Donald Traxler's Poetry: Reading Matthew in Hebrew

Monday, October 29, 2018

Reading Matthew in Hebrew - VI

For many years I have been interested in the "synoptic problem" and in the Semitic substratum for which there is evidence (mostly in the form of wordplay and translation variants). For a long time I believed that this substratum was probably Aramaic, but I am now favoring Hebrew. This note is intended to explain this shift in my thinking.

A good example is Matthew 5:46-48. When one reads these verses in the Delitzsch translation into Biblical Hebrew, one is impressed by the amount of wordplay present, of a kind that is typical of Semitic texts, but not of translations of any sort. For example, "ahava" (love) is echoed by "achim" (brothers), and "shalom" (peace, health) is echoed in "shalem" (perfect, complete). This last example works in Hebrew, but not in Aramaic, where the word used for "perfect" is "gamir."

Burt these verses are interesting for another reason. Verse 47 has come down to us in a form that either says "Do not the publicans (tax collectors) also do this?" (the so-called Received, or Byzantine Text) or says "Do not the ethnikoi (gentiles, goyim) also do this?" (the best and most ancient Greek texts). This verse 47 is absolutely central to the wordplay, so it clearly is original. But should the reference be to tax collectors (who have already been mentioned in verse 46), or to the gentiles? The latter is suggested by the better texts. The clincher, though, comes from the omission of verse 47 in the oldest Old Syriac that we have (the Sinaitic Syriac) and in our oldest Old Latin (Bobiensis, known as "k").

This omission of verse 47 cannot have been an accident, occurring as it does in both the Syriac and the Old Latin textual traditions. It is likely that it was at some time felt that the verse would be offensive to the gentiles, who had become the major audience for Christianity. But later texts, such as the Peshitta and the Byzantine Greek texts, found an easier solution: they simply changed "gentiles" to "publicans," who had already been mentioned in the preceding verse. St. Jerome, to his credit, kept the word "ethnici" in the Vulgate.

The verse, in its original form, shows that the original audience for the Sermon on the Mount was the Jews. Its omission at a certain point in time, in two different manuscript streams, shows that that situation had changed.

The omission of verse 47 in Syr-s and in k also interests me for another reason. I have a Hebrew translation of Matthew that also omits the verse. It was published in the late fourteenth century, but is clearly older. It is the Hebrew Matthew of Shem Tob ibn Saprut. Other evidence makes it likely that it was translated either from the Old Syriac or from the Old Latin.

The wordplay in verse 48, dependent on the choice of the word "shalem" for "perfect," fortunately came out in Delitzsch's Hebrew translation (ca. 1877, with many later editions), but it did not come out in that of Salkinson (ca. 1885), who used the other common Hebrew word for "perfect," which is "tamim." It did not come out in Syriac (late, eastern Aramaic), either.

The three translations I've mentioned of Matthew back into the language in which the Sayings were probably written are all somewhat different, and they are all interesting. That of Shem Tob was made by Jews for polemical purposes and supports a theology that is different, to be sure, from that of Pauline Christianity. Salkinson's translation (completed for Acts after his death, by C. D. Ginsburg) is intentionally periphrastic, so may sound more natural in places. It was based on the great Codex Sinaiticus, one of the best available. I also love the fact that he used the word "goyim" for "ethnikoi." But Delitzsch's translation is, by far, my favorite. It is written in impeccable Biblical Hebrew which, although it may be an anachronism, is reassuring and makes it quite clear and easy to understand. It's greatest weakness is that, after the first edition, the British and Foreign Bible Society forced him to modify it to agree with the so-called Received Text if he wanted them to publish and distribute it. Reading Matthew in any of these translations is highly rewarding, revealing things about the Sayings (which for me are the teachings of Rabbi Yeshua) that would not be apparent in any other language.