29 December 2020

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.

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