Synoptica XVII - John's Black Leather Belt

While I was adding the vowel points to Chapter Three of Shem Tob's Hebrew Matthew, I came across a strange thing, and it shows how a lot can be learned from a single word.

וְעוֹר שָחוֹר אָזוֹר בְמָתְנָיו

This is my pointed version, but of course Hebrew vowel points did not exist yet at the time of the evangelists. In the unpointed text it is simply

ועור שחור אזור במתניו

This means, as George Howard (correctly) translated it, "and black leather girded his loins." I noticed the word "black" a long time ago, because it does not survive in any manuscript of the Greek textual tradition, or in any version that I'm aware of. The description of John's raiment did not make it into Luke, but it is in Mark, who translated it as "a leather belt around his waist." This is very interesting, for several reasons.

First of all, why is the word "black" in the (presumably original) Hebrew at all? It is not in any ms of the Greek textual tradition, either in the case of Matthew or in that of Mark. The answer is simple: rhyme. The relevant Hebrew words are pronounced "v'or shachor azor." This triple rhyme is a literary feature of the Hebrew text, and one that does not work in Greek. As it happens, Mark either did not bother to include the adjective, or it had not yet been put into the very early version of Matthew (Matthew I) that he used.

Another interesting point is that Hebrew Matthew says "girded" (belted), while all the Greek mss of both Mark and Matthew say "girdle" (belt). This is a translation variant, explained by the fact that, in an unpointed Hebrew text, the Qal Stative form אזור, (awzor, "belted") looks exactly the same as אזור (ezor, "belt"). This is further evidence for the Semitic substratum in both canonical (Greek) Matthew and canonical (Greek) Mark. According to my Layered Matthew Hypothesis for solution of the Synoptic Problem, both Greek texts were, in fact, translated from Hebrew Matthew, just as Papias told us in the second century.

The reader may wonder how we know which Hebrew word is correct, since "belt" and "belted" look the same in an unpointed text. If we assume that the noun, "belt," is correct, then the word order is wrong. In Hebrew, adjectives and adjectival phrases follow the noun, so "belt" would have been the first word of the three rhymed words, instead of the last. This also tells us that whoever translated Hebrew Matthew into Greek may have been more familiar with Greek than with Hebrew. 

Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler