Out of the Mouths of Vampires

by peacefulpete 18 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  peacefulpete

  One of the most quoted and loved passages of the Bible has an unexpected textual history.

  At Matt 21:16 Jesus is made to say:

  Have you never read, ‘FROM THE MOUTHS OF INFANTS AND NURSING BABIES YOU HAVE PREPARED PRAISE FOR YOURSELF’?”

  Many recognize that the Psalm 8:2,3 here quoted in part is a form of the passage found in the LXX. The MT reads differently:

  Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings You have established strength because of Your adversaries, in order to put an end to enemy and avenger.

  Many, many commentators and theologians has commented on this passage since antiquity, in part because the texts reads awkwardly and defies an easy explanation.

  What do sucklings have to do with Yahweh's defeat of his enemy?

  Firstly we must appreciate this is likely the reason the LXX translators opted to creatively alter the text. But it gets complicated.

  Psalm 8:2b-3:New Proposals for Old Problems
  MARK S. SMITH
  Psalm 8 is one of the psalms that have attracted the greatest attention from biblical scholars. While the picture of humanity and the cosmos in Psalm 8 and the psalm's relations with the priestly story of creation in Gen 1 : 1- 2:4a have been the objects of frequent study, the textual difficulties involved in Ps 8:2b-3 have been addressed less often. Despite the variety of proposals for understanding these verses, no rendering advanced to date has been judged satisfactory. The reason lies largely with the text itself, which hardly conforms to the general canons of syntax and parallelism for biblical poetry.

  Smith continues by reviewing the suggestions and the links to a creation myth wherein Yahweh defeats his primeval enemies in the habituating the earth for humans.

  Verse 3 evokes a cosmic conflict at the time of the creation of the universe. The two expressions for cosmic enemies, côlelîm wěyoněqím and *Dôyêb ûmitnaqqëm, are semantically (though not syntactically) parallel. This proposal is informed by the frequent comparison of this passage with CTA 23,offered first by C. Shedl in 1964.11 Called "suckers" ( ynqm ) as in Ps 8:3, the cosmic foes, known also to be children of the god El, devour all the beasts of the cosmos and are remanded to the desert for seven || eight years until they are allowed into the sown region. The putative parallels with Ps 8:3 involve (1) divine "suckers," (2) their appetite that threatens all animals (stressed in Ps 8:3 with the image of their mouth), and (3) the possible cosmogonie setting of this myth. Evidently Ps 8:3 alludes to a related myth (though it is hardly necessary that the same myth be involved). On this view, cólělím wěyoněqím and Doyēb ûmitnaqqêm may be regarded as examples of hendiadys, rendered as such in the translation above. Accordingly, the prepositional phrase preceding cólělím wěyoněqím, namely, mippî (literally, "from the mouth of") does not refer to the material from which the stronghold is built; instead, it constitutes the threat for which the stronghold is need.

  In short the proposal is that the passage has been corrupted and originally was a hymn to Yahweh as mighty defeater of his enemies, who include "suckers", supernatural beings who were children of El but presented a threat to life. A number of other researchers have connected these elements as the referenced provided in his article show.

  The proposed alternate translation is:

  Let me sing/ celebrate your splendor over the heavens.
  From the mouth of (sucker children) suckling babes you established a strong place,
  For your stronghold you indeed ended the avenging enemy.

  By way of parallel another difficult passage in Proverbs 30:15 has defied simple explanation.

  To the leech (Aluka, sucker) are two daughters, 'Give, give'. Lo, three things are not satisfied, Four have not said 'Sufficiency;'

  Many commentators have suggested we have a conflation of proverbs with the verse 15a reference to the sucker having insatiable daughters having lost it's conclusion and 15b simply being the intro to what is now in verse 16.

  The ‛Alûka hath two daughters: Give! Give! (lost )

  Three are never satisfied; Four say not: Enough! The under-world and the closing of the womb, The earth is not satisfied with water, and the fire saith not: Enough!

  This enigmatic sucker has been linked to the Arabic cognate 'awleq' which refers to a sucking demon. (e.g. De Moor).

  So....what we have is another plausible ancient reference to a sucking demon related to the Arabic and Ugarit mythology.

  It is perhaps informative that that was a widely held understanding among Rabbinic and later Jewish mythologists. They expanding this sucking demon into elaborate tales of a shapeshifting bloodsucking witch/demon name Alukah. Alukah - Wikipedia

  Naturally most modern commentators argue against this conclusion, however their suggestions are IMO inadequate.

  
  
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  peacefulpete

  Sorry that was messy as usual. Very distracted and ran out of time for editing.
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  KalebOutWest

  I have heard this before, but this is just like the "torture stake" argument Jehovah's Witnesses created based off of reading the text and looking things up in lexicons, but forgetting that these texts were not written by Hebrew-speaking Jews but Aramaic-speaking Jews that used liturgical Hebrew for worship and were slowly beginning to replace their everyday speech with Aramaic.

  In Psalm 8 you find Aramaic mixed in with Hebrew and influencing the Hebrew liturgy. This is a liturgical text, very different from a narrative one from, let's say 2 Samuel or Joshua. The liturgy is filled with both Hebrew and Aramaic. Some of the prayers of the Siddur are completely in Aramaic, such as the Kaddish, which is the prayer one says for the dead. The time period is of the Second Temple, the time of Ezra, likely after his death.

  Since most doing research don't know the difference between a liturgical text and that there is an influx of Aramaic in these texts (and that, as I mentioned before in a previous thread, the Hebrew Bible was written during the Persian Era or the Iron Age and not the Bronze Age, when Hebrew was spoken), the cultural aspect of what the texts are used for and what language is actually being spoken is not taken into account.

  When you write a Hebrew prayer for liturgy, whether it became a psalm for the Bible for a fixed prayer for the Siddur, Jewish prayers do not rhyme in their words like they do in English. You employ a type of cadence or beat to each line, sort of like saying:

  "Georgie Porgie pudding pie, stick a finger in my eye."

  Except the words "pie" and "eye" do not rhyme; you just have the sing-song of the line made up by the words.

  This is important to understand why they selected these particular words over some more common Hebrew words. Let me give you a Hebrew example by transliterating part of a famous Hebrew prayer that uses a lot of this sing-song cadence that is hard to miss:

  ASHER YATZAR ET HAADAM B'CHOCHMAH
  UVARA VO N'KAVIM N'KAVIM
  CHALULIM CHALULIM
  GALULUI V'ADUA LIFNEI CHESEI CH'VODECHECHA
  SHE-IM YIPATEI-ACH ECHAD MEIHEM
  O YISATEIM ECAHD MEIHEM

  
  [God] who formed the human body with skill
  creating the body's many pathways and openings;
  it is well known before Your throne of glory...

  There is a far easier way to say the above prayer, known as the Asher Yatzar. The word choice is peculiar, odd, and actually fun to say (and this is just a selection of it). But this is how all the prayers and Psalms go, just about, except for the acrostics (which ususally employ a different technique sometimes).

  Just as when a poet in English will use a special dictionary to select special words to rhyme his words just right, the Jewish authors chose words that would keep this cadence in place. Why? Because the Hebrew text is not read like English text is. It is chanted.

  If you go here, you will note not only vowel signs but also what are called cantillation is found in most Hebrew texts. You probably have never noticed them before because you didn't know the difference these marks and the vowels. But Jews have preserved and passed these down over the centuries. Eventually they developed a system to write it down to help you read and chant the text correctly.

  The peculiar wording for Psalm 8 is used to make it bounce with the cadence it has so it can be chanted. It uses terms borrowed from Semitic sister languages and incorporates it into the text. The text isn't talking about vampires or parasites or young men or an orgy of the gods. But it is employing Aramaic at an early stage of liturgical development. People who forget that this text is meant to be sung or chanted and that the writers were looking for words to match music more than accurately reflect narrative theology can get mixed up in trying to reflect their own Western ideas about Bible study.

  This term is also found throughout the Hebrew Scriptures for nursing children in general, but remember, these were Jews living in the Persian Era, and Aramaic was taking hold of the Hebrew language. (Ge 21:4; 24:59; 35:8; Ex 2:7 ff) This is because, again, the late date of when most of the Bible was written (not before but after the Babylonian Exile).

  The cultural design of the God of the Jews was for the sake of cultural preservation. Preserving Jewish identity was important when this text was written, but the idea of what "God" was was still highly influenced by both a disgust for idol worship and an arrogance and self-superiority in their own ideals that would soon put Judaism at odds with Hellenism in time for the Macabbean Revolt. Only the Greeks were as arrogant as the Jews about their culture, language and religion. They were not writing about a weird deity. Alexender the Great was just on the horizon. Don't buy into the story that this Psalm was composed in some "Golden Age" of a Solomononic Temple than likely never was. YHVH's monotheism was fully established by the time this psalm was written. It was a lot later in time than you are thinking. By the time the Seleucid invasion occurred, the monothestic YHVH was a well-established concept.
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  dropoffyourkeylee

  Kaleb, I wish I could give your comment 10 likes!
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  peacefulpete

  Don't buy into the story that this Psalm was composed in some "Golden Age" of a Solomonic Temple than likely never was.

  I am not under that impression. The Psalms were in fact finally compiled and redacted as some of the latest to be included in the Tanakh, this is well known. However, they do often preserve older material.

  My necessarily brief post may have contributed to your dismissive conclusion. Perhaps carefully reading Smith's article may fill in the many gaps I have left. Psalm 8:2b-3: New Proposals for Old Problems on JSTOR

  As to the 2nd temple dating, that was in fact a time of rebirth of demonology and mysticism as you have elsewhere remarked. IMO, an ancient cosmological hymn that referenced a vanquishing of evil children of El is no more anachronistic than one referencing Leviathan. These names and stories had lost their original cultic importance in some sense, but the themes of creation and divine wisdom made these ancient motifs simultaneously viable and poignant.

  A certain confusion (or discomfort) with the text explains the LXX form.

  Also, the proposed parallel Proverb 30 has inspired Jewish mystics and clerics' embrace of an Aluka demon since very soon after the Psalms were compiled.

  While there are certainly other proposals to explain the difficulties with both texts, (lost vowels, added consonants, scribal error, etc.) this research is not ideologically driven nor conducted by amateurs. Mark Smith for example is among top of his field of Semitic studies and his proposal here is consistent with his extensive knowledge of Hebrew poetry and ANE mythology.
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  KalebOutWest

  Believe whatever you wish.

  English is not my first language. I grew up speaking Hebrew, Ladino and Aramaic, praying the Bible and the Siddur daily all my life in Hebrew. It was just an opinion

  I have been an instructor in praying the Jewish liturgy for some years now. But It doesn't mean I know everything.

  You do you.
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  peacefulpete

  I do respect experience and knowledge and regard your opinions highly. Thanks for your input.
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  Halcon

  Very interesting.
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  KalebOutWest

  So I got to do some further research on the article and its author. I had some trouble understanding what the paper was saying. Since it was from The Catholic Bible Quarterly, I asked an old acquaintance of mine who was a Catholic and a Bible translator who has asked for my help in translation in the past.

  To my surprise, he told me that I actually run in the same circles as Mark Smith. I have just never met him.

  First, Mark's article is not about "vampires" and the referring to the God of Abraham as "El." My buddy showed me this, even demonstrating that, just as I had posted on here earlier, the origins of the etymology of the word for "sucklings" stems from Semitic roots involving a non-Jewish myth that might involve something Smith labels as "divine 'suckers;'" but he goes on to say:

  "It is hardly necessary that the same myth be involved."

  This means that Psalm 8 has nothing to do with the myth even though a word evolved from the idea.

  "The paper is about a Catholic theology quandary," my friend told me. "Is Psalm 8 another creation narrative? If so, who are these children and babes? Who is the enemy? What is the silencing that occurs? Is this a parallel to chapter 3 in Genesis?"

  For Catholics, the question about Psalm 8 is not why is it using this word, but their belief that it is Messianic, about Jesus, and somehow tied up to him creating the world, and their view that it may have something to do with Genesis 3:15. If it does, if that can be proved, then in their eyes they will have a real "anchor" of sorts. (The only problem is that the Psalm is not as old as they want it to be.)

  My question was put forward as to how did Smith and other Catholics (since Smith is Catholic) see Psalm 8?

  While I am sure he couldn't directly speak for Mark himself, Mark is a very well-educated Catholic layman, serving as a professor at various universities. But he did have this to offer about the general Catholic viewpoint:

  "There is a difference between the academic answer and the one that motivates us by faith," he answered. "One [critical scholarship] is at service of the other [faith]. But for a Catholic, all Scripture has the earmark of divine inspiration."

  My friend, by the way, is a language scholar who helped produce the new English-language Psalter for the Roman Catholic Church which is being employed, beginning this Advent, all around the world, in every country where English is spoken. He isn't stupid by any means.

  The idea is that this Psalm might involve a cosmology in which creation, as Smith puts it, "ancient, divine victory over cosmic enemies," even though it is allegorical (there are no "children" or babies" in heaven, for example, and there was not yet a complex demonology in Judaism adopted into the Hebrew religion).

  This is important for Catholic theology in building its Christological ideas and theological instruction, especially as it evolves.
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  KalebOutWest

  P.S.:

  That new Psalter, The Abbey Psalms and Canticles, already published for the U.S. market, won't be issued here in the American Church until about a year later due to a delay in the publication of the Liturgy of the Hours, the Church's official prayer book, which includes the Psalms throughout.

  It should be about only one year later, with an entire update of the NABRE incorporated along with it. The pandemic was mostly to blame for the delay, but the project was massive, as can be seen by this update page at the USCCB.