The Boundaries
Deuteronomy 32:8. The Masoretic Text says the Most High divided the nations 'according to the number of the sons of Israel.' The Hebrew manuscript at Qumran and the Septuagint preserve the older reading: 'according to the number of the sons of God.'
The previous installment of this series proved that the Hebrew Bible was edited. The evidence was internal — two versions of the same sentence, dated relative to each other, with one word substituted for another. The argument worked, but it required a chain of inference. The Chronicler must have known Samuel. Samuel must have come first. The change must have been deliberate.
This installment requires no inference. The unedited verse still exists. It was found in a cave. It is older than the version printed in every Bible currently in circulation. And it says something the printed version does not say.
The verse is Deuteronomy 32:8.
The verse as printed
Open any standard English Bible. Turn to Deuteronomy 32. Read verse 8.
"When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel."
This is the reading of the Masoretic Text — the medieval Hebrew manuscript tradition from which nearly all modern translations descend. The verse describes a primordial event. The Most High — Elyon in Hebrew — divides humanity into nations. He sets boundaries between them. The number of nations matches the number of bene Yisrael — the sons of Israel.
This is the verse as it has been read for at least a thousand years. The Masoretic manuscripts agree. The translations agree. The commentaries explain.
There is one problem with the verse as printed. It does not make sense.
The problem
The setting of Deuteronomy 32:8 is the division of the nations after the flood. The reader is meant to recall Genesis 10 — the Table of Nations — and Genesis 11 — the Tower of Babel. The Most High divides humanity into seventy peoples and disperses them across the earth.
Israel does not yet exist.
Abraham has not been called. Isaac has not been born. Jacob — the man later renamed Israel — is many generations away. The twelve tribes that descend from his twelve sons are further away still. At the moment Deuteronomy 32:8 describes, there are no sons of Israel. There is no Israel. There is no Jacob. The category does not exist.
The verse as printed in the Masoretic Text says that the Most High divided the nations according to the number of a group that would not come into being for centuries. The numbers do not even match in any coherent way — Genesis 10 lists seventy nations; Genesis 46 lists seventy descendants of Jacob who went down to Egypt; the correspondence between these two seventies has to be constructed retroactively, and the construction strains the chronology of the text itself.
The verse is not difficult to interpret. It is impossible to interpret. The Most High is establishing the structure of the world according to a population that has not yet been born.
For most of the last two thousand years, this problem was either ignored, harmonized through ingenious commentary, or treated as one of the deep mysteries of the text.
Then, in 1947, a shepherd found a cave.
The cave
The caves at Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, contained the manuscript library of a Jewish sectarian community that was active from roughly the second century BCE to the first century CE. The library included biblical texts copied centuries before the earliest surviving Masoretic manuscripts. Among the scrolls was a fragmentary copy of the book of Deuteronomy, designated 4QDeut^j. A second relevant fragment, 4QDeut^q, was also recovered.
The fragments preserve Deuteronomy 32:8.
The Qumran text does not read bene Yisrael. It reads bene Elohim — the sons of God.
"When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of God."
The verse now makes sense. The Most High is dividing the nations according to the number of divine beings — assigning each nation to one of his subordinates. The verse refers to a heavenly population, not a future earthly one. The seventy nations correspond to seventy divine beings. The structure of the cosmos is established at creation, not retroactively to match a family tree that has not yet branched.
The Qumran reading is older than the Masoretic reading. The fragments are dated by paleography and by radiocarbon to roughly the late second or first century BCE — more than a thousand years older than the standard Masoretic manuscripts.
The unedited verse survived. It survived in the desert, in a sealed jar, in a cave, for two thousand years. And when it was found, it read differently than the verse the Masoretes preserved.
The second witness
The Qumran fragments are not the only witness to the older reading.
The Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures produced in Alexandria beginning in the third century BCE — also preserves the older reading. The Septuagint translators rendered Deuteronomy 32:8 as kata arithmon angelōn theou — "according to the number of the angels of God." The translators were working from a Hebrew text that did not say bene Yisrael. They were working from a Hebrew text that said something closer to bene Elohim, which they rendered into Greek with their standard equivalent for divine beings.
This means we have two independent witnesses to the older reading. A Hebrew witness from Qumran. A Greek witness from Alexandria. The two communities were geographically distant and theologically distinct. They were not coordinating. They both preserve a reading that differs from the Masoretic Text in exactly the same way.
The Masoretic reading, then, is not the original. It is a later development. The reading the Masoretes preserved — sons of Israel — was not the reading in front of the Qumran scribe in the first century BCE, and it was not the reading in front of the Alexandrian translators centuries earlier than that.
It was a change. Made later. In one manuscript stream. The stream that became the basis for the medieval Hebrew Bible and, through that, for nearly every modern translation.
Why this is not a scribal accident
The defense of the Masoretic reading typically begins by suggesting that the difference is a scribal error. The Hebrew word for Israel — Yisrael — contains the consonants yod-shin-resh-aleph-lamed. The Hebrew word for God — El — contains the consonants aleph-lamed. A scribe, the argument goes, might have lost a few letters in copying, or added a few letters, and produced the variant.
This defense has been examined in detail. It does not work.
The Qumran fragment reads bene Elohim — sons of Elohim, the plural form. Elohim contains the consonants aleph-lamed-he-yod-mem. There is no way to get from Yisrael to Elohim by a single scribal slip. The letter sets do not overlap in the way required. A scribe copying from a text that read bene Yisrael would have to delete five consonants and add five different consonants in a specific order to produce bene Elohim. This is not a slip. This is a substitution.
The reverse — a scribe copying from bene Elohim and producing bene Yisrael — also requires substantial alteration. But it has a motive. The motive is the same motive that drove the Chronicler in Part 1 of this series. A theological problem in the source text was resolved by changing a word.
The textual critic Emanuel Tov, one of the foremost scholars of the Hebrew Bible's manuscript history, classified the Masoretic reading of Deuteronomy 32:8 as an anti-polytheistic alteration. The change was made to remove a theological feature that had become unacceptable to the editors.
What feature?
What the older verse says
In the older reading — preserved at Qumran, preserved in the Septuagint, almost certainly original — Deuteronomy 32:8 says that the Most High divided the nations and assigned each nation to one of the sons of God.
This is not a metaphor. The verses that follow make the meaning explicit. Deuteronomy 32:9 says: "For the LORD's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance." The LORD — Yahweh — receives Jacob as his allotment.
The structure is this. Elyon — the Most High — is the head of a divine council. He divides the nations among the sons of God. Each son receives a nation. Yahweh receives Israel. Israel is Yahweh's allotted portion within a larger structure presided over by the Most High.
This is not the theology of the Hebrew Bible as Jews and Christians have received it. The Most High and Yahweh are not the same figure in this verse. Yahweh is one of the divine beings to whom the Most High distributes nations. The system is hierarchical and pluralistic. There is one supreme deity. Beneath him is a council of subordinate deities. The nations of the earth correspond to the members of the council. Israel is one nation, with one patron deity, within a system that contains many.
This is the religious structure of the ancient Near East. It is the structure preserved in the Ugaritic texts, which describe a divine council headed by El, with seventy subordinate deities who are the sons of El's consort Athirat. The seventy nations of the Genesis Table of Nations correspond to the seventy sons of the council. Each nation has its god. The Hebrew god — Yahweh — has Israel.
The unedited verse of Deuteronomy 32:8 preserves this older theology inside the Hebrew Bible. The edited verse hides it.
When the edit happened
The dating of the edit can be established with reasonable precision.
The Qumran manuscripts preserving bene Elohim are dated to the late Second Temple period. The Septuagint translation preserving angelōn theou was begun in the third century BCE and continued for centuries. Both witnesses confirm that the older reading was the standard reading well into the Second Temple period.
The Masoretic reading — bene Yisrael — appears in later manuscripts. The earliest complete Masoretic Bible, the Leningrad Codex, is from the eleventh century CE. But the textual tradition behind it stabilized centuries earlier, probably between the first and third centuries CE, during and after the rise of rabbinic Judaism.
Between roughly the first century BCE — when the Qumran scribe wrote bene Elohim — and roughly the second or third century CE — when the Masoretic stream was being standardized — somebody made the change. The change persisted in the manuscript stream that became authoritative. It did not persist in the streams that did not.
The window for the edit, in other words, overlaps the centuries during which Jewish theology was being decisively reformulated around strict monotheism. The Mishnah was being compiled. The Talmudic project was beginning. The boundary between Yahweh and any other divine beings was being hardened. The divine council was being theologically dismantled.
The edit of Deuteronomy 32:8 belongs to this project. It removed, from a single verse, the residue of an older theology that had become unacceptable.
The verse was edited because it said the wrong thing.
What the edit proves
The edit of Deuteronomy 32:8 proves something that the edit in Part 1 also proved but with stronger evidence.
It proves the text was changed. Not interpreted differently. Not transmitted with minor variants. Changed — with one substantive reading replaced by another substantive reading in a verse that was otherwise preserved.
It proves the change had a theological motive. The substitution does not improve the grammar, does not clarify the meaning, does not resolve any literary problem. It removes a theological claim. The claim was that the world is divided among the sons of God under the presidency of the Most High. The edit removes the claim.
It proves the older theology existed inside the Hebrew Bible before it was edited out. This is the most important point. The older theology is not being inferred from external sources or reconstructed from cognate cultures. It is being read off the surface of the unedited verse. The Hebrew Bible, in its older form, taught a hierarchical divine council with subordinate national deities. The edited version does not.
The history of Israelite religion, in other words, is not a straight line from primitive polytheism to mature monotheism. It is a process in which earlier theological forms were progressively eliminated from the texts that preserved them. The forms were not absent from the original texts. They were edited out of the surviving manuscripts.
This is the forensic significance of Deuteronomy 32:8. We are not deducing the older theology. We are reading it. The fragment is in our hands.
The pattern with Part 1
Two installments of this series. Two edits. Both involve the substitution of one named agent for another. Both produce a text more compatible with the theology of the editing community than with the theology of the source.
In Part 1, the Chronicler replaced the LORD with Satan as the inciter of David's census. The substitution served a theological program in which God could no longer be the direct source of morally awkward action. The replacement figure was supplied by the theological environment in which the Chronicler was working — an environment shaped, during the Persian period, by cosmic dualism.
In Part 2, the Masoretic tradition replaced the sons of God with the sons of Israel as the population by which the Most High divided the nations. The substitution served a theological program in which the divine council could no longer be acknowledged. The replacement figure was supplied by the theological environment in which the Masoretes' predecessors were working — an environment in which strict monotheism had become the unnegotiable center of Jewish self-understanding.
The two edits run in opposite directions chronologically. Chronicles added a figure that the older theology lacked. The Masoretic Text removed a figure that the older theology contained. But the operations are formally identical. In each case, an editor confronted a verse incompatible with the theology of his moment. In each case, the editor preserved the rest of the verse and changed the part that gave offense. In each case, the change is visible — to the Chronicler's audience because the Samuel verse survived alongside the Chronicles verse, to us because the Qumran and Septuagint witnesses survived alongside the Masoretic text.
The Bible was not transmitted untouched. It was transmitted through a process of selective theological editing. The process is visible because, in case after case, the unedited version survived somewhere — in an earlier book, in a desert cave, in a Greek translation made before the Hebrew text was standardized.
The Edit Room is not a metaphor. It was a real practice, conducted over centuries, by communities with theological commitments that required certain verses to say something other than what they said.
The honest reading
The honest reading of Deuteronomy 32:8 is that the older form of the verse described a divine council, that the editor of the Masoretic tradition changed the verse to remove the council, and that the older form survived in two independent witnesses that the editor could not reach.
Every modern Bible carries the edited verse in its main text. Some Bibles include a footnote noting the variant. Most do not. The reader who has not been told about Qumran will never know that the verse he reads is not the verse his ancestors read.
The verse he reads says that the boundaries of the peoples were established by the number of a tribe that did not yet exist. The verse his ancestors read said that the boundaries of the peoples were established by the number of the divine beings who would govern them.
The first verse is nonsense. The second verse is theology.
The first verse is what the editor wrote. The second verse is what the cave preserved.
The cave is older.