O Death, Where is Thy Sting?

Most of the following was well-explored in the nineteenth century, but I’ve never seen it discussed in all its aspects in one place, so here goes.

I

Hosea 14:13 goes like this:

מיד שאול אפדם ממות אגאלם אהי דבריך מות אהי קטבך שאול נחם יסתר מעיני

This is a very difficult verse, studded with several lexical difficulties. But our first guide should be its context: it is set within a prophecy of Ephraim’s ruin, so whatever interpretation we land on, it should probably be a threatening announcement of doom.

The three words that have historically caused trouble are: 

1. אהי. This is either a) an untranslatable interjection, b) the word ‘where’, akin to איה, or c) the word ‘I am’, akin to אהיה. The question is still unsettled: translations and dictionaries, even good ones and modern ones, are all at variance.

2. דבריך. ‘Your ___s.’ There is no way of knowing a priori whether דֶּבֶר, ‘plague’, or דָּבָר, ‘word/thing/affair/lawsuit’ is intended. But that דבריך comes from דֶּבֶר and not דָּבָר is made plain by the parallelism of דֶּבֶר  and קֶּטֶב at Ps 91:6. 

3. קטבך. ‘Your destruction’. This is merely a rare word, whose proper vocalization in the singular is probably קֶטֶב. 

Meanwhile there is a grammatical problem. Are the opening words מיד שאול אפדם ממות אגאלם meant to be ironic rhetorical questions (i.e. do I ransom them from the grave? or redeem them from death?)? Or are they affirmative statements that God will rescue Israel from death? And if the latter, how are they to be reconciled with the immediately following threats?

In my private view the verse is properly translated:

I ransom them from the grave, and from death I redeem them: [but] O for your plagues, O Death! O for your ruin, O grave! Comfort shall be hidden from my eyes. 

That is: ‘I save Israel from the grave and death, but only to her sorrow, for I will demand plagues from death and ruin from the grave to afflict her mercilessly withal.’ 

II

The Septuagint translates our verse like this:

ἐκ χειρὸς ᾅδου ῥύσομαι αὐτοὺς καὶ ἐκ θανάτου λυτρώσομαι αὐτούς· ποῦ ἡ δίκη σου, θάνατε; ποῦ τὸ κέντρον σου, ᾅδη; παράκλησις κέκρυπται ἀπὸ ὀφθαλμῶν μου. 

I will ransom them from the hand of Hades and redeem them from death: where is your suit, O death? Where is your sting, O Hades? Comfort is hidden from my eyes.

Δίκη, ‘(law)suit’, is a translation of דָּבָר, not דֶּבֶר. The Septuagint’s translation is thus a misapprehension of the Hebrew, especially in light of Ps 91:6 as I noted above. Moreover, it takes אהי to mean ποῦ, ‘where’, plausibly enough.

Jerome translated the verse as follows for the Vulgate: 

De manu mortis liberabo eos de morte redimam eos ero mors tua o mors ero morsus tuus inferne consolatio abscondita est ab oculis meis.

This differs in several points from the Septuagint. Jerome explained himself like this:

...In eo loco, in quo LXX transtulerunt, ubi est causa tu? et nos diximus, ero mors tua: Symmachus interpretatus est, ero plaga tua: quinta editio et Aquila: Ubi sunt sermones tui? quod hebraice scribitur DABARACH: legentes DABAR, hoc est, verbum pro DEBER, quod interpretatur mors...Pro aculeo quoque, quem nos morsum transtulimus, Symmachus ἀπαντημα, id est occursum, Theodotion et quinta editio, plagam, et conclusionem interpretati sunt.

For the word דְבָרֶיךָ, which the Septuagint translated as where is your suit?, we as ‘I will be your death’, Symmachus as: ‘I will be your plague’; and the Quinta and Aquila as: ‘where are your words?’ —the Septuagint read דָּבָר; that is, ‘word’, rather than ‘ דֶּבֶר’, which is translated ‘mors’. .. And for aculeo [קטבך], which we translated as ‘morsus’ [bite], Symmchus had ἀπαντημα, i.e. ‘meeting’, Theodotion ‘plague’, and the Quinta ‘shutting-up’.

Thus Jerome correctly noticed the Septuagint’s error at דְבָרֶיךָ; probably not independently, but following on Symmachus’ unique translation of the verse. Apparently only Symmachus had rendered דְבָרֶיךָ as ‘plagues’ rather than as one of the variants of דָּבָר. Jerome happened to prefer his translation to that of the Septuagint and all of the other hexaplar translators—which was fortunate, as it happens to have been the right one. Meanwhile, he had the good sense to reject Symmachus’ strange translation of קטבך.

[By the way, here are Frederick Field’s back-translated reconstructions of the hexaplar variants at this verse:

Aquila. ἔσομαι ῥήματά σου, θάνατε, ἔσομαι δηγμοί σου, ᾅδε.

Symmachus. ἔσομαι πλήγή σου ἐν θανάτῳ, ἔσομαι ἀκηδία σου ἐν ᾅδῃ.

Theodotion. καὶ ἔσται ἡ δίκη σου ἐν θανάτῳ, καὶ πληγή σου ἐν ᾅδῃ.

Quinta. ποῦ οἱ λόγοι σου...]

III

That would seem to be all, but I have not yet mentioned what is by far the most famous ancient commentary on this verse: Paul’s quotation of it at I Corinthians 15:54–6. In the Nestlé-Aland edition we read:

ὅταν δὲ τὸ φθαρτὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσηται ἀφθαρσίαν καὶ τὸ θνητὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσηται ἀθανασίαν, τότε γενήσεται ὁ λόγος ὁ γεγραμμένος· κατεπόθη ὁ θάνατος εἰς νῖκος. ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος; ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ κέντρον; τὸ δὲ κέντρον τοῦ θανάτου ἡ ἁμαρτία, ἡ δὲ δύναμις τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ νόμος.

But when this corrupt thing puts on incorruption, and this mortal thing puts on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up into victory [Isaiah 25:8]. 

O death where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the Law.

This passage displays strong textual variation in the manuscripts, including an inconsistent ordering of the twin ποῦ σου θάνατε clauses. To keep to one of them, I think that we should probably not read (θάνατε, τὸ) νῖκος, victory, but rather …τὸ νεῖκος, suit; controversy. In order to clarify this error, look at the Hebrew original of Isaiah 25:8, which Paul quotes immediately before our verse:

בִּלַּע המות לנצח

Κατεπόθη ὁ θάνατος εἰς νῖκος is indeed a correct translation of this. (Κατέπιεν ὁ θάνατος ἰσχύσας, in the Septuagint, is an acceptable alternative.) Εἰς νεῖκος, meanwhile, cannot be the translation of לנצח by any stretch.  But as for Paul’s following citation, אהי דבריך מות cannot easily be translated as ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος; and a much better translation is νεῖκος, which is in line with the Septuagint’s understanding of דבריך as a suffixed form of דָּבָר. Paul was probably relying on a manuscript of the Septuagint that had νεῖκος instead of its synonym δίκη. (Where he found the variant translation of Isaiah 25:8 is something that I’d be very happy to learn.) Anyway, I suspect that the two words νῖκος and νεῖκος in I Corinthians have been confused in most manuscripts as a result of cross-contamination between proximate verses. This is extremely understandable on palaeographic grounds; so much so, in fact, that it would be surprising if the manuscript tradition had managed to get the two words straight.

Pier Vettori, writing in the sixteenth century, observed that Jerome’s translations implied that he had read  νεῖκος in both places in his manuscripts of I Corinthians. Vettori also cited some other authors who had been under the same impression, and a manuscript that had the same reading. Most of our received texts, in contrast, tend to have νῖκος in both places. It might be tempting to conclude immediately that Paul originally wrote both νῖκος and νεῖκος, which is the correct reading as far as conformity to (the Septuagint’s reading of) the Hebrew is concerned. But this is only one of three possibilities:

1. Paul wrote νῖκος / νεῖκος, but the earliest copies of I Corinthians merged them both into either νῖκος or νεῖκος.

2. The manuscripts used by Paul had νεῖκος / νεῖκος or νῖκος / νῖκος, and he copied what he saw.

3. The manuscripts used by Paul had νῖκος / νεῖκος, and he made a mistake.

All the same, given the existence of both variants in the manuscripts of Corinthians, I think that possibility 1 is the most likely after all. Paul probably wrote ‘κατεπόθη ὁ θάνατος εἰς νεῖκος. ποῦ σου, θάνατε, τὸ νῖκος;’, and variations of this represent scribal corruptions.

Apart from this, there are some other variants. For instance, the first θάνατε is replaced in some manuscripts by ᾅδη. But I am inclined to think that this and several other variants result from scribal attempts to bring Paul’s phrasing into line with the Septuagint’s. The double θάνατε, both for its awkwardness and for its marked deviation from the Septuagint, is the harder reading. And as we have already seen in the case of the Isaiah 25:8 citation, there is no reason to assume that Paul was copying faithfully from any single manuscript of the Septuagint or any other Greek translation of Hosea or Isaiah.

Conjecture at Horace, C. I.xxxii.15

Horace, C.I.xxxii.13–16, according to the mss.:

O decus Phœbi et dapibus supremi
Grata testudo Iovis o laborum

Dulce lenimen mihi cumque salve
Rite vocanti.

This is gibberish. Lachmann made things better, writing obiter in his comment on Lucr. V.311: 

…præterea cumque nisi cum relativis coniunctum lingua Latina non agnoscit: neque Horatius in carminum 1,32 potuit dicere mihi cumque salve (volunt enim hoc esse ‘salve quotiens te advoco’: at cur lyra alias ei non salveat?), sed scripsit o laborum Dulce lenimen medicumque salve Rite vocanti. 

Now I propose:

O decus Phoebi et dapibus supremi
Grata testudo Iovis, o laborum
Dulce lenimen melicumque salve
Rite vocanti.

O grace of Apollo, O lyre beloved at the feasts of exalted Jupiter, O sweet and songful lightener of suffering, rejoice in him who duly calls thee.

Update: A loyal friend of mine has pointed out that T. J. B. Brady made this very emendation in the late nineteenth century. My rabbi once told me that you shouldn’t curse your luck in such a situation for being preempted, but thank God that you were allowed to attain the same insight as one of your elders and betters.  

New word submitted to the OED: Gargalism

Gargalism, n.

Something gargled; a mouthwash. 

 It is attested in the funeral sermon for Lancelot Andrewes, 1626:

And true Religion is no way a gargalisme onely, to wash the tongue and mouth, to speake good words: it must root in the heart, and then fructifie in the hand; else it will not cleanse the whole man.

John Buckeridge, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God Lancelot, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester, in the Parish Church of St. Savior in Southwarke, On Saturday being the XI. of November, A. D. MDCXXVI (London: Richard Badger, 1629), p. 7.

This word would seem to have the same meaning of gargarism, n., and could perhaps be listed with it as a variant form. Its figurative connotation, however, is not present in any of the examples listed under sense 1 of gargarism.

Letter to the OED on Torpedo

I’ve written this letter to the Oxford English Dictionary about part of their entry on torpedo:

 b. figurative. One who or that which has a benumbing influence.

a1593   C. Marlowe Edward II (1594) sig. C2v   Faire Queene forbeare to angle for the fish..I meane that vile Torpedo, Gaueston.

1762   O. Goldsmith Life R. Nash 34   He used to call a pen his torpedo, whenever he grasped it, it numbed all his faculties.

c1855   B. S. Hollis Hymn-bk. C'tess Huntingdon's Connecticut Pref.   The torpedo of formality had benumbed the churches.

Sense 1b of the existing entry ‘torpedo’ does not exist as a coherent category, and the quotations listed under it need to be resolved into at least two clearly distinguishable senses. The first of these is merely ‘numbness’, and is derived directly from the primitive sense of Latin torpēdō, defined by the Oxford Latin Dictionary as ‘A state of inertness, sluggishness, lethargy’. The citation from Hollis belongs plainly to this sense, as ‘torpedo’ does not refer to any agent, abstract or concrete, but is merely in (genitive) apposition to ‘formality’. The citation from Goldsmith about Nash is on the borderline, I think, and might belong to the distinct sense ‘that which has a benumbing influence’; but should probably just be folded into the general sense of ‘numbness’. Torpedo was already conceived of in Latin as having an active benumbing force on a person; cf. Sallust’s ‘si tanta torpedo animos obrepsit’ or Tacitus’ ‘tanta torpedo invaserat animum’. Incidentally, the Goldsmith quotation seems to be related somehow to the following passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which should be added to the list of attestations:

‘It has been circulated, I know not with what authenticity, that Johnson considered Dr. Birch as a dull writer, and said of him, “Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand, than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.”’ (ed. 1791, pp. 85–6.)

I think it is highly unlikely that Johnson or Nash (if either of them indeed said this) had the electric ray in mind; far likelier they were just using a Latin word for oppressive numbness. Therefore it is questionable whether the sense of the Nash and Hollis attestations should be described as ‘figurative’, as it has nothing to do with fish and does not rely for its meaning on the abstract application of any concrete image. 

As for the citation from Marlowe, it does not belong to the other two at all, because it is unmistakably a reference to the electric ray. However, that this reference is mischaracterized by the definition ‘one who or that which has a benumbing influence’ is made clear by the full context:

Faire Queene forbeare to angle for the fish,
Which being caught, strikes him that takes it dead,
I mean that vile Torpedo, Gaueston,
That now I hope flotes on the Irish seas.
(ed. 1594, fol. C2 v.)

Marlowe’s torpedo doesn’t benumb you—it strikes you dead! In any case, I am not convinced that this attestation deserves even to be called figurative, as it rather seems to be a literal reference to the fish, to which Gaveston is likened in a simile. Thus it can arguably be listed under sense 1a.