Texts in Conversation
Isaiah 6 describes the prophet seeing God sitting on a throne and wearing a robe, a physical description of God. The Greek Septuagint changes this to say Isaiah saw the glory of God and removes the reference to the robe, removing all physical elements.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Isaiah 6:1
Hebrew Bible
1 In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord seated on a high, elevated throne. The hem of his robe filled the temple. 2 Seraphs stood over him; each one had six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and they used the remaining two to fly. 3 They called out to one another, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Heaven’s Armies! His majestic splendor fills the entire earth!”
Date: 740–450 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX Isaiah 6:1
Septuagint
1 And it happened in the year in which king Uzziah died, that I saw the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne, and the house was full of his glory. 2 And seraphs stood all around him: each one had six wings: and with two they covered their face, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 And one cried to the other, and they said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Sabaoth: the whole earth is full of his glory.
Date: 100–1 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... when God is the object, not the subject, of bodily actions, the targumists were faced with a problem. It was obvious that the human actions themselves could not be metaphorical; but the object of them had to be understood in a different way. For instance, when the Bible says that someone saw God, it is clear that they saw something, and that something had to be identifiable as God, without suggesting that God himself was visible in bodily form. One solution to this is to introduce God’s “glory”, understood as a visible bright light ... The concept of the visible “glory” of God had already been introduced in the Bible itself: “You shall see the glory of God” (Exodus 16:7), “the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a consuming fire” (Exodus 24:17), “the glory of the Lord will appear to you” (Lev 9:6), and so on; compare also 1 Enoch 14:20: “The great glory sat on the throne” (see also Testament of Levi 3:4). It also appeared previously in other translations; compare the Septuagint rendering to the Targum (Isaiah 6:1) ..."
Edward M. Cook, “The Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in the Targums,” in A Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism, ed. Matthias Henze (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 92–117.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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