Parsing Problems

It was a frigid January day in 2015, and I was sitting in my Herodotus seminar in college. It was my turn to translate. I was very proud of how well I’d prepared, and began confidently reading the Greek aloud. But after three words of my English translation, I was stopped short by the august professor. ‘Mr Nathan’, he said, ‘you have a parsing problem’.

I have hardly passed a day of my life without a parsing problem. It started when I realized that I had no way of knowing whether ‘the skies are not cloudy all day’ meant that the skies stayed cloudless for the whole day, or whether they were only cloudy for some of the day, but not all of it. The truth is, as soon as you start thinking about problems of phrasing, only a draught from the river Lethe will let you stop. We are surrounded every day by ambiguous syntax, and alas there is much less pleasure in solving parsing-problems than there is pain in noticing them. But at least I can make you share in some of my suffering.

In dulci jubilo, loveliest of all Christmas songs, contains the following stanza:

O Iesu parvule
Nach dir ist mir so weh:
Tröst mir mein Gemüte
O puer optime
Durch alle deine Güte
O princeps gloriæ,
Trahe me post te, trahe me post te.

O little Jesus, how I am pained for thee. Console my spirit, o greatest boy, through all thy goodness. O prince of glory, drag me after thee, drag me after thee. 

Here we have the stanza in its very earliest attestation from the fourteenth century:

If my palaeography hasn’t failed me, this says:

O Iesu parvule • nach dir ist mir so we • droste myn gemüde tu puer inclite • daȥ dů dorch dyne gůde • tu princeps glorie • Trahe me post te trahe me post te • in dines fader ryche o pater optime.

O little Jesus, how I am pained for thee. Console my spirit, thou glorious boy, through thy goodness, thou prince of glory. Drag me after thee, drag me after thee into thy father’s kingdom, O greatest father!

In both versions, the words trahe me post te are a little odd: where does that thought come from? The answer is the Song of Songs, 1:4.

מָשְׁכֵנִי אַחֲרֶיךָ נָּרוּצָה

Word for word, this means:

[Draw me] [after thee] [let us run]

But these words admit two different interpretations, depending on where one places a pause. Either we have:

Draw me after thee! Let us run.

or else

Draw me! Let us run after thee.

The Masoretes clearly preferred the second interpretation, and punctuated the half-verse like this:

מָשְׁכֵ֖נִי אַֽחֲרֶ֣יךָ נָּר֑וּצָה

The shophar holech under אַחֲרֶיךָ joins it to the following word נָּרוּצָה, which is marked with an atnah. The half-verse is thus apparently to be translated, ‘Draw me! Let us run after thee.’ (Incidentally, I don’t know why people use the word pointillation to describe the Masoretic marks, when we already have the word punctuation to hand; which comes from the same root, means the same thing, and is much more readily understood.)

 The Septuagint, for its part, translated the verse as follows: 

εἵλκυσάν σε ὀπίσω σου [εἰς ὀσμὴν μύρων σου] δραμοῦμεν.

This would suggest the opposite reading from the Masoretic text, as the interpolation (here in brackets) makes ὀπίσω σου modify εἵλκυσαν, not δραμοῦμεν. (The third-person plural aorist form εἵλκυσαν, just like the interpolation, is an eccentricity of its own, but we can’t stop to discuss it now.)

And at last, the Vulgate:

Trahe me post te curremus

Utter ambiguity. In sharp contrast to the scrupulously digested Masoretic text, Latin Bibles of the Middle Ages were systematically under-punctuated. They left questions of phrase division completely open to interpretation, so that it was left to any commentator to decide which phrasing he preferred. Thus the fourteenth-century composer of In dulci jubilo picked one interpretation, but he might as well have picked another. If we insist on the parsing as it is given in the Masoretic text, then he was wrong to quote the verse as he did. Trahe me and post te belong to two different sentences, and do not form a single phrase. But at least he is supported the authority of the Septuagint’s reading, which I suspect got nearer to the truth after all.

This is of relatively little importance, but there are other examples where the ambiguous division of a Biblical phrase could have much more serious consequences. The most famous instance of all is Isaiah 40:3:

ק֣וֹל קוֹרֵ֔א בַּמִּדְבָּ֕ר פַּנּ֖וּ דֶּ֣רֶךְ יְהוָ֑ה

If we observe the Masoretic punctuation, we must put a break at the zakef katon and translate this as:

A voice cries: prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness.

But the Septuagint had another idea:

φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ῾Ετοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου.

A voice of one that cries in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord.

And it was the Septuagint that got quoted by all four writers of the Gospel, making the ‘voice of one that cries in the wilderness’ into a prophecy of John the Baptist. For instance (Matthew 3:1–3):

In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, and saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

I don’t want to get into the question of which parsing is better. (It has been controversial for many centuries, and a standard point of dispute between pre-modern Christians and Jews.) But it is enough to observe that one of the basic prophecies of the New Testament, repeated in all four Gospels, depends on the correct parsing of an ambiguous verse. 

Finally consider a pair of verses in the Song of Moses, where God proclaims (Deuteronomy 32:40–41): 

כִּֽי־אֶשָּׂ֥א אֶל־שָׁמַ֖יִם יָדִ֑י  וְאָמַ֕רְתִּי חַ֥י אָנֹכִ֖י לְעֹלָֽם׃
אִם־שַׁנּוֹתִי֙ בְּרַ֣ק חַרְבִּ֔י  וְתֹאחֵ֥ז בְּמִשְׁפָּ֖ט יָדִ֑י
אָשִׁ֤יב נָקָם֙ לְצָרָ֔י  וְלִמְשַׂנְאַ֖י אֲשַׁלֵּֽם׃

Here are the translations of this passage in the LXX, the Vulgate, and the KJV:

ὅτι ἀρῶ εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν τὴν χεῖρά μου καὶ ὀμοῦμαι τῇ δεξιᾷ μου καὶ ἐρῶ Ζῶ ἐγὼ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, ὅτι παροξυνῶ ὡς ἀστραπὴν τὴν μάχαιράν μου, καὶ ἀνθέξεται κρίματος ἡ χείρ μου, καὶ ἀνταποδώσω δίκην τοῖς ἐχθροῖς καὶ τοῖς μισοῦσίν με ἀνταποδώσω.

Levabo ad cælum manum meam et dicam vivo ego in æternum. Si acuero ut fulgur gladium meum et arripuerit iudicium manus mea reddam ultionem hostibus meis et his qui oderunt me retribuam.

For I lift up my hand to heaven, and say, I live for ever. If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that hate me.

This is a case where the classical tradition is wrong, from the Septuagint right down to the KJV. These translations all take חַ֥י אָנֹכִ֖י לְעֹלָֽם׃, ‘I live forever’, to be an independent proposition, as if it were of great importance for God to say such a thing about himself. But it is no such thing. It was Rashi who pointed this out:

כי אשא אל שמים ידי. כִּי בַחֲרוֹן אַפִּי אֶשָּׂא יָדִי אֶל עַצְמִי בִּשְׁבוּעָה: ואמרתי חי אנכי. לְשׁוֹן שְׁבוּעָה הוּא, אֲנִי נִשְׁבָּע חי אנכי:

For I lift up my hand to heaven. That is, ‘in my wrath I lift up my hand in an oath’. And I say, I live forever. This is the language of an oath, as if to say, ‘I swear: as I live...’

He was absolutely right. חַ֥י אָנֹכִ֖י לְעֹלָֽם, I live forever, is not an emphatic proposition: it is the formulaic introduction to an oath. As God lives is the classical-oath formula in the Bible, and here we merely have an instance of its use in the first person. This is made even clearer by God’s lifting his hand: the standard Biblical oath-gesture. Sforno, agreeing with Rashi, pointed to a very similar passage at Daniel 12:17:

וָֽאֶשְׁמַ֞ע אֶת־הָאִ֣ישׁ ׀ לְב֣וּשׁ הַבַּדִּ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֣ר מִמַּעַל֮ לְמֵימֵ֣י הַיְאֹר֒ וַיָּ֨רֶם יְמִינ֤וֹ וּשְׂמֹאלוֹ֙ אֶל־הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וַיִּשָּׁבַ֖ע בְּחֵ֣י הָֽעוֹלָ֑ם כִּי֩ לְמוֹעֵ֨ד מֽוֹעֲדִ֜ים וָחֵ֗צִי וּכְכַלּ֛וֹת נַפֵּ֥ץ יַד־עַם־קֹ֖דֶשׁ תִּכְלֶ֥ינָה כָל־אֵֽלֶּה׃

And I heard the man dressed in linen who was above the waters of the Nile, and he lifted his right and left hand up to the heavens: and he swore on the One who lives forever that...

We should therefore read our verses: I lift my hand up to heaven, and I say: as I live forever, if I whet my sword, etc. 

The Septuagint was the first translation to get it wrong, and all subsequent translations followed suit. They definitively exclude the correct logical construction of these verses. Whether the Masoretic text can be said to be wrong too is a nice question: usually after oath-formulas there is no soph-pasuk, but on the other hand the poetic form of the passage imposed its own requirements of verse-division beyond the sense alone. 

Here I’ve discussed only three examples. But parsing problems are an extremely common phenomenon, and come up constantly in the history of the Bible’s interpretation. And elsewhere: I’m now editing a short book from the 1530s, which was printed with reasonable care, and still it is filled from beginning to end with fiendish problems of parsing and punctuation. To take one example at random:

Which would seem to mean: ‘above all [the damsels] should take care to pray at the very least that they not declare their wills so soon’, etc. Awful. But put a full stop after prier, and the whole passage becomes much happier: ‘they should force their lovers to beg for them. At the very least, they should not declare their wills so soon, but should dissemble as long as possible.’

In my experience, problems like this are actually much more frequent than garbled words and variant letters. Open up the Septuagint alongside the Masoretic text, and you’ll notice discrepancies by the dozen. And problems of this nature are also more difficult to correct: as soon as you undertake to repair a badly punctuated sentence, you find yourself clueless in a labyrinth of uncertainties, prey to the Minotaur of nonsense. If you do arrive at the right solution, it is always very hard to state the case in an elegant or convincing way to your peers; much harder than with other emendations. 

So pay attention to parsing, and always ask yourself whether a given attempt at representing it by punctuation it is correct. You might have all of the words that an ancient author wrote in pristine form: but unless you can establish the phrasing with which they are to be pronounced, you do not yet know what they mean.