Language Studies

Aramaic Thoughts

The Peshitta of the Old Testament - Part 2

The Hebrew text of Genesis 2:2 reads, “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done.” The text of the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, and the Peshitta read, “And on the sixth day God finished the work that he had done.” None of the major English versions have gone with the “sixth day” reading here, and most don’t even footnote the alternate reading.

The reasons for this are first that the change from “seventh” to “sixth” was probably a deliberate change by the translators (that is, it was not found in some no longer extant Hebrew text) in order to avoid the idea that God did any work on the seventh day. Second, the consensus of scholars is that the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Peshitta were both influenced in their rendering by the Septuagint. Hence, the SP and the Peshitta are not really independent witnesses at this point. The Keil & Delitzsch commentary refers to the alternate reading as “”erroneous.” John Skinner (p. 37) reports that some commentators prefer the “sixth day” reading as the original text. He then goes on to say, “But sixth is so much the easier reading that one must hesitate to give it the preference.” In other words, one can imagine a translator being tempted to change the difficult “seventh” to the easier “sixth,” on the basis noted above. However, it is much more difficult to imagine a translator, deliberately or accidentally, changing the easy “sixth” to the more difficult “seventh.”

In a more helpful vein, Wenham offers the following comment: “To say that God finished work on the seventh day might seem to imply that he was working on that day. For this reason some versions and modern commentators changed ‘seventh’ to ‘sixth.’ This spoils the threefold repetition of ‘seventh’ in vv 2-3, and it overlooks the exact nuance of klh ‘and he had finished.’ Elsewhere in the Pentateuch, e.g., Genesis 17:22; 49:33; Exodus 40:33, the phrase indicates that the action in question is past, and a pluperfect is used in English translations. There is no implication in the Hebrew of 2:2 that God was working on the seventh day before he finished.” He also draws the reader’s attention to the article, published in The Bible Translator, vol 27 (1976) by A. Newman, titled “Genesis 2:2: An Exercise in Interpretive Competence and Performance.”

This does not mean, of course, that the reading in the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, and the Peshitta is in fact wrong or not original. It may preserve an original reading that somehow became defective in the Hebrew texts. However, what it does mean is that an evaluation of the data has led most scholars to conclude that the versions have introduced a change into the text, rather than faithfully passing on the text that they received. Now this change may have been deliberate, or it may have been accidental. It may be the case, for instance, that the Septuagint translator introduced the change deliberately, perhaps thinking that the copyist of the Hebrew text before him had made a mistake. The later Samaritan Pentateuch and Peshitta may then have been faced with trying to determine which of the two traditions they had (sixth or seventh) was correct. Having chosen “sixth” they thus continue the change introduced by the Septuagint.

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