Texts in Conversation
Isaiah 59:2 says sin has hidden God’s face. The Greek translator makes God an active judge who turns away to withhold mercy, rather than a passive deity whose face is hidden.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Isaiah 59:2
Hebrew Bible
1 Look, the Lord’s hand is not too weak to deliver you; his ear is not too deaf to hear you. 2 But your sinful acts have alienated you from your God; your sins have caused him to reject you and not listen to your prayers. 3 For your hands are stained with blood and your fingers with sin; your lips speak lies, your tongue utters malicious words.
Date: 740–450 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
LXX Isaiah 59:2
Septuagint
1 Has the hand of the Lord no power to save? or has he made his ear heavy, so that he should not hear? 2 But your iniquities separate between you and God, and because of your sins he has turned away his face from you, so as not to have mercy upon you. 3 For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with sins; your lips also have spoken iniquity, and your tongue meditates unrighteousness.
Date: 100–1 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... The Masoretic Text allows for the perception that God has been forced into idle passivity, though it is worth repeating that this is hardly the picture that the Hebrew text requires of its reader’s mind. The actual intention of the Masoretic Text 59.2 seems much closer to a recent description of Hosea 5.15, a verse that has the Lord returning to his place until Ephraim and Judah acknowledge their guilt and seek his face... The Septuagint removes any suggestion that sin has the power to turn the divine face. It also transforms a divine deafness that sin has imposed upon God into an implicit divine decision not to show mercy... In the Greek text, God has become an active judge rather than a passive deity who suffers alienation from his people because of sin’s active force upon him. The translator accomplishes this by converting the people’s sins to the occasion of God’s judicial turning by means of the inserted preposition διά. This allows him to make God the subject of ἀπέστρεψεν (now singularized), a verb that has now become one member of a stock phrase for divine judicial turning. ..."
David A. Baer, When We All Go Home: Translation and Theology in LXX Isaiah 56–66, JSOTSup 318 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), 122–125.
* 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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