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This entry is part of the Blogging-the-Bible series. To see a list of passages, covered so far click here. |
–[continued from previous post] The Philistines place the Ark of YHWH in the temple of Dagon the Philistine fish-god. From then on begins 2 chapters of destruction thanks to the Ark. At first, its presence topples the Dagon statue overnight. Oh well, say the Philistines, no matter. We’ll just place him on his pedestal once more. The next night he is toppled once again, this time smashed. YHWH shows his superiority but this little story is well written since it doesn’t mention his involvement so it shows the writer knew something of dramatic irony (in the Philistines being unaware of the “obvious”).
Then YHWH (actually the writer) shows some toilet humour. He strikes the Philistines with hemmorhoids, young and old, to the point where they can’t bear it. They move the Ark to another Philistine town which also gets hemmorhoids and so forth. Eventually they consult their conjurers who say that the ark should be returned to Israel along with a tribute to YHWH to acknowledge that he really is the biggest bully on the block.
The conjurers order them to place the Ark in a cart driven by two cows. It should be accompanied by a tribute to The Bully consisting of, yes, 5 golden figurines of the hemorrhoids and 5 of the mice that YHWH had struck them with. They then order a skeptical test I missed in my post on Biblical skepticism. The cows are to go by themselves. If they turn towards Beit Shemesh in Israelite territory this is taken as a sign that the hemorrhoids were from YHWH. If not they were to consider it as coincidence. Again, much respect to the god of the Bible being a reality — he is actually tested and actually shows up. The cows turn the Ark towards Israel. I guess these days since the cows don’t do such things we should attribute everything to coincidence instead of saying Sep 11th was caused by God’s wrath against lesbians, witches, atheists and the ACLU.
There are 2 curious aspects to their gift. The first is that the conjurers order hemorrhoids AND mice to be made (”and of the mice that are ravaging your land” [6:5]). But this is the first time mice are mentioned at all — the previous chapter which outlines the Philistines’ tribulations spends all its time talking only of the hemorrhoids! The Bible I’m using is from the Jewish Publication Society and is based on the Masoretic Text, ie. the traditional Jewish scribal version that also forms the basis of Protestant bibles. However there is the Septuagint (LXX for short), a much earlier Greek translation used by the Orthodox and Catholic churches. That version contains quite a few differences. For instance LXX’s chapter 5 indeed describes mice ravaging the land. This is one of many examples where the LXX (considered flawed, mistranslated and godless) by Jews and Protestants is much more reasonable than the Masoretic version, supposedly preserved perfectly intact by the Jewish scribes for centuries more than the LXX.
The second thing about the gift is in the Masoretic text. Sometimes there are marks on the text that a certain word should be pronounced differently to the way it’s written. Often this was done by the scribes to fix mistakes that have crept into the text (which they were too pious to fix in the text itself). So when the Bible talks about a woman but then says “he”, the Masoretic note is “read ’she’”. In a synagogue, someone called to the Torah would then read out ’she’. However this passage contains one of the only places where there’s a major departure because of censorship. In the text, the word for hemorrhoids is ofalim. However, the Masoretic note is to pronounce each instance as techorim, a completely different word! The apparent explanation (which makes sense) is that by the time of the scribes (over 1000 years later?), the first word for hemorrhoids was considered rude and so it was censored and replaced by the more polite (at the time) term. The story of the Ark is one of the liveliest, most visual in the whole Bible but it has not escaped the inconsistencies, messiness and inaccuracies of time.
Finally, it seems that the Ark brings trouble wherever it goes. As soon as it enters Israel, the town it enters celebrates and they peek into the Ark. And so, YHWH strikes down “seventy and 50,000″ people. This is where the idea of the Ark being deadly comes from — its the first of many instances which culminated in the Ark’s well known and heroic saving the day in WWII. In Samuel though, God’s punishment for Israel seems to be much harsher than his punishment of the Philistines. Although the text mentiones Philistines dying, it doesn’t give a figure so YHWH is even more of a mob boss towards his pet nation. Go figure.
Now, the plague-ridden town is sick of the Ark so they get it moved to another part of Israel, where–[to be continued]
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[...] from previous post]–the Ark was placed in a remote town and largely forgotten. Samuel’s long reign (over [...]
To clarify your statements on the LXX:
The Catholic church hasn’t used the LXX in a long time for the stories in the Hebrew Bible. Modern Catholic Bibles are translated from the Masoretic Text, with text-critical emendations. Before that they used the Vulgate, the latin bible, and translations of it. The Vulgate OT was originally translated mainly from Hebrew manuscripts, predecessors of the Masoretic Text.
The catholics however have a number of books in their Old Testament that were either written in Greek or where the Hebrew Vorlage is lost. Theses are translated from the LXX.
The protestants have also never regarded the Masoretic Text with the same reverence as the Jews. In modern times they are often quite willing to embrace textual criticism, even the more fundamentalist ones.
Oops, I thought the Catholics still used the LXX. Although it might be seen as regress not progress since many of the instances where I’ve read of a difference, the LXX appears to make more sense than the Masoretic.
Also Jews have also been willing to accept textual criticism in recent times. It’s almost entirely Reform and Conservative Jews (and left wing Orthodox) but then again the right-wing Orthodox might be considered as equivalent to those fundamentalist Christians that wouldn’t touch criticism with a 10 foot pole.
To be fair, the most common version of the Latin Psalter were actually translated by Jerome from the LXX version. And maybe the Greek-speaking Catholic Churches have used the LXX. But apart from that the Catholic church has not used the LXX for the last 1600 years probably.
My understanding is that the LXX is often a rather poor translation. The most famous error is of course confusing “young woman” with “virgin” but there are many others. Other times the translators were engaging in something closer to paraphrase than translation. And sometimes they were apparently translating a quite different text from the Hebrew one that is preserved today. (The book of Jeremiah being one example.)
The LXX is by no means worthless as a text-critical witness and there are many instances where it makes more sense than the masoretic text. But in most cases it is the other way around.
I thought Judaism did not use textual criticism for their Bibles*? Surely the Hebrew text that is read in synagogues is the Masoretic text, for example? I know the JPS claims to translate the Masoretic text exclusively in its Tanakh translation, though in practice it uses text-critical emendations in a few places.
Among Protestants the interesting thing is that even many fundamentalists that believe in young earth-creationism are willing to accept textual criticism of both the New and the Old Testament.
*That Reform and Conservative Judaism accepts scholarly inquiry into the origins of the masoretic text is something quite different. Just like they may accept the documentary hypothesis for the origin of the Torah but still view the final redaction as the inspired version they may view the masoretic text as inspired while accepting that it contains scribal errors.
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