to...” found throughout the prophetic books. By attaching this kind of language to Samuel, the Masoretic Text implies that Samuel’s words carry the same authority as divine speech, Both the Septuagint and the Aramaic Targum independently altered or removed this phrase because neither tradition wanted readers to confuse the word of Samuel with the word of God ^[1]. The Targum’s solution was to add the word “pleasing,” so that the phrase reads “the word of Samuel was pleasing to all Israel,” transforming a statement about prophetic authority into one about popular reception. The Septuagint’s solution was more radical, removing the clause entirely. That two independent translation traditions both felt the need to address this phrase in different ways confirms how sensitive the equation of Samuel’s word with divine speech was for later communities.

The text-critical picture at this point in 1 Samuel is complicated. Most scholars treat “the word of Samuel was to all Israel” not as the introduction to the battle story in chapter 4 but as the conclusion to the call story in chapter 3, which describes how Samuel grew in stature and was recognized as a prophet from one end of the land to the other ^[2]. Read this way, the phrase summarizes what the preceding chapter established, that Samuel’s prophetic authority now extended to the entire nation. The awkwardness is in its placement at the head of a chapter about a battle in which Samuel plays no role at all, vanishing from the narrative until chapter 7.

The Septuagint resolves this structural problem by expanding the end of chapter 3 with additional material. After noting that Samuel was confirmed as a prophet, the Greek text adds that Eli had grown very old and that his sons continued to act wickedly before God, providing a transition to the disaster that follows. It then begins chapter 4 cleanly with the Philistine attack, without any reference to Samuel ^[3]. Whether the Septuagint preserves an older form of the text that the Masoretic tradition lost through scribal error, or whether the Hebrew behind the Masoretic Text added the clause about Samuel’s word as a secondary expansion, remains debated ^[4].

What is clear is that the two traditions present noticeably different versions of this transition. The Masoretic Text elevates Samuel by attaching prophetic-formula language to his name and places him, however briefly, at the head of the battle account. The Septuagint removes that elevation, foregrounds the wickedness of Eli’s sons as the cause of the coming disaster, and attributes the war to Philistine aggression. These are not minor scribal variants but different editorial choices about how to frame the relationship between Samuel’s prophetic authority and the national catastrophe that unfolds in the chapters that follow ^[5].

Citations

[1] Meiser, Martin The Septuagint of Samuel and the Targum Jonathan, in The Septuagint and Its Reception: Collected Essays (pp. 83–84) Mohr Siebeck, 2016
[2] Campbell, Antony F. 1 Samuel, Forms of the Old Testament Literature (pp. 52–54) Eerdmans, 2003
[3] McCarter, P. Kyle I Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes, and Commentary, Anchor Bible 8 (pp. 97–101) Doubleday, 1980
[4] Klein, Ralph W. 1 Samuel, Word Biblical Commentary 10 (pp. 148–150) Word Books, 1983
[5] Bodner, Keith 1 Samuel: A Narrative Commentary, Hebrew Bible Monographs 19 (pp. 43–45) Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008

Where the Septuagint Removes

The Septuagint also omits material found in other traditions, whether to resolve perceived contradictions, smooth over theological difficulties, or streamline narratives for a new audience.

Removing Rahab from Isaiah

In the Hebrew tradition, Rahab is the name of a primordial sea monster, a chaos dragon that the God of Israel defeated in the distant past. The name appears nowhere outside the Hebrew Bible, and unlike Leviathan, which has a clear connection to the Ugaritic dragon Lotan, Rahab seems to be a uniquely Israelite contribution to the wider tradition of divine combat against the forces of chaos.^[1] In the Masoretic text of Isaiah 51:9, this mythological tradition is on full display, as the prophet calls on the “arm of the Lord” to awaken and act as it did in the primordial past, when it “smashed Rahab” and “wounded the sea monster.” The passage then pivots from mythological combat to historical memory, recalling the drying up of the sea during the exodus.

Isaiah 51:9-10

9 Wake up! Wake up! Clothe yourself with strength, O arm of the Lord! Wake up as in former times, as in antiquity. Did you not smash Rahab?²⁶ Did you not wound the sea monster? 10 Did you not dry up the sea, the waters of the great deep? Did you not make a path through the depths of the sea, so those delivered from bondage could cross over?

The Greek translator of Isaiah, however, produced a version of this passage that looks dramatically different. Where the Hebrew addresses the “arm of the Lord,” the Greek reads “O Jerusalem,” redirecting the entire appeal from a divine body part to a personified city. More significantly, the entire clause about smashing Rahab and wounding the sea monster is absent from the Greek, replaced by nothing at all. The translation skips directly from the call to awaken to the exodus imagery of verse 10, preserving the historical memory of the sea crossing while removing every trace of the mythological combat that preceded it.^[2]

LXX Isaiah 51:9-10

9 Awake, awake, O Ierousalem; put on the strength of your arm! Awake, as at the beginning of a day, like a generation of long ago! Are you not 10 she who made desolate the sea, the water, the abundance of the deep, who made the depths of the sea a way of passage for those being delivered

Whether this omission was accidental or deliberate has been debated. The repetition of nearly identical Hebrew phrases at the beginning of the missing clause and at the start of verse 10 creates the conditions for a copying error called parablepsis, where a scribe’s eye skips from one occurrence of a repeated phrase to another, accidentally dropping everything in between.^[3] The scholarly consensus, however, leans toward intentional omission. The translator had already changed the addressee from “the arm of the Lord” to “Jerusalem,” and once that substitution was made, a reference to Jerusalem smashing the chaos dragon Rahab would have been incoherent. The translator appears to have recognized this problem and resolved it by simply removing the mythological language entirely.^[4]

This omission fits within a broader pattern that scholars have identified across Greek Isaiah. The translator shows a consistent tendency to soften or remove language that attributes physical characteristics to the divine, whether by eliminating anthropomorphic imagery (as with the “arm of the Lord” becoming Jerusalem) or by removing references to mythological creatures that belonged to Israel’s older religious imagination. The replacement of “arm of the Lord” with “Jerusalem” itself reflects what one commentator describes as the translator’s “aversion to anthropomorphism,” a theological sensitivity visible at multiple points throughout the Greek translation of Isaiah.^[5]

What makes this example particularly instructive for understanding how text traditions diverge is that the Masoretic text preserves a version of Isaiah 51:9 where mythological and historical registers blend freely, with the defeat of the chaos monster and the parting of the sea treated as aspects of a single divine act. The Greek translator, working centuries later in a Hellenistic cultural environment where Jewish communities were articulating their traditions in new ways, produced a version that retains the historical dimension of the passage (the exodus) while stripping away the mythological framework that supported it. Neither version is more or less “original” in any simple sense; each reflects the theological priorities of the community that transmitted it, with the Hebrew tradition preserving older mythological imagery and the Greek tradition reshaping the text to match its own understanding of how to speak about divine power.

Citations

[1] Dekker, Jaap God and the Dragons in the Book of Isaiah (pp. 49–65) Brill, 2016
[2] Baer, David When We All Go Home: Translation and Theology in LXX Isaiah 56–66 (pp. 170–171) Sheffield Academic Press, 2001
[3] Giere, Samuel Translation Technique and the Intertextuality of Creation in LXX Isaiah 40–55 (pp. 119–121) Marquette University, 2005
[4] van der Vorm-Croughs, Mirjam The Old Greek of Isaiah: An Analysis of Its Pluses and Minuses (pp. 469) SBL Press, 2014
[5] Penner, Ken Isaiah (pp. 597) Brill, 2021

Where the Septuagint Changes

Beyond adding or removing material, the Septuagint translators sometimes altered the meaning of their source texts in subtle but significant ways, adjusting descriptions of God, resolving Sabbath tensions, and reshaping messianic language.

Protecting the Sabbath in Genesis

The Masoretic text of Genesis 2:2 contains a statement that has troubled readers for centuries. It reads, “By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing.” The difficulty is subtle but significant. If God “finished” his work on the seventh day, the natural implication is that some creative activity extended into the day that was supposed to be set apart for rest. The priestly tradition behind Genesis 1 carefully structures creation across six days of work, with the seventh day reserved exclusively for cessation, and the Hebrew phrasing of 2:2 threatens to undermine that framework by suggesting the boundary between work and rest was not as clean as the larger narrative implies.^[1]

Genesis 2:2-3

2 By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. 3 God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he ceased all the work that he had been doing in creation.

The Greek translation of Genesis resolves this ambiguity with a single word change that carries enormous theological weight. Where the Hebrew reads “on the seventh day God finished,” the Greek reads “on the sixth day God finished.” Everything else in the verse remains the same: God still rests on the seventh day, still blesses and sanctifies it. The only difference is that the completion of creative work has been moved back one day, ensuring that the seventh day is entirely free of any activity other than rest. The change makes the Sabbath absolute, a day on which God did nothing at all, removing even the possibility of misunderstanding.^[2]

LXX Genesis 2:2-3

2 And on the sixth day God finished his works that he had made, and he left off on the seventh day from all his works that he had made. 3 And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it he left off from all his works that God had begun to make.

This is not a change unique to the Greek translation. The Samaritan Pentateuch, the Syriac Peshitta, and the later rabbinic compilation Genesis Rabbah all preserve the same reading, placing the completion of work on the sixth day rather than the seventh. The breadth of this agreement across independent textual traditions suggests that the tension in the Hebrew was recognized early and addressed by multiple communities working from different manuscripts and in different languages. Whether each of these traditions arrived at the “sixth day” reading independently or whether some share a common ancestor text remains an open question.^[3]

From a text-critical perspective, the Masoretic reading “seventh” is generally considered the more difficult and therefore the more likely original, since a scribe would have strong motivation to change “seventh” to “sixth” but no obvious reason to introduce the problem by changing “sixth” to “seventh.” At the same time, the possibility that the translator’s Hebrew source text already read “sixth” cannot be entirely ruled out, and some text critics have argued that it is impossible to determine with certainty whether the Greek reflects a different Hebrew text or an independent exegetical tradition that developed around the verse.^[4] The question may ultimately be unanswerable, but what is clear is that the change, whether made by the translator or already present in his source, was driven by the same theological concern, namely that the Sabbath must be protected from any suggestion that God performed creative work on it.

This example illustrates a pattern that recurs throughout the comparison of the Masoretic and Greek traditions. A Hebrew text that can be read in more than one way, with one reading potentially problematic for later theological sensibilities, is clarified in translation so that only the theologically acceptable meaning remains. The Greek translator of Genesis, working in a community where Sabbath observance was a defining practice of Jewish identity, produced a text that left no room for the kind of ambiguity the Hebrew permitted. The result is a version of the creation account that serves the practical and theological needs of its readers more directly than the Hebrew, at the cost of preserving the older, more ambiguous formulation.^[5]

Citations

[1] Smith, Mark S. The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 (pp. 181–182) Fortress, 2010
[2] Jobes, Karen H. and Silva, Moisés Invitation to the Septuagint (pp. 98) Baker, 2000
[3] Cook, Johann On the Role of External Traditions in the Septuagint (pp. 19–20) Brill, 2010
[4] Scarlata, Mark Genesis (pp. 21) Bloomsbury, 2015
[5] Law, Timothy Michael When God Spoke Greek (pp. 46–47) Oxford University Press, 2013

Where the Septuagint Changes

Removing God from the Mountain

When Moses encounters the burning bush in the book of Exodus, the Hebrew text introduces the location with a theologically loaded phrase, calling it “the mountain of God, Horeb.” The Greek translation, however, strips this divine designation entirely, rendering the location as simply “the mountainous area of Horeb” , a geographical description with no theological content at all. This small but significant change transforms what the Hebrew presents as an already sacred site into an ordinary landscape feature, and it offers a window into how the Greek translator of Exodus understood the relationship between God and physical space.

Exodus 3:1

1 Now Moses was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to the mountain of God, to Horeb.

LXX Exodus 3:1

1 Now Moses was tending the sheep of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock into the wilderness area and came into the mountainous area of Horeb.

One explanation for this change focuses on narrative logic rather than theology. The Hebrew phrase “mountain of God” appears to presuppose a sacred status that the mountain has not yet earned at this point in the story, since the theophany of the burning bush has not yet occurred.^[1] The mountain receives the name “mountain of God” at several later points in the narrative (Exodus 4:27, 18:5, 19:3, 24:13), after the divine presence has been established there. By removing the designation at its first appearance, the Greek translator may have been smoothing out what seemed like a chronological inconsistency, reserving the title for the moments when it would make narrative sense. Some manuscript traditions of the Greek text do retain “of God” at this verse, which suggests that later scribes recognized the omission and occasionally restored the phrase to match the Hebrew.

This reading of the change as a matter of logical consistency gains support from a broader pattern visible throughout the Greek translation of Exodus, where the translator systematically adjusts language that implies God can be physically located in or contained by a particular place. The Greek rendering of the tabernacle, for instance, consistently avoids the Hebrew language of God “dwelling” in the tent, replacing it with language of God “appearing” or “descending.” The Hebrew phrase “tent of meeting,” which implies a place where God and humans come together, becomes “tent of the testimony” in the Greek, shifting the emphasis from divine presence to divine instruction.^[2] These are not random variations but reflect a coherent theological perspective in which God’s transcendence is safeguarded against any suggestion of physical limitation.

The pattern extends beyond the tabernacle to direct encounters with God. In the Hebrew of Exodus 19:3, Moses “went up to God,” but the Greek renders this as Moses going up “to the mountain of God,” inserting the mountain as a buffer between the human figure and the divine presence. In Exodus 24:10–11, where the Hebrew states that the elders of Israel “saw the God of Israel,” the Greek reports instead that they saw “the place where the God of Israel stood,” carefully avoiding the claim that any human being looked directly at God.^[3] Even in Exodus 4:24, where the Hebrew says that “the Lord met him and sought to kill him,” the Greek substitutes “an angel of the Lord,” placing an intermediary between God and the violent action. Each of these adjustments works in the same direction, creating greater distance between God and the physical world.

Whether the removal of “of God” from Exodus 3:1 reflects a concern for narrative consistency, a desire to protect divine transcendence, or some combination of both remains an open question in scholarship. The debate has a long history, reaching back to early studies that identified anti-anthropomorphism as a defining feature of the Greek Pentateuch, though later work has questioned whether any single theological program can account for the full range of translation choices.^[4] What is clear is that the Greek translator of Exodus was not producing a mechanical word-for-word rendering but was actively shaping the text according to certain interpretive principles, whether those principles were theological, literary, or both. The result is a version of the burning bush narrative in which Moses arrives at an unremarkable hillside rather than a mountain already marked as divine territory, and the full significance of the place emerges only through what happens there.

Citations

[1] Gurtner, Daniel Exodus: A Commentary on the Greek Text of Codex Vaticanus (pp. 19, 198) Brill, 2013
[2] Rösel, Martin Concepts of God’s Dwelling in the Septuagint (pp. 144–151) Mohr Siebeck, 2011
[3] Wyckoff, Eric John When Does Translation Become Exegesis? Exodus 24:9–11 in the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint (pp. 675–686) Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 2012
[4] Jobes, Karen H. and Silva, Moisés Invitation to the Septuagint (pp. 93–97) Baker Academic, 2000

Where the Septuagint Changes

The Titles of the Child in Isaiah

One of the most dramatic differences between the Hebrew and Greek versions of Isaiah appears in the royal oracle of chapter 9, where the birth of a child is announced alongside a series of titles describing the child’s significance. In the Hebrew text, the child receives four distinct throne names that together paint a picture of extraordinary authority, while the Greek translation condenses all of these into a single, very different designation. The scale of the change is unusual even by the standards of the Septuagint, and the scholarly debate over what motivated it remains unresolved.

Isaiah 9:6

6 For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us. He shoulders responsibility and is called Wonderful Adviser, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

The Hebrew text assigns the child a fourfold name that includes titles normally reserved for God, including “Mighty God” and “Everlasting Father.” In the context of Israelite royal ideology, these throne names reflect the belief that the king served as God’s representative on earth, bearing titles that expressed the divine qualities channeled through his rule. The passage has been central to debates about the nature of kingship in Israel precisely because the language pushes so close to identifying the human ruler with divine attributes.

LXX Isaiah 9:6

6 because a child was born for us, a son also given to us, whose sovereignty was upon his shoulder, and he is named Messenger of Great Counsel, for I will bring peace upon the rulers, peace and health to him.

The Greek translator replaces all four titles with a single name: “Messenger of Great Counsel.” Where the Hebrew elevates the child to near-divine status, the Greek reframes him as a messenger who announces God’s plan. The shift is significant in two directions at once: it reduces the child’s own authority while elevating the role of the divine counsel he carries.^[1] The verse continues in the Greek with first-person speech (“for I will bring peace upon the rulers”) that does not appear in the Hebrew at all, and scholars disagree about whether the speaker is God or the child himself. If God is speaking, the child’s role is further subordinated to divine action; if the child is speaking, his authority is expressed through the act of announcing rather than through the exalted titles the Hebrew assigns him.

Part of the difficulty in interpreting this change lies in the possibility that the Greek translator was working from a Hebrew text that differed from what survives in the Masoretic tradition. The Hebrew behind the four titles is notoriously difficult, and the Greek rendering suggests a text in which the word “everlasting father” (avi-ad) was instead read as “I will bring upon” (avi al), and the word “prince” (sar) was read as the plural “princes” or “rulers.” There is no equivalent in the Greek for the Hebrew word “mighty,” and the Greek adds the phrase “peace and health to him” where the Hebrew has only “peace.”^[2] These differences are substantial enough that some scholars argue the translator was not freely reinterpreting the Hebrew but was faithfully rendering a different Hebrew text, one in which the fourfold name had already been reshaped or was never present in the same form.

Whether the change originated with the translator or with the Hebrew text available to him, the result is a version of Isaiah 9:6 that served the Greek-speaking Jewish community in a distinctive way. The Greek oracle is more explicitly future-oriented than the Hebrew, shifting a chain of verbs into future tenses that suggest the birth and reign of the child are still anticipated rather than celebrated as accomplished events.^[3] Later readers connected the Greek title “Messenger of Great Counsel” to other passages in Isaiah (particularly the child of Isaiah 7:14 and the servant of Isaiah 53), building a network of messianic expectation across the Greek version of the book that does not exist in quite the same way in the Hebrew. Early Christian writers would eventually identify this “Messenger” with Jesus, drawing on the Greek title to develop what scholars call angel christology. The Hebrew and Greek versions of this single verse thus generated two quite different theological trajectories, each rooted in the same underlying tradition but shaped by the interpretive decisions of the communities that transmitted them.

Citations

[1] Ngunga, Abi T. Messianism in the Old Greek of Isaiah: An Intertextual Analysis (pp. 90–91) Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013
[2] Lust, Johan Messianism in the Septuagint: Isaiah 8:23b–9:6 (pp. 157–165) Sheffield Academic Press, 1998
[3] Schaper, Joachim Messianism in the Septuagint of Isaiah and Messianic Intertextuality in the Greek Bible (pp. 371–378) Leuven University Press, 2006

Where the Masoretic Adds

The Masoretic tradition similarly expanded its texts, harmonizing parallel accounts, emphasizing authoritative figures, and adding dramatic details that shaped how later readers would encounter these stories.

Harmonizing the Rebellions of Numbers 16

Numbers 16 tells the story of a dramatic rebellion against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, but the chapter as it stands in the Hebrew text has long puzzled readers because it appears to describe two quite different conflicts at once. One strand involves Korah, a Levite who challenges the exclusive priesthood of Aaron, while the other involves Dathan and Abiram, members of the tribe of Reuben who challenge Moses’ political leadership. These two conflicts have different causes, different characters, and different resolutions, and most scholars since the nineteenth century have concluded that Numbers 16 is a composite text that fuses two originally independent rebellion narratives into a single chapter.^[1] The differences between the Hebrew and Greek versions of this chapter offer a rare window into the process by which that fusion was accomplished.

Numbers 16:24-25

24 “Tell the community: ‘Get away from around the homes of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram.’” 25 Then Moses got up and went to Dathan and Abiram; and the elders of Israel went after him.

In the Hebrew text, God instructs Moses to tell the community to move away from the “homes of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram,” grouping all three names together as though they share a single dwelling. This is awkward on its own terms, since the narrative has already established that Dathan and Abiram live separately from Korah, and Moses must travel to reach them in the very next verse. The Greek text, by contrast, mentions only Korah at this point, instructing the community to withdraw from “the gathering of Korah.” The same pattern appears in verse 27, where the Hebrew again names all three men together while the Greek names only Korah.

LXX Numbers 16:24-25

24 “Instruct the congregation, saying, ‘Withdraw from around the gathering of Korah.’ ” 25 And Moses arose and proceeded to Dathan and Abiram, and all the elders of Israel came along with him.

The shorter Greek reading almost certainly reflects an earlier form of the text, one in which the Korah narrative and the Dathan and Abiram narrative had not yet been fully merged at this point in the chapter. The Hebrew text’s insertion of “Dathan and Abiram” into what was originally a Korah-only instruction represents a deliberate editorial effort to bind the two stories more tightly together, ensuring that readers would understand all three rebels as sharing a common fate.^[2] The Samaritan Pentateuch shares the Hebrew reading here, suggesting that this harmonization occurred relatively early in the transmission of the text, before the Masoretic and Samaritan traditions diverged but after the Hebrew text that served as the basis for the Greek translation. The interpolation of names at precisely these verses served as a linking device, a way of stitching the priestly Korah material to the older Dathan and Abiram tradition so that readers would experience them as a single continuous story.^[3]

Evidence from elsewhere in the Bible supports the conclusion that these were originally separate traditions. Deuteronomy 11:6 recalls the rebellion as the work of Dathan and Abiram alone, with no mention of Korah. Psalm 106:16–18 similarly attributes the rebellion to those who were “jealous of Moses in the camp” and describes the earth swallowing Dathan and covering Abiram, while a separate fire consumes the wicked, with Korah entirely absent from the account.^[4] These independent witnesses preserve a memory of the Dathan and Abiram tradition without any knowledge of its fusion with the Korah story, confirming that the combination visible in the Hebrew of Numbers 16 is a product of editorial activity rather than an original feature of the narrative. The priestly author appears to have had an existing tradition about Dathan and Abiram at hand and built the Korah rebellion into it, providing Korah with a Levitical genealogy and shaping the combined narrative around a challenge to the authority of both Moses and Aaron.^[5]

Not all scholars agree on the direction of the change. Some have argued that the Greek translators themselves removed the names Dathan and Abiram because the difficulties of having all three rebels share a single dwelling were too obvious to leave in place, making the shorter Greek text a secondary editorial smoothing rather than a preservation of the original. On this reading, the Greek translators were doing essentially the same kind of source-critical work that modern scholars do, recognizing the seams in the composite narrative and quietly removing the most visible stitching. Whether the Masoretic text added names that were not originally there or the Greek translators removed names that created logical problems, the result in both cases is a tradition actively shaping its text to produce a more coherent narrative for its readers.

Citations

[1] Milgrom, Jacob Numbers (pp. 363–366) Jewish Publication Society, 1990
[2] Carr, David M. The Formation of the Hebrew Bible: A New Reconstruction (pp. 93) Oxford University Press, 2011
[3] Levine, Baruch A. Numbers 1–20 (pp. 405–416) Yale University Press, 2000
[4] Kugel, James How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (pp. 520–521) Free Press, 2007
[5] Budd, Philip J. Numbers (pp. 328–341) Thomas Nelson, 1984

Where the Masoretic Adds

Elevating Moses' Authority in Joshua

The book of Joshua exists in two significantly different editions, one preserved in the Hebrew (Masoretic) tradition and the other in the Greek (Septuagint) translation. The Masoretic text of Joshua is roughly four to five percent longer than the version reflected in the Greek, and a substantial portion of that additional material consists of phrases and clauses that emphasize Moses’ authority over Joshua. One of the clearest examples appears in the account of Israel’s crossing of the Jordan River, where the Hebrew text inserts a reference to Moses that changes the chain of command described in the narrative.

Joshua 4:10

10 Now the priests carrying the ark of the covenant were standing in the middle of the Jordan until everything the Lord had commanded Joshua to tell the people was accomplished, in accordance with all that Moses had commanded Joshua. The people went across quickly,

In the Hebrew text, the verse describes the priests standing in the Jordan “until everything the Lord had commanded Joshua to tell the people was accomplished, in accordance with all that Moses had commanded Joshua.” The sentence begins by stating that God commanded Joshua directly, then immediately adds that this was also in accordance with what Moses had commanded Joshua. The juxtaposition is awkward, since the verse has already identified God as the source of the command, and the addition of Moses as an intermediary authority creates a redundancy that disrupts the syntax of the sentence.^[1] The phrase appears to have been drawn from Deuteronomy 3:28, where God instructs Moses to commission Joshua, and inserted here to ensure that readers would understand Joshua’s authority as derived from Moses rather than received directly from God.

LXX Joshua 4:10

10 The priests who carried the ark of the covenant stood in the Jordan until Joshua finished everything that the Lord had commanded him to announce to the people. And the people hurried and crossed over.

The Greek text lacks this addition entirely. In its shorter form, the verse simply states that the priests stood in the Jordan until Joshua finished everything that the Lord had commanded him, with no mention of Moses. The result is a cleaner sentence in which Joshua’s authority flows directly from God, and the narrative moves forward without interruption. The shorter reading is widely regarded as reflecting an earlier Hebrew text, one that the Greek translators rendered faithfully, while the longer Hebrew text represents a later editorial layer that inserted Moses into the chain of authority.^[2]

Joshua 4:10 is not an isolated case. The Masoretic text of Joshua contains a pattern of similar additions that are absent from the Greek, including the title “servant of the Lord” after Moses’ name in several verses (1:1, 1:15, 12:6, 22:4), the phrase “all the Torah” of Moses in 1:7, and formulaic references to Moses’ commands throughout the book. Taken together, these additions amount to a systematic editorial effort to subordinate Joshua’s authority to that of Moses, ensuring that readers would understand Joshua not as an independent leader receiving direct divine instruction but as a faithful executor of commands that had already been given through Moses.^[3] The Greek text, which lacks most of these additions, preserves a version of Joshua in which the relationship between the two leaders is less hierarchical and Joshua’s own connection to God is more prominent.

The editorial logic behind these additions reflects a concern that would have been pressing for the communities that transmitted the Hebrew text: establishing the unbroken chain of authority from Moses through Joshua and into the subsequent history of Israel. By inserting Moses into moments where the earlier text had Joshua acting on God’s direct command, the editors reinforced the principle that legitimate leadership in Israel was always mediated through the Mosaic tradition.^[4] The Greek tradition, working from a Hebrew text that predated these expansions, preserves a portrait of Joshua as a leader who stands in more direct relationship with God, one that later editors evidently felt needed to be qualified.

Citations

[1] Tov, Emanuel The Growth of the Book of Joshua in the Light of the Evidence of the LXX Translation (pp. 389) Brill, 1999
[2] Kim, Hwan Sung Crossing the Jordan: Diachrony Versus Synchrony in the Book of Joshua (pp. 80, 153) Bloomsbury, 2010
[3] van der Meer, Michaël Formation and Reformulation: The Redaction of the Book of Joshua in the Light of the Oldest Textual Witnesses (pp. 178–181) Brill, 2004
[4] Dozeman, Thomas B. Joshua 1–12 (pp. 32–38) Yale University Press, 2015

Where the Masoretic Adds

The Two Versions of David and Goliath

The story of David and Goliath is one of the most famous narratives in the Bible, and it is also one of the places where the Masoretic tradition expanded its source material most dramatically. The Hebrew text of 1 Samuel 17–18 contains eighty-eight verses, while the Greek translation spans only forty-nine, a difference of nearly half the chapter. The Greek translator of 1 Samuel has been shown through detailed analysis to be relatively literal and faithful to the Hebrew before him, making it effectively impossible that he independently omitted nearly half the chapter; the shorter Greek text reflects a shorter Hebrew edition that predated the expansion now preserved in the Masoretic tradition.^[1] The material the Hebrew tradition added falls into two categories: large narrative blocks that introduce an entirely second account of David’s origins, and smaller dramatic details scattered through the battle scene that make the encounter with Goliath more dramatic.

1 Samuel 17:41-42

41 The Philistine, with his shield bearer walking in front of him, kept coming closer to David. 42 When the Philistine looked carefully at David, he despised him, for he was only a ruddy and handsome boy.

The smaller additions are visible in the duel itself. Verse 41 is entirely absent from the Greek; the earlier version of the story moves directly from David selecting his stones and approaching the Philistine (verse 40) to Goliath looking at David with contempt (verse 42), without the intervening detail of the shield-bearer advancing ahead of the giant. The Hebrew tradition inserted this verse to heighten the visual contrast between the two combatants, emphasizing the military apparatus arrayed against the boy with a sling.^[2] The same pattern of dramatic enhancement appears later: the Hebrew text adds a half-verse in which David “quickly ran toward the battle line to attack the Philistine” (verse 48b), creating an image of boldness that contrasts sharply with the earlier description of Israelite soldiers fleeing in fear. It also adds an entire summary verse (verse 50) declaring that “David prevailed over the Philistine with just the sling and the stone,” restating the outcome before the beheading to underscore the miraculous nature of the victory.

1 Samuel 17:48-50

48 The Philistine drew steadily closer to David to attack him, while David quickly ran toward the battle line to attack the Philistine. 49 David reached his hand into the bag and took out a stone. He slung it, striking the Philistine on the forehead. The stone sank deeply into his forehead, and he fell down with his face to the ground. 50 David prevailed over the Philistine with just the sling and the stone. He struck down the Philistine and killed him. David did not even have a sword in his hand.

The large-scale additions reveal even more about the Masoretic tradition’s editorial activity. The Hebrew text inserts an entire second introduction for David (17:12–31) in which he is an unknown shepherd boy sent by his father to bring food to his brothers, and after the battle, inserts a scene (17:55–18:5) in which Saul has to ask who David is. These additions create obvious contradictions with the shared version of the story, where David has already been introduced to Saul as a court musician and armor-bearer whom Saul “loved greatly” (16:17–23).^[3] The contradiction is the telltale signature of two originally independent traditions combined into one: in the first, David is a skilled musician who enters Saul’s service through his talent; in the second, he is a folkloristic hero, the youngest of eight brothers, who arrives at the battle by chance and defeats the giant against all expectations.^[4]

Fragments from Qumran (4QSam-a) preserve parts of the longer version, confirming that the expanded Hebrew text existed in written form by at least the first century BCE. The Greek tradition, working from a Hebrew text that predated this expansion, preserves the earlier edition, one in which David’s victory required no folkloristic buildup and no supplementary verses to heighten its drama.^[5] The Masoretic tradition produced what is in many ways a more compelling story, richer in narrative detail and more emotionally satisfying in its portrait of the underdog shepherd boy, but it did so by combining and expanding its source material in ways that left visible seams in the final text.

Citations

[1] Tov, Emanuel The Composition of 1 Samuel 16–18 in the Light of the Septuagint Version (pp. 333–354) Brill, 1999
[2] Gilmour, Rachelle Representing the Past: A Literary Analysis of Narrative Historiography in the Book of Samuel (pp. 279–283) Brill, 2011
[3] Alter, Robert The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (pp. 1930–1932) W. W. Norton, 2018
[4] Ulrich, Eugene The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Developmental Composition of the Bible (pp. 101–102) Brill, 2015
[5] Law, Timothy Michael When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (pp. 30–32) Oxford University Press, 2013

Where the Masoretic Removes

The Masoretic tradition also lost or excluded material preserved in other witnesses, whether through scribal accident, editorial decision, or the narrowing of a once-broader collection.

Cain's Missing Words in Genesis

The story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 contains one of the most recognizable textual problems in the Hebrew Bible. In the Masoretic text, verse 8 reads “Cain spoke to his brother Abel,” and then, without recording what Cain actually said, the narrative jumps immediately to the murder: “While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.” The sentence is grammatically broken. The verb “spoke” sets up a quotation that never arrives, leaving a gap in the narrative at the moment just before the first murder in the Bible.

Genesis 4:8

8 Cain spoke to his brother Abel.²¹ While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

The Greek translation, along with the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Vulgate, the Peshitta, and the Palestinian Targumim, preserves what appears to be the missing quotation: Cain says to Abel, “Let us go out into the field.” The agreement of so many independent textual witnesses, each from a different transmission history, makes it virtually impossible that all of them independently invented the same words; the far simpler explanation is that the words were present in the common ancestor and were lost in the line of transmission that produced the Masoretic text.^[1] The one Qumran manuscript that preserves Genesis 4 (4QGen-b) unfortunately does not preserve this particular portion of the verse, so the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot settle the question directly.

LXX Genesis 4:8

8 And Kain said to his brother Habel, “Let us go through into the plain.” And it came about when they were in the plain, that then Kain rose up against his brother Habel and killed him.

The most likely explanation for the loss is a scribal error known as parablepsis, in which a copyist’s eye skips from one occurrence of a phrase to a second, nearly identical occurrence, accidentally dropping everything in between. In the Hebrew of Genesis 4:8, the phrase “Cain to Abel his brother” appears twice in close succession, once before the quotation and once after it, creating exactly the kind of repetitive environment in which this type of error occurs.^[2] A scribe copying the text would have written “Cain to Abel his brother,” looked back at the source, and picked up at the second “Cain to Abel his brother” rather than the first, skipping the two Hebrew words in between. The result is the text now preserved in the Masoretic tradition: a speech introduction with no speech.

The Masoretic scribes themselves appear to have recognized the problem. Some medieval Masoretic codices mark a special division at this point in the verse, a notation called a “section break in the middle of a verse,” which signals a disruption in the content. The oldest Masoretic manuscripts with this passage present the verse without the break, suggesting that the notation was a later scribal response to a difficulty that readers and copyists had already noticed.^[3] Even Jerome, who held that the traditional Hebrew text represented the unchanging original, initially dismissed the fuller reading found in the Greek and Samaritan traditions, only to reverse himself when he made his Latin translation, incorporating a version of Cain’s invitation after all.

The restored reading also makes strong literary sense. By inviting Abel out to the field, Cain lures his brother to a place where there are no witnesses, a detail that biblical and ancient Near Eastern law treated as significant: Deuteronomy 22:27 presumes that in the open field there is no one to hear a victim’s cry.^[4] Cain’s plan to kill in secret fails precisely because God hears Abel’s blood crying out from the ground (Genesis 4:10), and the irony depends on the reader knowing that Cain deliberately chose a location where he believed no one would witness the crime. Without the invitation, the murder happens in the field without explanation for how the brothers got there; with it, the field becomes the scene of a premeditated act, and the narrative gains a layer of moral weight that connects the crime to the punishment.

Citations

[1] Charlesworth, James H. The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls (pp. 13–14) Baylor University Press, 2006
[2] Hendel, Ronald Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (pp. 3–7) SBL Press, 2016
[3] Campbell, Jonathan G. Deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls (pp. 31) Wiley-Blackwell, 2002
[4] Wenham, Gordon Genesis 1–15 (pp. 149) Thomas Nelson, 1987

Where the Masoretic Removes

The Masoretic tradition also lost or excluded material preserved in other witnesses, whether through scribal accident, editorial decision, or the narrowing of a once-broader collection.

The Missing Nun Verse of Psalm 145

Psalm 145 is an acrostic poem in which each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, moving from aleph through tav across twenty-two letters. In the Masoretic text, however, the psalm contains only twenty-one verses. The verse for the letter nun, which should fall between the mem verse (verse 13) and the samekh verse (verse 14), is entirely absent. The gap is immediately visible to anyone reading the Hebrew, and it has puzzled readers for centuries.

Psalms 145:13-14

13 Your kingdom is an eternal kingdom, and your dominion endures through all generations. 14 The Lord supports all who fall and lifts up all who are bent over.

The Greek translation, working from a Hebrew text that predated the Masoretic tradition, preserves the missing line. Between the mem and samekh verses, the Greek includes a nun verse that reads “Faithful is the Lord in his words, and holy in all his works,” where the Hebrew behind “faithful” (ne’eman) begins with the letter nun, completing the acrostic pattern. The same verse appears in the great Psalms Scroll from Qumran (11QPsa), which reads “God is faithful in his words, and gracious in all his deeds.” The Syriac translation and at least one medieval Hebrew manuscript also attest the verse independently.^[1]

LXX Psalms 144:13-14

13 Your kingdom is the kingdom over all the eternities, and your dominion in every generation and generation. 14 Faithful is the Lord in his words, and holy in all his works. The Lord supports all those who are falling down and sets up again all those who have been broken down.

The convergence of these witnesses from different transmission histories makes it difficult to argue that the verse was a later invention. The Greek translators, the Qumran scribes, and the Syriac tradition had no access to each other’s work, and the phrasing of the nun verse does not appear to have been stitched together from other passages in the Psalter; it is a unique formulation that fits seamlessly into the theological vocabulary of the psalm.^[2] The evidence has proven compelling enough that most modern English translations, including the New Revised Standard Version and the New International Version, restore the nun verse to its expected position.

The most likely explanation for its absence in the Masoretic text is accidental loss during copying. Scribal errors in which a line of similar length and structure to its neighbors is skipped are well documented in ancient manuscript transmission, and the regular, repetitive structure of an acrostic poem creates exactly the kind of environment in which such errors occur.^[3] Some scholars have raised the alternative possibility that the omission was deliberate, noting that other acrostic psalms attributed to David (Psalms 25 and 34) also contain missing letters, which may reflect a conscious structural choice by the poet rather than a scribal accident.^[4] On this reading, the Greek and Qumran witnesses would preserve a later restoration of a line that was never part of the original composition. The majority of text critics, however, treat the Masoretic gap as a loss, and the psalm as originally complete, in part because the 11QPsa version includes a liturgical refrain after every verse (“Blessed be the Lord and blessed be his name forever and ever”) that suggests the scroll preserves a living worship tradition in which the full acrostic was performed, not a scholarly reconstruction of a defective text.

Citations

[1] VanderKam, James and Flint, Peter The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (pp. 137–139) HarperSanFrancisco, 2002
[2] Flint, Peter The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible (pp. 24–25) Jewish Publication Society, 2012
[3] Alter, Robert The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (pp. 4864–4865) W. W. Norton, 2018
[4] Freedman, David Noel Patterns in Psalms 25 and 34 (pp. 135) Sheffield Academic Press, 1992

Where the Masoretic Removes

The Masoretic tradition also lost or excluded material preserved in other witnesses, whether through scribal accident, editorial decision, or the narrowing of a once-broader collection.

The Excluded Psalm 151

The Masoretic Psalter contains exactly 150 psalms, and that number has become so familiar that it is easy to assume it was always fixed. The Greek Psalter, however, contains 151, and the additional psalm is not a late Christian addition or a marginal curiosity but a Jewish composition that predates the second century BCE and circulated widely in antiquity.^[1] Its exclusion from the Hebrew canon tells us something important about how the boundaries of scripture were drawn, and about what was lost when certain communities settled on a fixed collection.

LXX Psalms 151:1-5

1 I was small among my brothers and the youngest one in the house of my father. I was shepherding the sheep of my father. 2 My hands made an organ; my fingers prepared a harp. 3 And who will report to my Lord? The Lord himself, it is he who will hearken. 4 He dispatched his messenger and raised me from the sheep of my father. He anointed me with the oil of his anointing. 5 My brothers were handsome and big, but the Lord was not well pleased with them.

Psalm 151 is a first-person poem attributed to David, recounting his youth as the youngest of his brothers, his time as a shepherd making music for God, his anointing, and his defeat of the Philistine giant. The poem draws directly on the narratives of 1 Samuel 16 and 17, retelling them in David’s own voice. It is the only psalm in any tradition that can be called genuinely autobiographical in this sense, tying its speaker to specific events rather than to generalized circumstances of distress or praise. The Greek version presents this as a single seven-verse composition, but the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that behind the Greek text stand two originally separate Hebrew psalms, each with its own superscription: one about David’s election and anointing (designated by scholars as Psalm 151A), and a second about his fight with Goliath (Psalm 151B).^[2] The Greek translator appears to have merged these into a single composition, condensing and rearranging the material in the process.

LXX Psalms 151:6-7

6 I went out to a meeting against the foreigner, and he imprecated curses upon me with his idols. 7 But I, after drawing the sword from him, beheaded him and took away the reproach from the children of Israel.

The Greek Psalter itself signals that this psalm occupies an unusual position. Its superscription labels it as “outside the number,” a notation that acknowledges the psalm’s existence while marking it as supernumerary to the 150-psalm collection that was becoming normative. This heading reflects a moment of transition in which the boundaries of the Psalter were still being negotiated; editors included the psalm because it was part of their received tradition, but flagged it as falling beyond the standard count.^[3] Evidence from Qumran confirms that the back half of the Psalter (roughly Psalms 90 onward) remained fluid well into the late Second Temple period, with different manuscripts preserving different arrangements and including compositions not found in the Masoretic collection, while the first half of the Psalter was already largely fixed.

The Masoretic tradition’s exclusion of Psalm 151 was not an act of suppression, and no official body ever convened to legislate what belonged in the collection and what did not. The once-popular hypothesis that rabbis at Jabneh (Jamnia) formally decided the Jewish canon near the end of the first century CE has been thoroughly discredited; no evidence from rabbinic literature supports the idea that any synod, academy, or council ever ruled on the inclusion or exclusion of specific books.^[4] What the rabbinic sources do reveal is a gradual process driven by a conviction that the biblical era had come to an end and that a new period of literary production, culminating in the Mishnah, had begun. The closing of the biblical canon was shaped more by exclusion than by inclusion: works classified as “extraneous” were kept out, and even some books already within the collection (Ezekiel, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes) faced periodic challenges to their status. Compositions on the margins, like Psalm 151, were simply never absorbed into the collection that became normative.

The psalm continued to circulate in Greek, Syriac, Latin, Ethiopic, Coptic, and Armenian Christian traditions, and it remains part of the Orthodox Christian Psalter today.^[5] Its presence in the Dead Sea Scrolls alongside canonical psalms, without any visible distinction in status, suggests that for at least some Jewish communities in the Second Temple period, the line between what was “in” and what was “out” of the Psalter had not yet been drawn. The 150-psalm collection familiar from the Hebrew Bible represents one outcome of a long process of selection, and Psalm 151 is a reminder that other communities preserved a slightly different collection, one in which David’s voice extended to one more poem.

Citations

[1] Charlesworth, James H. and Sanders, James A. More Psalms of David (pp. 612–613) Doubleday, 1985
[2] VanderKam, James and Flint, Peter The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (pp. 185–188) HarperSanFrancisco, 2002
[3] Pajunen, Mika S. Psalms 151–155 (pp. 444–445) Oxford University Press, 2021
[4] Talmon, Shemaryahu The Crystallization of a Canon of Hebrew Scriptures in Post-Biblical Judaism (pp. 12–13) British Library, 2002
[5] Dorival, Gilles The Septuagint and the Issue of the Canon (pp. 58–60) Mohr Siebeck, 2021

Where the Masoretic Changes

Some of the most telling Masoretic alterations involve theological corrections, adjusting texts that seemed to diminish God’s dignity or imply uncomfortable theological ideas that later communities found problematic.

Who Stands Before Whom in Genesis

Genesis 18 describes a visit by three mysterious figures to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre, one of whom the narrative identifies as the Lord. After announcing the coming destruction of Sodom, two of the visitors depart, and the text describes the moment before Abraham begins his famous intercession on behalf of the city. It is at this transition point that the Masoretic tradition preserves one of its most revealing alterations, one so well known that the rabbinic tradition itself records and discusses it.

Genesis 18:22

22 The two men turned and headed toward Sodom, but Abraham was still standing before the Lord.

The Hebrew text reads “Abraham was still standing before the Lord,” placing the human figure in the subordinate position of one who stands in attendance before a superior. The rabbinic tradition, however, preserves a memory that the original text read the reverse: “the Lord was still standing before Abraham.” This reversal is recorded in Genesis Rabbah 49:7, where Rabbi Simon states that “this is a correction of the scribes, for the Shekhinah was actually waiting for Abraham.”^[1] The phrase “to stand before” someone in Hebrew idiom can carry the connotation of serving or attending to that person, and the image of God standing in attendance before a human being was evidently felt to be intolerable. The scribes reversed the syntax so that Abraham stood before God rather than God before Abraham, restoring the expected hierarchy between the divine and the human.

This alteration belongs to a category known in Jewish tradition as tiqqune soferim, literally “corrections of the scribes.” Various rabbinic and masoretic sources identify between seven and eighteen instances throughout the Hebrew Bible in which the earliest scribes are said to have modified the text to protect divine dignity, most commonly by changing a pronoun or reversing a syntactical relationship to avoid language that seemed disrespectful toward God.^[2] Genesis 18:22 is the most famous of these and the only example that falls within the book of Genesis. It is also the most substantial, involving a reversal of the entire clause rather than the more typical adjustment of a single pronominal suffix. The tradition preserves both the corrected reading and the presumed original, creating a situation in which the text as transmitted says one thing while the interpretive tradition openly acknowledges that it once said something else.^[3]

Scholars remain divided over whether the tiqqune soferim represent actual changes made to the consonantal text or are instead a form of exegetical commentary in which the rabbis proposed what the text “should have said” without claiming anyone had physically altered it. Some early rabbinic sources use the term kinna ha-katub (“the verse used a euphemism”) rather than the language of correction, suggesting that the text was always written this way but was understood to have softened a theologically difficult idea. Later sources adopted the more direct language of “correction,” implying an actual change to the text.^[4] The fact that all surviving textual witnesses, including the Greek translation, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Targumim, read “Abraham was still standing before the Lord” means that if a change did occur, it happened very early in the transmission process, well before the text was translated into Greek in the third or second century BCE.

Regardless of whether the reversal reflects an actual scribal intervention or an exegetical tradition about what the text avoided saying, it reveals a community deeply attentive to the theological implications of every clause. The concern was not with the narrative content of the passage, which remains unchanged either way, but with the relational grammar of the sentence, specifically who stands before whom and what that posture implies about the hierarchy between God and humanity. It is a small change with large theological consequences, and the fact that the tradition itself preserved the record of the alteration, rather than concealing it, demonstrates an unusual transparency about the process by which the text was shaped.

Citations

[1] Bowker, John The Targums and Rabbinic Literature: An Introduction to Jewish Interpretations of Scripture (pp. 214) Cambridge University Press, 1969
[2] Tov, Emanuel Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (pp. 65–67) Fortress Press, 2012
[3] Levy, B. Barry Fixing God’s Torah: The Accuracy of the Hebrew Bible Text in Jewish Law (pp. 73, 82–83) Oxford University Press, 2001
[4] Arnold, Bill T. Genesis (pp. 181–182) Cambridge University Press, 2009

Where the Masoretic Changes

The Sons of God in Deuteronomy

Deuteronomy 32 contains one of the oldest poems in the Hebrew Bible, and its eighth verse preserves what may be the single most theologically significant textual variant in all of scripture. The verse describes God dividing the nations of the world and assigning their boundaries, but the three major textual traditions disagree about the basis for that division. The Masoretic Hebrew text reads “according to the number of the sons of Israel,” the Greek translation reads “according to the number of the angels of God,” and a Dead Sea Scroll fragment (4QDeut-j) reads “according to the number of the sons of God.” The difference between these readings is not a matter of translation variation but of fundamentally different claims about the structure of the divine world.

LXX Deuteronomy 32:8-9

8 When the Most High distributed nations as he scattered the sons of Adam, he set up boundaries for the nations according to the number of the angels of God. 9 And his people Jacob became the portion of the Lord, Israel an allotment of his inheritance.

The Dead Sea Scrolls reading, “sons of God” (bene elohim), is now accepted by near-unanimous scholarly consensus as the original. The phrase refers to members of a divine council, a concept well attested elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (Job 1:6, Psalm 82:1, Psalm 89:6–7) and in the broader literature of the ancient Near East.^[1] Ugaritic mythology describes the head of the pantheon, El, as having seventy divine sons, and the table of nations in Genesis 10 lists seventy nations. The original form of Deuteronomy 32:8 thus draws on this tradition to describe the Most High dividing the nations among the members of his divine council, with each divine being receiving a nation to oversee, while Israel’s God received Israel as his own portion (verse 9).

The theology embedded in this original reading is older and more significant than a generic reference to divine beings. It reflects a period in early Israelite thought when the God of Israel was understood not in terms of pure monotheism, but as part of a larger divine family. In this conception, every nation had its own patron deity, and the world was organized as a kind of divine household in which the presiding god distributed peoples and territories to his subordinate sons.^[2] Psalm 82 preserves a similar idea, depicting a council of divine beings who have failed to govern their nations justly and are sentenced to die “like mortals.” That psalm also presupposes the arrangement described in Deuteronomy 32:8, where each god holds authority over a people, and then dismantles it by calling Israel’s God to rise and inherit all the nations instead.^[3] Both the Masoretic and Greek traditions, in their different ways, obscure and reshape this picture. The Masoretic text seems to eliminate the divine beings entirely, replacing them with the sons of Israel. The Greek text retains the divine beings but demotes them from gods to angels, transforming what was a council of peers into a hierarchy of servants. Neither tradition would then preserve the original henotheistic description of a family of gods ruling their own allotments.

The Masoretic reading, “sons of Israel,” replaces the divine beings with the descendants of Jacob. This preserved the numerical connection to seventy, since Genesis 46:27 and Exodus 1:5 record that seventy members of Jacob’s family went down to Egypt, but it eliminated the theologically uncomfortable picture of multiple divine beings presiding over the nations.^[4] The direction of the change is clear. It is inconceivable that a scribe would have altered an innocuous “sons of Israel” to the theologically explosive “sons of God,” while the reverse, a pious scribe removing a polytheistic implication, follows a well-documented pattern of scribal practice.^[5] A parallel alteration appears to have occurred in the same poem at Deuteronomy 32:43, where the Masoretic text is noticeably shorter than the version preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek, with references to divine beings similarly removed.

The Greek translation represents a third stage in the interpretation of this verse. The majority of Greek manuscripts read “angels of God” rather than “sons of God,” a rendering that acknowledges the presence of divine beings in the original but reinterprets them within the framework of later monotheistic theology, in which divine beings were reinterpreted as angels subordinate to a single God. Where the original envisioned a council of divine figures with their own authority over nations, the Greek translator reframed them as angels, beings who serve God rather than exercise independent power.^[6] Some early Greek witnesses preserve the more literal rendering “sons of God,” suggesting that the shift to “angels” was itself a secondary development within the Greek tradition.

Deuteronomy 32:8 thus preserves three successive moments of theological revision in a single verse. The first is the original poem, which described a divine council distributing authority over the nations; the Masoretic tradition, which replaced the divine beings with the sons of Israel to eliminate polytheistic language entirely; and the Greek tradition, which retained the divine beings but domesticated them as angels. Each revision reflects the theological concerns of its community, and none of them represents a corruption or a mistake. They are, instead, evidence of living traditions actively reshaping their most sacred texts to serve the needs of communities whose understanding of God was itself developing over time.

Citations

[1] Day, John Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (pp. 23–25) Sheffield Academic Press, 2002
[2] Smith, Mark S. The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (pp. 49) Oxford University Press, 2001
[3] Heiser, Michael S. Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an Assessment of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible (pp. 1–30) Bulletin for Biblical Research, 2008
[4] Tigay, Jeffrey H. The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy (pp. 513–517) Jewish Publication Society, 1996
[5] Heiser, Michael S. Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God (pp. 1–8) Bibliotheca Sacra, 2001
[6] Smith, Mark S. God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (pp. 196–202) Eerdmans, 2008

Where the Masoretic Changes

Cursing God in 1 Samuel

“His sons were cursing God.” That is what the Greek text of 1 Samuel 3:13 says, and it is almost certainly what the Hebrew originally said as well. The verse belongs to a scene in which God speaks to the boy Samuel at night, delivering an oracle of judgment against the priestly house of Eli. The charge is specific and damning: Eli’s sons were committing sacrilege, and Eli knew about it but failed to restrain them. In the Masoretic Hebrew text, however, the object of the cursing has been changed. Instead of “cursing God,” the Hebrew reads that the sons were “cursing for themselves” or “bringing a curse upon themselves,” a reflexive construction that redirects the offense away from God and onto Eli’s sons as both agents and victims of their own behavior.

1 Samuel 3:13

13 You should tell him that I am about to judge his house forever because of the sin that he knew about. For his sons were cursing themselves, and he did not rebuke them.

LXX 1 Samuel 3:13

13 And I have declared to him that I am avenging his house for eternity for the injustice of his sons, because his sons were abusing God, and he did not admonish them—and not even in any way.

The change in the Hebrew is remarkably small. The original text read the Hebrew word for “God” (elohim), which scribes replaced with a pronoun meaning “to them” or “for themselves” (lahem). The two words share enough visual similarity in Hebrew script that the substitution could pass as a minor variant, but the theological effect is enormous. In the original, Eli’s sons are guilty of the most serious offense in Israelite law: direct blasphemy against God. In the altered version, they are guilty of something vaguer and less theologically dangerous, a self-destructive pattern of behavior that brings ruin on their own heads. The Greek translation, working from a Hebrew text that had not yet undergone this change, preserves the original accusation without euphemism.^[1]

What makes this case unusual is that the rabbinic tradition itself records the alteration. The Masorah, the system of notes that accompanies the traditional Hebrew text, identifies 1 Samuel 3:13 as one of the tiqqune soferim, a term that means “corrections of the scribes.” These are passages where early scribes deliberately changed the wording of the text to avoid language they considered irreverent or theologically inappropriate. The Masorah even preserves the original, uncorrected reading alongside the text that replaced it, creating a situation in which the tradition simultaneously transmits the alteration and documents the fact that an alteration was made.^[2] The principle behind the practice is attributed to the rabbi Johanan, transmitted by Hiyya bar Abba: “It is better that one letter be uprooted from the Torah than that the Name of names be publicly profaned.” The scribes considered it less harmful to alter a word of scripture than to require readers to pronounce aloud the words “cursing God” every time the passage was read in a liturgical setting.^[3]

The same sensitivity to blasphemous language appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. In Job 1:5, Job offers sacrifices on behalf of his children in case they have “blessed God in their hearts,” using the Hebrew word for “bless” (barakh) as a transparent euphemism for its opposite. Job’s wife repeats the same construction in Job 2:9 when she tells him to “bless God and die.” In both cases, the text substitutes a positive word for the negative one that the narrative clearly intends, because even the act of writing about cursing God was considered dangerous enough to require verbal camouflage.^[4] The tiqqune soferim in 1 Samuel 3:13 operates on the same principle, with the difference that the change was made not by the original author but by later scribes who inherited a text they found too direct.

The Greek translation thus preserves not only an earlier reading but also a window into the theological nerve that prompted the change. The Masoretic tradition’s own marginal notes confirm that the Hebrew text was deliberately softened, making 1 Samuel 3:13 one of the clearest cases in the entire Bible where the direction, the motive, and the mechanism of a scribal alteration are all independently documented.

Citations

[1] Tov, Emanuel Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (pp. 65–66) Fortress Press, 2012
[2] McCarter, P. Kyle I Samuel (pp. 98) Doubleday, 1980
[3] Van Staalduine-Sulman, Eveline The Targum of Samuel (pp. 131) Brill, 2002
[4] Hartley, John E. The Book of Job (pp. 72–73) Eerdmans, 1988

Introduction

Where the Septuagint Adds

Where the Septuagint Removes

Where the Septuagint Changes

Where the Masoretic Adds

Where the Masoretic Removes

Where the Masoretic Changes

All Guides

Introduction

Where the Septuagint Adds

Where the Septuagint Removes

Where the Septuagint Changes

Where the Masoretic Adds

Where the Masoretic Removes

Where the Masoretic Changes

Neither Pure Nor Original

Citations

How the Dead Sea Scrolls Changed the Conversation

Citations

The Longer Ending of Job

Citations

Importing Wisdom into Proverbs

Citations

Adding the Binding of Isaac to Isaiah

Citations

Removing Isaac as Abraham's Only Son

Citations

Removing Samuel's Divine Authority

Citations

Removing Rahab from Isaiah

Citations

Protecting the Sabbath in Genesis

Citations

Removing God from the Mountain

Citations

The Titles of the Child in Isaiah

Citations

Harmonizing the Rebellions of Numbers 16

Citations

Elevating Moses' Authority in Joshua

Citations

The Two Versions of David and Goliath

Citations

Cain's Missing Words in Genesis

Citations

The Missing Nun Verse of Psalm 145

Citations

The Excluded Psalm 151

Citations

Who Stands Before Whom in Genesis

Citations

The Sons of God in Deuteronomy

Citations

Cursing God in 1 Samuel

Citations

Contents

Contents

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