Texts in Conversation
Isaiah 34 describes the sky rolling up “like a scroll” and stars falling like leaves in a dramatic cosmic unraveling. The Greek Septuagint translation omits the opening phrase, perhaps due to a scribal or translation error.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Isaiah 34:4
Hebrew Bible
3 Their slain will be left unburied, their corpses will stink; the hills will soak up their blood. 4 All the stars in the sky will fade away, the sky will roll up like a scroll; all its stars will wither, like a leaf withers and falls from a vine or a fig withers and falls from a tree. 5 He says, “Indeed, my sword has slaughtered heavenly powers. Look, it now descends on Edom, on the people I will annihilate in judgment.”
Date: 740–450 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX Isaiah 34:4
Septuagint
3 And their people who were killed shall be cast forth, and their corpses; and their ill aroma shall come up, and the mountains shall be made wet with their blood. 4 And the sky shall be rolled up like a scroll: and all the stars shall fall like leaves from a vine, and as leaves fall from a fig tree. 5 My sword has been made drunk in heaven: look, it shall come down upon Idumea, and with judgment upon the people doomed to destruction.
Date: 100–1 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Isaiah 34:4 ... there are textual uncertainties on the Hebrew side that may weaken the contribution of this verse to our discussion, though it is not clear that these doubts are weighty. Furthermore, it may be possible to account for the LXX minus (the opening has not been translated) by parablepsis, for both the first and second clauses ... Still further, our translator often collapses a series of syntactical units, such as these three verbal clauses. However, this will more often than not involve the use of elements of each of the Masoretic text units, whereas in this case the first of the three has been cleanly omitted ..."
David A. Baer, When We All Go Home: Translation and Theology in LXX Isaiah 56–66, JSOTSup 318 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), 187–188.
* 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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