Deuteronomy 32:8

Hebrew Bible

6 Is this how you repay the Lord, you foolish, unwise people? Is he not your father, your Creator? He has made you and established you. 7 Remember the ancient days; bear in mind the years of past generations. Ask your father and he will inform you, your elders, and they will tell you. 8 When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided up humankind, he set the boundaries of the peoples, according to the number of the heavenly assembly. 9 For the Lord’s allotment is his people, Jacob is his special possession. 10 The Lord found him in a desolate land, in an empty wasteland where animals howl. He continually guarded him and taught him; he continually protected him like the pupil of his eye.

Pseudo Jonathan Deuteronomy 32:9

Targum

The beloved children have corrupted their good works, a blemish is found upon them; a perverse generation which have altered their works; so shall the order of this world"s judgment be altered upon them. Can you indeed so requite the Name of the Word of the Lord, O foolish people, and receive the law, yet not be made wise? Is He not your Father who bought you, who created you and established you? Remember the days of old; consider the years of every generation; read the books of the law, and they will teach you, and the books of the prophets, and they will tell you. When the Most High made allotment of the world unto the nations which proceeded from the sons of Noach, in the separation of the writings and languages of the children of men at the time of the division, He cast the lot among the seventy angels, the princes of the nations with whom is the revelation to oversee the city, even at that time He established the limits of the nations according to the sum of the number of the seventy souls of Israel who went down into Mizraim. And when the holy people fell to the lot of the Lord of all the world, Michael opened his lips and said: Let the good portion of the Name of the Lord"s Word be with Him. Gabriel opened his lips with thanksgivings, and said, Let the house of Jakob be the lot of His inheritance.

 Notes and References

"... The other pertinent uses of the number seventy come in Genesis 46:27, Exodus 1:5 and Deuteronomy 10:22. Each of these verses gives seventy as the number of Jacob’s descendants at the time he went into Egypt. Thus, the modified text of Deuteronomy 32:8 attempts to place a link between the number of the ‘sons of Israel’ and the Table of Nations in Genesis 10. Barthélemy believed that numbers in Genesis 46:27, Exodus 1:5 and Deuteronomy 10:22 were all harmonized to seventy as a result of this modification to Deuteronomy 32:8, thus they all intimately linked together. Having established this link, he dates these changes to the Hasmonean era, drawing on evidence from the LXX, the Qumran scrolls and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. In addition, the common reading of the SP and MT points to a time before the Samaritan textual tradition definitively broke off from the Judean tradition, a separation which Barthélemy dates between the John Hyrcanus’ destruction of the Gerizim cult in 107 BCE and the coming of the Romans ..."

Reid, Philip Mark A Preliminary Investigation into the Samaritan Pentateuch as an Intralingual Translation (p. 90) University of the Free State South Africa, 2021

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