SHUFFLING SCRIPTURE: THE MINOR PROPHETS

 

                                     Zechariah (mixed media, 2004)

It is quite a common practice for translators of modern English versions of the Old Testament to make more or less liberal use of Hebrew texts found at the Dead Sea as well as early translations such as the Greek Septuagint. But scholars generally rely on these other sources only when the standard Hebrew text appears to make little sense and has obviously suffered from poor transmission over the centuries.

However, the emendations that are made to the Hebrew text generally only affect the way individual verses are translated.

But then we come to the Jerusalem Bible, an English translation of an original French version put out by scholars coming from the Roman Catholic tradition. What is disturbing about parts of this translation is that the authors have tampered with the actual order of verses in a number of places and done so in the total absence of any manuscript support. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in the poetic sections of the Minor Prophets.

The list of the “improved” order of verses in the Jerusalem Bible includes:

Amos 5:6-10 = 6, 8, 9,7, 10

Micah 5:5-6 = 5a, 6b, 5b, 6a

6:9-15 = 9, 12, 10,11, 13, 15, 14

7:3-6 = 3, 5, 6, 4

Nahum 3:16-17 = 16a, 17a, 16b, 17b

Habakkuk 2:16-19 = 16, 17, 19, 18

Zechariah 3:3-10 = 3, 4a, 5, 4b, 6, 7, 9a, 8, 9b, 10

4:5-14 = 5, 6a, 10b, 11-14, 6b, 7-9, 10a

6: 8-15 = 8, 15, 9-14

Since the rationales behind these various changes are seldom given anywhere in the extensive notes found in the Jerusalem Bible, for most of them we are left to guess why they were made. There are two logical possibilities. The first is that the translators felt the meaning of the passages flows better with these changes. Or since most of these occur in poetic passages of the Bible, one can possibly detect unwanted corruption in the Hebrew text by looking for ways to improve the known parallelism of thought that generally occurs in adjacent lines of poetry.

But in either case, it seems rather unlikely that a scribe would purposely take an original text that made good sense as is and provided parallel poetic lines of thought and purposely change it into our present Hebrew text. However, that still leaves the possibility that such scribes over the centuries might have accidentally displaced a line or two. Even that accidental error in copying does not fit into any of the known categories well documented by textual scholars. These include accidentally leaving out a line of text or copying the same line twice, but never transposing a line from one place to another in a text.

Thus, let us look at a few of the examples listed above to see if we can possibly discern the reason for the rearrangements and whether we agree with them.

Amos 5:6-10

Before looking specifically at these problem verses, it is best to consider the surrounding context and the way it is organized. Thus, we can consider the symmetrical structure below:

            A. Lamentation (vv. 1-3)

                    B. Seek me and live (vv. 4-5)

                            C. CENTER (vv. 6-10)

                    B'. Seek the good and not evil (vv. 14-15)

            A'. Lamentation (vv. 16-17)

With that in mind, one might expect that the central portion would continue this sort of literary arrangement. And that is just what we find, as seen below:

                            C. Change your ways in view of the evil time (v. 6)

                                    D. Sins against the righteous (v. 7)

                                            E. God's power is coming ( vv. 8-9)

                                            E'. Reaction of the unrighteous (vv. 10-11)

                                    D'. Sins against the righteous (v. 12)

                            C. Change your ways in view of the evil time (v. 13)

Not recognizing that very common way the Bible has of presenting its material, the editors of the Jerusalem Bible attempted to rearrange the text in a more “logical” manner instead by placing v. 7 after v. 9, causing a complete disruption of the carefully constructed symmetrical organization above.

Their justification for doing this is not stated, but it it is obvious from the way they divide up their paragraphs that they felt verse 10 began a brand new section, and therefore should be introduced by the same sort of warnings that begin 5:18 and 6:1 – namely “Woe to...” In verse 7, they felt they had that sort of warning even though it does not actually contain those words. So they simply moved v. 7 right before v. 10 and added the missing required words “Woe to...” to start v. 7.

The scientific world in which I was trained frowned greatly on this sort of practice and described it as “falling so much in love with your own theory that you are willing to alter the actual data so that it supports it.” Even the great chemist and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling was found guilty of this unforgivable sin when he attempted to become the first one to determine the chemical structure of DNA in order to win a second Nobel Prize.

Nahum 3:15b-17

Below is how the JB rearranges these verses in order to “make more sense:”

        Increase like the locust, increase like the grasshopper (15b)

        Multiply your traders to exceed the stars of heaven (16a)

        Your guards are like grasshoppers, your scribes like a cloud of insects (17a)

        They settle on the walls when day is cold; the sun appears (17b)

        The locust spread their wings; they fly away (16b)

        They are gone, no one knows where. (17c)

The rationale here was to combine all the material relating to the great number of such people together in the first three stanzas and all the presentation of their insubstantial nature in the next three verses. However, to do so required them not only to rearrange the order of lines in the poetry, but also delete one of the two places in the text where the verb “fly” appeared.

By contrast, consider the Hebrew text as received:

        A. Increase like the locust, increase like the grasshopper

        Multiply your traders to exceed the stars of heaven

                        B. The locust spreads its wings and flies away.

        A'. Your guards are like grasshoppers, your scribes like a cloud of insects

        They settle on the walls when day is cold

                        B'. The sun appears; they fly away. No one knows where they are.

Once it is realized that the organization in this case is a parallel one (ABA'B') as shown above, there is no need to resort to shuffling the verses.

Habakkuk 2:16-18

The Jerusalem Bible treats these verses in the order 16, 17, 19, 18. The reasoning for repositioning verse 19 is seemingly a valid one. If you consider how chapter 2 is structured, you can readily see that from verse 6b on, it consists of five woes. The first four begin appropriately with the warning “woe is.” But the last woe, verses 18-19 breaks that established pattern by placing “woe is” at the concluding verse instead of the opening one. Actually, this “mistake” is so obvious that one might ask the logical questions: “Why would one accidentally or purposefully make that error in the first place?” and “Why did no subsequent scribes catch that error and correct it?”

The editors of JB apparently feel that they are sharper than the generations of scribes who transmitted the text to us. But there is a rather obvious reason for that reversal in the final portion of the section. Whereas the other four woe sections begin with “woe,” the last one appropriately breaks the pattern to signal that the woes are over. We see the same thing in the very beginning of the Bible. Each of the first six days of creation concludes with the statement “And there was evening and there was morning, a Xth day.” But on the seventh day (Genesis 2:1-3), that pattern is abandoned entirely to purposefully point to the special nature of that day.

The remainder of Genesis presents us with another illustrative example. There is an almost universal assumption that toledot, usually as the phrase ellah toledot ('These are the generations of'), “clearly and consistently structurally marks the beginning of new sections.” (Wright) But things are not that clear-cut. For example, Wright makes that assertion just after recognizing that the same phrase in Gen. 36:9 does not function in that manner.

Also, the first usage of toledot in Genesis does not actually occur until Gen. 2:4, where there is the question of whether it signals the beginning or conclusion of a passage or as a colophon instead.

Turner also brings up several caveats. He points out, “Additional uses of the formula or equivalent occur, which summarize (Gen. 10:32) or reiterate (Gen. 25:13; 36:9) a toledot already introduced, but these do not have a structuring function.” He also notes that 5:1 departs from the traditional toledot formula by saying “This is the book of the descendants of...” instead.

Perhaps the editors of the JB should take Emerson's statement to heart: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Zechariah 3:3-5

The Jerusalem Bible feels that the logical place for 4a (“Look, I have taken away your iniquities”) is only after Joshua's dirty clothes have been removed and new clothing put on. But the original order is actually more logical since it has the removal of iniquity symbolized by removal of his dirty clothes alone. The putting on of new clothing is a subsequent step.

Zechariah 3:6-10

As it stands in the traditional Hebrew text, this section can be seen to be totally symmetrical:

        A. Promise – “says the LORD of hosts” (vv. 6-7)

                B. “I will bring my servant the Branch” (v. 8)

                        C. stone with seven facets – “says the LORD of hosts” (v. 9a)

                B'. “I will remove the guilt of the land” (9b)

        A'. Promise – “says the LORD of hosts” (v. 10)

Such an arrangement places all the “says the LORD of hosts” in a symmetrical arrangement as well as putting two clear references to the coming of Christ, the Branch, to take away the people's sins in a parallel relationship (see B and B'). The meaning of the central section C has been much discussed, but it appears to be a highly symbolic way of capsulizing the whole passage.

The Jerusalem Bible “improvement” disrupts the above symmetry by transposing sections B and C.

Zechariah 6:8-15

The note in the Jerusalem Bible regarding the end of v. 8 says that v. 15 “must be transposed here” since they deal with the same exiles in the north. That may be the logical place to put v. 15 according to the editors of this translation, but no such need is apparent except to those who do not recognize the ABA nature of the passage. Thus, we have two “Those who” sections (verses 8 and 15) bracketing verses 9-14 which tell us what the word of the LORD to the prophet was. And that center section itself has its own set of brackets as seen below:

        A. Those who go to the north country (v. 8)

                B. The word of the LORD (v. 9)

                        1. Heldai, Tobijah, Jedaiah, Zephaniah and the crown (vv. 10-11)

                                2. “Thus says the LORD of hosts” (vv. 12-13)

                        1'. Heldai, Tobijah, Jedaiah, Zephaniah and the crown (v. 14)

        A'. Those who are far off shall come (v. 15)

Note again the centrality of the phrase “Thus says the LORD of hosts,” as in Zech. 3:9a above.

Thus, you can see that some modern scholars seem determined to force the Bible into the strait-jacket of their own preconceived notions rather than attempting to understand it on its own terms.

As an exercise, I will leave the other proposed rearrangements above for you to look at yourself and decide whether you agree with the translators' improvements.