The Septuagint — Christology

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still woe. On today's Stone Choir, we are continuing our series on the Septuagint. I apologize to everyone who's been listening faithfully that we dropped out for a month after saying that the next episode this episode would be next week. That was about four weeks ago. We poured so much into getting those two history episodes done that I naively assumed that the collection of texts that we had ready to go for the Old Testament and the New Testament would be a cinch. And we got one week and then two weeks into preparing for that and it just kind of became overwhelming. And so the second week of preparation, we realized we're gonna have

1:18 to split this episode into multiple episodes. So initially the plan was that this was going to be entirely the Old Testament looking at places where the rabbinic text differs from the Septuagint. What we realized was that there were so many of those that the only way to deal with it was to break that up. So I was listening to an episode from last July where I said that two horrible lies. One, I said that we would be doing the Septuagint series very soon, nearly a year ago. And two, I said it was gonna be in two parts, which in a sense is true because the two parts are the history and then the Bible itself. We have now completed the portion about the history. So episodes one and two are in the can, we're not gonna

2:00 touch history again. And we deliberately didn't talk much about scripture at all. We didn't much at all because we're segregating that for what we thought would be the final two episodes. The new plan, and I think we're gonna stick with this, so you can hold me to it, make fun of me terribly if I fail if we fail. This is gonna be a nine-part series. It's going to be humorously seven plus two. So we saw the intro that we finished episode ninety nine on the context window, and one of the things I said in there just as a refresher, there's so much here you can't possibly keep it all in your head. Now the reason that a year ago I was optimistic we could do it in two episodes is I can't keep most of it

2:38 in my head, but I really had no idea how difficult it's gonna be to spit it all out to make a coherent case. So that was a very naively optimistic thing for me to say. There's a lot to cover, and it's important to do it well. So the two parts are history and scripture, that's still true. I initially thought that this would be, you know, two history episodes, maybe one turned into two history episodes, and then three episodes of Old and New Testament. It turns out we're going to be doing seven content episodes plus the bonus episode at the end we're gonna talk about next steps steps, how do we get a Bible back to what Jesus and the Apostles and the Early Church used? We've been calling on bonus content because that's entirely our opinion.

3:20 But right now we're on episode three of the seven content episodes. So the first two are history, the next three beginning with this one are going to be entirely about the Old Testament. The way that we're dividing this content up is this episode is going to be entirely about Christology. We're going to deal with the Christological passages in the Old Testament, some that are in the Masoretic they're not in the Septuagint, some that are in the Septuagint, they're not in the Masoretic, and some that are quoted from the New Testament that are present and they're actually richer in the Septuagint, and we just kind of leave them out of when we're discussing things or and we're gonna get into some of these examples where every Bible you have in your house

4:00 is already based on the rabbinic text. But what we're going to demonstrate in small part here today is that there are a ton of places where your Bible that's supposed to be based on the old Hebrew that was passed on as oral tradition by the rabbis, there are a whole bunch of places where it just throws out the Hebrew entirely and uses the Greek instead. So even in this episode that's the beginning of the three talking just about the Old Testament, we're gonna start to pull in some of the examples of the New Testament, quoting the Old Testament, because what we find is that in your Bible, I ran into this left and right just last couple days of preparation, it's really difficult to unravel some of this stuff because your Bible, even though

4:42 it claims to be based on the rabbinic text, doesn't There are a whole bunch of places where it's not even going to footnote and it's just going to render things according to the Septuagint, totally ignoring the rabbinic text entirely. So we're going to give some examples where we're going to point to the rabbinic text says one thing, the Septuagint says something else. Your Bible is probably in many cases, depending on which translation, going to agree with the Septuagint all over the place, far more examples than I thought were present. And it's good because these are Christological passages that should have been preserved should not have been tampered with by the rabbis. For better or worse, the translation committees have just been quietly cleaning

5:22 this stuff up and so And so we have kind of this hermeneutic disaster where we have all these people picky choosy, whichever verses they prefer are the ones that they're putting in the Bibles. We all been reading. Me too. I didn't know. Again, even if you look at the footnotes, most of the footnotes aren't always going to be exhaustive about where they choose to ignore the rabbis and copy the Septuagint. So that's good news in case of us making the argument that this is in fact the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles, not only the early church. It turns out in quite a few cases, particularly with some of these Christological passages, when the New Testament quotes a Septuagint, the guys who are translating your Bible, just go ahead and backport the Greek

6:03 back into the Old Testament without any regard to what the rabbinic text says. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what it means for us to be dealing with that. But just up front, I want to warn you, if you want to dig into some of the verses that we're going to give examples of, you're really going to have to do your due diligence. You're going to have to pull up for most of this. I've been using Bible Hub because it lets you see it like 30 plus translation in English. You can also see interlinear for the rabbinic text. So you can see what they're claiming to be basing it on. Unfortunately, even that is sometimes tampered with. So there will be cases where the actual underlying rabbinic text will

6:45 say one thing, and you'll look at even places like Bible Gateway. There are some examples, not going to highlight them today, but I've found examples where they will flat out lie and change how they define a word so that it matches the New Testament. So if you want to, you know, fact check us or whatever, you're gonna have to do a ton of work, just like we've done a ton of work. And that's not a setup, say just believe whatever we say. It's just this is such a mess because of the inconsistency. And the inconsistency has been introduced by the fact that we have this rabbinic text that Jerome poisoned the church with around four hundred, and then the Reformation ratified it. That's why we did the history episodes first.

7:22 When we get into looking at our own Bibles, we don't have consistency. And so on one hand, that's frustrating just in terms of trying to unwind, okay, what's going on. On the other hand, I and the reason I'm highlighting this in the introduction is I want for listeners to take some comfort in the fact that things were always a little bit messy. Because what we are doing with this series is introducing more mess. We're saying, you know what, it's even more complicated than you thought. There's this other textual basis that was the textual basis for Jesus and the apostles in the early church, and then we forgot to use it for a while. Yeah, by a while, I mean, you know, fifteen hundred years. It's actually both messier and not as bad as it frankly I

8:07 first thought because the translation committees have been playing fast and loose. And so there are cases where they're still using the septuagin while pretending they're not. So I don't want anyone, as we said in the first episode of the series, episode 100. We do not want anyone to feel unsettled by this. This is a source of a bunch of new work that the church is going to have to do. There's centuries of scholarship that has yet to be done because we haven't been looking at scripture the way we should have been for a long time. On the other hand, we have more of what God intended for us from the very beginning. It's a source for joy and celebration. And while this is not an argument for the Septuagint itself, I

8:50 will tell you that, you know, it's now been eighteen months that I've been talking, Corey and I, uh principally me, I think. I've been doing research and just live tweeting is I've been going for eighteen months. A lot of you who follow me on X got a Septuagint or started reading it online. And every guy who has done that and begun reading it consistently has said the same thing. They have said to me, and it's what I agree with, but I I never said this publicly before these guys, other guys were saying it, that The Septuagint in English reads like the New Testament. It's the same voice. And that is a profound statement for so many random guys to have arrived at the same conclusion that I also have arrived at

9:30 and Courtney has arrived at. It sounds like the New Testament. It's the same voice. You know, Corey and I have different voices. Even in text, I speak one way, he speaks another way. It's how everyone is. Different men have different modes of speech. That's perfectly normal. The New Testament and the Old Testament, if you're reading them all in Greek, they have one voice. If you're reading the rabbinic text and then you're reading the church text of the Old Testament, they read differently. But the church text, the Greek of the Old Testament, reads exactly like the Greek of the New Testament. It's the same voice because it's the same author. It's not something to be unsettled about, it's something to be happy

10:09 about. But the church has a lot of work to sort out okay, we've been relying on one thing and now we're looking at another. We're going to give a number of examples today and over the next five episodes where that is the case. the structure of the Old Testament episodes, beginning with this one, specifically Christology today, the next episode, which will not be next week. I'm finally having hernia surgery. I've been living with a hernia for four years, and it's finally gotten pretty bad, so I haven't talked about it, but it's annoying. It's particularly annoying because it makes it kinda uncomfortable to walk around, which is a huge part of my process for preparing. If I can't walk around comfortably and just find my words, it

10:48 makes it a lot harder to do these episodes. So no episode next week is I gotta have surgery get that fixed. It's gonna be quick and easy, so I'm not worried about it. Prayers appreciated, but I'm not concerned. But I'm not gonna be able to do an episode next week. So hopefully I'll be able to begin preparing that week and the following week the middle episode of the middle portion of the seven episodes and the middle portion of the nine episodes, the Septuagint. Look at the lovely chiastic structure we've discovered here. The episode number five is going to be or no episode number four, because we're on we're on three now. This is interminable. The next episode, whatever the number is, is going to be

11:27 on the wisdom literature, uh, psalms, proverbs, and a little bit of other stuff. Because there are a ton of changes there. You have never read Proverbs before. As Cory Vy have been saying, we've been talking to each other in a little bit in public, we could quite literally do a thousand episodes just covering the changes. We would be long dead before we began to scratch the surface on this. So even just doing proverbs and summer psalms isn't gonna scratch the surface on the changes there, but we're gonna sequester that in one episode to give some good examples. And then the third episode, and we're gonna just cut the old testament portion, is going to be a grab bag of some interesting changes, including specifically some of the timeline stuff.

12:06 Because we have the timeline of the genealogies of Abraham and his people. We have the Job chronology. And if you've been following Man X, you know, for example, that Job was not just floating in space. If you use the text of the Septuagint and you use the chronology of the Septuagint, which is the Bible of Jesus and Apostles and the early church, not only is Job not just floating in history with no apparent connection, Job appears multiple times in the Bible. Job is, according to the chronology, almost certainly the king of Eum who refused Moses entry. During their wanderings, when Moses went to the king of Edom and said, Please just let us through, it was Job who was the king of Edom who refused that.

12:50 And Job lived for a number of years after that, and God continued to bless him and call him the most righteous man on the planet. So we'll get into that chronology and some of the implications, but once you understand where some of these chronological perversions, what effect they have on the text, it starts to make sense why the rabbis would have deliberately tampered with them. So the third episode of the Old Testament portion of the Septuagint series will be about chronology and some other grab bag changes, including Aster, which is a completely different book. The last two episodes, so number seven and eight, are going to be entirely New Testament. And I don't know yet what the division will be, but there's

13:31 just so much there I know it's going to be a couple of episodes. And then nine, the bonus episode would be how do we come up with a new English translation based on the Septuagint that doesn't have any of this mess? How do we make it easy? How do we make it approachable? How do we make sure that it is not tainted by any of these past mistakes. So that's the overall scheme of the arc of this thing. It's going to be seven plus two, and God willing, we'll finish in the next like three months. I really hope we can get it over with. The structure of this particular episode on the Christology of the Old Testament is going to be broken itself into a few different parts. We're going to begin with a number of cases that are somewhat

14:14 famous. You've probably heard of them before. The most prominent cases where your Bible, which is based on the rabbinic text, flat out ignores it and uses the Septuagint, uses it quite literally because they're Christological prophecies that are perverted in the rabbinic text. And there are a few key examples of that where when those changes were deliberately introduced, and a couple of them are very obviously deliberately introduced, the church responded correctly in one sense by saying, No, you've deleted Jesus from this, absolutely not. We're going to preserve the Septuagint rendering because it's clearly faithful. Unfortunately, that choice of ignoring the rabbinic text and just picking another

14:56 one for the sake of Christology is also a trap. You know, we spent a lot of time in the previous episode talking about how the literal versus allegorical hermeneutic that were introduced and then abandoned was also a trap where the bad reading by Christians was then replaced by a good reading by the Christ-killing rabbis. That setup is the same sort of thing we're seeing here. There were a couple places where the rabbis deliberately tampered with their own text, so that when it was translated into the current languages, Christians are like, no, the Septuagint very clearly shows that Jesus is in these passages. When they chose to ignore that rabbinic text, it set up the trap that's going to be the second portion of this episode.

15:41 There are a number of passages where the rabbinic text has what has been long seen as Christological passages that are not present in the Septuagint. So this is the trap. If you have already bought into we're just going to ignore the rabbis when we find more Jesus in the Septuagint, what are you then going to do when you find more Jesus in the rabbis than you find in the Septuagint? What do you do when the rabbinic text has more Jesus when it's more Christological? Does that mean you go running back to the rabbis? That's the trap. And that's what is going to be one of the fights about those who do not take the historical and the New Testament arguments for the Septuagint seriously. Now, simple, reasonable Christians are not going to care, they're going to

16:25 understand I don't listen to rabbis, but everybody else is going to feel very concerned, so we're going to address those passages head on. Some of your very favorite Christological passages in the Old Testament, they're not quite there, in some cases they're not there at all in the Septuagint. The reason for highlighting this is very important. What is your hermeneutic for determining what is scripture? Is it whichever Bible has the most Jesus in it? Because if that is your soul determinant, give me a text editor in a few hours, I can give you an old testament that's got fifty more Christological passages. I can go in and add things, change things a little bit, I can give you a Bible with more Jesus than you have

17:02 ever seen in your entire life. How would you receive that? If I told you, look, I've got more Jesus in this new Bible I've written for you. Would you receive it and say, oh, this is wonderful. Look how much Jesus there is. It's got so much Christology. This is my new Bible. Or would you punch me in the throat and set it on fire? If you're a Christian, it would be the second. Because these are God's things. We don't tamper with them. So part of the reason that we're going to highlight Christology in the beginning of this portion of the series is that this is a big deal. If we say whichever Bible has more Jesus in it is the one we're going to pick, I can tell you right now that the rabbinic text is going to win by that superficial metric.

17:42 But that's going to be at odds with our closing argument with the New Testament. The reason we've saved the New Testament for last is very simple. Jesus and the apostles overwhelmingly verify that the Septuagint is their scripture. So you need nothing else other than the New Testament to know that this is true. I've said that's what we're calling it. That's our closing argument. We could have done just a single episode where we just went through the New Testament, read all the places where it exclusively quotes the Septuagint. And the way we can tell is exclusive is that the rabbinic text doesn't say what's in the New Testament. You find these passages left and right. That's why I mentioned earlier the English translations are really sloppy.

18:21 They have gone back and tampered with the translations of the Old Testament to harmonize them. Now on one hand that was the right thing to do. When I say tampered, I mean they're tampering with the underlying text, but I think it's the right approach. The problem is that there's so many places where the rabbinic text doesn't match that your current English Bible is just a hodgepodge. Sometimes it's based on the rabbis, sometimes it's based on the Septuagint. Being the Septuagint is going to be the basis for the New Testament. It's messy. And so we don't need to be concerned about, we do need to be careful. As I said in the very beginning of the first episode of the series, we do not want anyone to be undermined in their

19:02 confidence about scripture. God has preserved faith in spite of all this foolishness, in spite of the things that have been done. We're all Christians today without having read the Septuagint. That is the power of God's word. That is the fact that faith is a gift. We're not doing it, we're not intellectually assenting, we're not figuring out some puzzle and getting the right answer on a quiz, and then we're fine. And so as we go through these examples that are Christological in nature, keep in mind, if there's less Christology apparently in some of the Septuagint verses, is that then a reason to disregard Jesus and the apostles when they quote it almost exclusively? I want to read now the word at the very end of

19:45 Revelation twenty two. This is virtually the end of the Bible, and this is not simply talking about the book of Revelation, it's talking about the entire scripture, all Old and Old New Testament combined. There is only one scripture breathed out by God, and God says this I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book. If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city which are described in this book. That's part of Revelation. It's describing Revelation. It also implies that entire Bible. We don't get to add or remove just based upon our whims.

20:28 And so as we tackle the Christological prophecies, those that are present, those that are absent, those that are weakened in some cases, simply keep that in mind. If you are confronted with a text which doesn't read the way you're used to, but Jesus and the apostles verify that it is scripture. Do you reject it because you don't like it? Are you going to play picky choosy, or are you going to receive whatever God has seen fit to give you? Our exhortation is precisely that God's word is sufficient, whatever it is, whether it is the rabbinic text or it is the Septuagint, it is sufficient. The question then becomes which one is it? Whichever one it is, that is the one that is sufficient. So as we look at which ones breathed out by God in

21:15 our closing argument from the New Testament, there can be only one conclusion. But again, just to brutally frame this episode, we cannot make Christology the basis for validating our old testament source. That's simply invalid. There's nowhere in scripture that says that. Now the Now the last portion, the third portion of this episode, is going to be spoiling in part some of the New Testament episodes. We're going to go through a number of places where precisely this has happened, where the New Testament quotes Christological passages, makes very explicit and explains in detail in the New Testament, this Old Testament prophecy is about the Christ. Every time they do that, they quote the Septuagint.

21:58 And so as I said, there are a lot of cases where your Bible is going to have backported that Septuagint rendering from the New Testament into the Old. So that when you read the Old Testament, you see the same words and you don't see the problem. In one sense, it's a good thing that the translators were sloppy. At least they were sloppy in a Christian fashion, but what have they done? They have sort of disregarded the underlying text in very blatant ways. And so we have to be really careful when we're looking at the text to even know what it is we're looking at. So we're going to give specific examples. These is a very long intro, but I just want to lay out that as I said in the episode on the context window,

22:36 there's so much going on here that you have to incorporate all of it before you can render a final decision. And maybe you as an individual can't. There's so much here, maybe you just can't fit it all in your head, and that's fine. But you should still hear that these are arguments that are going to be coming and going in both directions for at least a decade to come. This is going to split the church, this fight. So we're going to address that on some of the fights they're going to be picked by false so-called brethren within the church in order to try to defend the rabbinic text. Just keep in mind if all you want is a Bible with the most Jesus, you have set yourself up for false teachers and

23:12 false prophets. Because anybody can come along with gold tablets and say, hey, I have another testament from Christ. It's got even more. That is the book of Mormon. It's got more Jesus in it than we have. It's lies. It's a back of lies, but it's got more Jesus. That's part of their sales pitch. Is that our hermeneutic? You'll turn into a Mormon or something worse if you want to base your decision about the Old Testament text on that. So as we go through these three portions, just keep in mind that when we make our concluding arguments from the New Testament, we will establish that Jesus and the apostles, the disciples who are quoted in the New Testament, virtually all they talk about, is a Septuagint,

23:55 and that matters. So So, for this first section of the three sections of this particular episode, we're going to be going over two places in which your translation of the Old Testament, although it pretends to be based on the Rabbinic text, does not in point of fact use the Rabbinic text, because these are prophecies, very clear prophecies about Christ, beloved prophecies about Christ that really are not there in the underlying rabbinic text, which is supposedly the basis of most modern translations. The first one we'll be using, and I'm sure many of you already know this one, is Isaiah 7.14. I'll read it first in the English Standard Version and then read it in a translation of the Septuagint.

24:49 Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign, behold the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel. I'll read from the Brenton, translation of the Septuagint. Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign Behold a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Emmanuel. Now the problem here, of course, is that these sound identical, and the reason they sound identical is that, as mentioned in Wo's intro, the English standard version, in this case, is translating from the Greek. It's not actually translating from the Hebrew, because the word there for virgin in the Hebrew is Alma, which is marriageable girl or young

25:37 woman. It's not actually virgin. Now the word that is there in the Septuagint is very clearly virgin, because it's Parthenos, which indeed does mean virgin or maiden. Same two words we have in English. This is one of the clearest cases in which our modern translations have decided to use what is clearly the Christological translation interpretation, ignoring the Hebrew text, ignoring the rabbinic text. They've done this with what one could say is a good intent, because obviously they are seeking to harmonize this with what we know as Christians, with what is said in the New Testament. However, this is an instance where they are not following, as Woe said in his intro, a proper hermeneutic. They're not relying on the actual underlying text.

26:29 What they are claiming is the underlying text. If you use the Greek, you have no problem here. The Greek very clearly says virgin. The Hebrew does not. If you take a look on Bible Hub and search for Isaiah 714 and then do a find for virgin, You will find that almost every English translation does this. They copy the Septuagint, they correctly preserve this prophecy because it's the Christian thing to do. If you happen to have an NRSV Bible or a Good News Translation or an NET Bible, then it does say young woman, which is exactly what is in the rabbinic text. Now, one of the false arguments made by Jews as oh well alma means yeah means virgin too. Well, there is a presumption that a young woman who has reached

27:21 puberty is a virgin. That's presumptive. You would not assume that she has been fornicating. But that's not implicit. There are two different words in Hebrew for young woman and for virgin. And we know that Isaiah knows the word for virgin, which is Betula, because he uses it five other times, including here in Isaiah sixty two five, for as a young man marries a virgin, so shall your sons marry you, as a bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you. So five other times in Isaiah he uses the word virgin. He was not confused, and just forgot to use it for this important prophecy of the Christ. And one of the reasons that you know we can know with absolute certainty that this was tampered with is that Matthew 121 and

28:13 following quotes this by name. It quotes it directly. Matthew says, Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel. One of many cases where the Septuagint is quoted in the New Testament. So as we said, like the translation committees did the right thing, but they should have stopped using the rabbinic text entirely. That was their mistake. They solved the immediate problem. They didn't solve the much greater problem. And so it's an important example because you will find some Jews today coming like oh no, almost fine, young woman's fine means the same thing. It's completely subversive lies and you shouldn't be arguing with them at all. That's the simple chief point you need to understand.

28:56 Don't listen to them. But thankfully, virtually every translation committee, going back to the King James, which they added translation committee too, that's nothing new. That's not a dirty word to say that. The next Septuagint translation of the Bible is gonna have a committee. You get a bunch of Christians together who know their stuff who are faithful, and you try to do the best you can with the source text as an entirely illegitimate thing. They all overwhelmingly chose to ignore the rabbinic text and say what the Septuagint says and what Matthew says. Interestingly, one last point, and we're not getting into this really at all because it's irrelevant for Christians, but the Dead Sea Scrolls, the great Isaiah scroll, also says Alma.

29:40 It says young woman. Now that is dated a hundred years before Christ was born. So when we say that the Jews, the rabbis corrupted this text, it didn't happen after the virgin birth. It had already happened before. And so the great Isaiah scroll that, you know, a lot of people probably think the great Isaiah scroll, if you've heard of it, you probably think it was what was being used in the temple. You probably think it was what all Jesus and the apostles were learning from and speaking and preaching from. Well, it says young woman, and yet Matthew, who was very much a Jew, quotes the Septuagint. So as we talked about in the history episode, in both of them, we already have the case one hundred fifty two hundred years

30:24 before the birth of Christ that the That the Hebrew was a lost language in terms of being spoken. It was still studied by the scholars, but it was not in teaching use. They had to have it translated into Aramaic and then into Greek so they could even understand it. So on one hand, it's not surprising that Matthew would have quoted the Septuagint against the rabbinic text of Isaiah 714. But just keep in mind, even the so-called great Isaiah scroll from over a hundred years before the birth of Christ already has already has this corruption. We're not going to deal with that further, but just keep that in mind. If someone wants to appeal to the Dead Sea Scrolls or whatever other archaeological find they have, they're ignoring Jesus and the Apostles in

31:07 the New Testament. And to give you an idea of just how pervasive this surreptitious as it were usage of the Greek in places where the Rabbinic text disagrees with very clear Christian doctrine and what is clearly the text of scripture, even in supposedly literal translations of the Hebrew into English, you still have this because when running this comparison I was looking also at Young's literal translation which one would think would be a literal translation of the Hebrew, it still has this. It still translates Alma as virgin instead of as young woman. And this is similar because it does the same thing with the next example, which is Psalm twenty two, which again I will read from the ESV and then read from in this case I'll read

32:01 the Lexum, another translation of the Septuagint. For dogs encompass me, a company of evildoers encircles me, they have pierced my hands and feet. Now the Septuagint. For many dogs encircled me, a gathering of those doing evil surrounded me, they pierced my hands and feet. And you can see in both of these they have pierced my hands and feet. And in fact, if you look at the Young's literal translation, it still says pierced. But if you go ahead and highlight that word pierced and look at the underlying Hebrew, the word there is lion, it's not pierced, which is the problem with this particular text in the rabbinic text, because what it actually says in the Hebrew is like a lion at my hands and feet.

32:51 You completely lose the prophecy, the Christological prophecy concerning the crucifixion. It simply is not there in the Hebrew. But you'll find that basically every English translation has pierced my hands and feet. It's the same in the King James, they pierced my hands and feet. All of these translations resort to the Greek and don't even make a note on it. Now some of them may footnote it, but most of them don't. This is something that they have simply corrected in the rabbinic text and then imported into their translation. And like I said, it is the exact same thing done in even the literal, supposedly literal translations of the Hebrew, they still don't use the Hebrew. They are using the Greek because the Greek is the actual text

33:37 of Scripture. Structurally there are a few things that are going on in Psalm 22:16 that are different than the Isaiah 7:14 example. One, the change itself completely breaks the text. You know, whether it's a young woman or virgin, it still makes sense. It's a complete sentence. This, where pierced is changed to lion, no longer makes sense because those are two different parts of speech. One's a verb, the other's a noun. So with the change that the rabbinic text includes, you no longer have a complete sentence. It's actually irrational. And there's no legitimate argument for how any of the scribes would have just accidentally forgotten what was going on and produced a sentence that doesn't mean anything.

34:24 It breaks the structure of the passage. It makes the sentence not a sentence. And unlike the alma versus Batullah thing, what's happening here is the difference of a single character. Elsewhere in scripture it talks about not a single iota being lost. What we have here in this verse in the Hebrew script, you have You have two different letters, one's a Vav and one's a Yod. It's really just the difference in the height, the line height. It's like an upside down J versus a shortened version of that. The closest example for you to picture in English would be Would be the difference between a lowercase I and a lowercase j. An i and a j are the same letter, except that the j has that little hook at the end.

35:08 In this case, it's not even a hook. The hook is present in both, but the length is different. And it's interesting that I and J are like that because J was originally not a letter in the English alphabet. It was added much later on. It's fairly recent. And so it's a reason in many languages, though not consistently. I's we pronounced like J, or sometimes the J's pronounced like a Y. It's kind of messy because of that because it was a late addition. So we have the notion in English of these small changes having big effects downstream. Yeah, in the case of this one thing, one of the arguments would be oh it's a scribal error. They just changed a little bit and they forgot. Yeah, they forgot that like a lion and said it pierced my

35:47 hands and feet. It doesn't make any sense. And they know it doesn't. But what did it do? It created more bait. Suddenly Christians are going to come along and say, oh, obviously we have to use the Septuagint, it's much better. And now they've introduced the Christological hermeneutic for the text that opens them up later on. Interestingly, even the earliest manuscripts, including ones used by Jerome, do say they pierced. So some of these messes occur at different points in history, but by the time we get to the Leningrad Codex that was one thousand eight AD, they had very much locked in the different character that made it a lion. So some of the changes were before Christ, some of the changes

36:29 were must be after Christ. The good news is the church has always fixed it. We always ignored the rabbis, did what the Septuagint said. The bad news is we started playing picky choosy with Christological prophecies. So the next passage we're going to deal with kind of bridges from this first category where the rabbinic text is clearly corrupt and the church has always just ignored it, to a case where we have what is often seen as a Christological prophecy that in one part is removed by the Septuagint, but in another part is actually enhanced, is a famous passage that gets quoted a lot specifically as a very Christological text, but if you actually look at it in the rabbinic text, on one hand it does have a word that

37:17 makes it more Christological. On the other hand, it doesn't sound much like Christ at all. Whereas when we look at the Septuagint text, we lose one word, but we gain a description that sounds as much more like Jesus. So that's why it's kind of the bridge between these categories. So this is Psalm two, verses ten through twelve. And we're mostly focusing on verse twelve, but I'm gonna give you the intro just because it sets the frame for how we have to understand what comes next. So it begins Now therefore, O kings, be wise, be warned, O rulers of the earth, serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. And we get to verse twelve. The ESV correctly rendering what is in the Rabbinic text says kiss

37:59 the sun, lest he be angry and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him. So we frequently throughout church history, at least after Jerome, have people saying, Oh, kiss the sun. And most of your Bibles are going to put sun with a capital letter so you know it's Jesus. So it's long been held that this was about Jesus, kiss the sun. Well, great. Here we have the second person of the Trinity in the Old Testament, in the Psalms. But when you read the rest of it, it's like he's gonna be angry and you perish in the way. Not entirely sure what that is, but obviously I'm dead, so it's bad. And his wrath is suddenly kindled like just out of randomness.

38:38 Basically it makes Jesus seem capricious and violent and terrifying. Now we did the Fear of the Lord episode talking about the fact that Jesus and God himself in the Trinity is undoubtedly a fearful God. There's another word for him. I was going to say creature, entity. He's God. He's a superset of everything else. He's terrifying in one sense, but his behavior is not capricious. It always follows rules. Here's what the Brenton Septuagint translation says for the same thing. Instead of kiss the sun, it says accept correction, lest at any time the Lord be angry, and you should perish from the righteous way. Wherever his wrath shall suddenly be kindled, blessed are all they that trust in him.

39:24 That has a fundamentally different tenor, doesn't it? We've lost Kiss the Sun. It's been replaced with accept correction in another even more literal translation of the Greek would be seize discipline. So what's that saying? God is saying to do something. Accept correction. Seize discipline. If God corrects you, take it willingly, gladly. Accept correction lest at any time the Lord be angry. So explains why would God be angry? You accept God's discipline so that you do not anger him, and you should perish from the righteous way, which is different from the rabbinic text, which just says you perish in the way. Like what way is that? So they deleted righteous as well. That's a big deal. And so on one hand, this is the reason it bridges these

40:05 categories. If kiss the sun is one of your favorite passages and it's one you want to go to, then the Septuagint is less Christological because it doesn't say kiss the sun anymore. Andstead it says seize discipline, accept correction, and then explains why the sun, who is clearly being referenced here, is going to behave angrily. It's if you don't, if you misbehave, if you sin and persist in your sin and reject discipline. So this is a much more Christological passage in the Septuagint than it is in the rabbinic text, but we lose kiss the sun. So that's why it's the bridge here. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna picky choosy and say, Well, I like kiss the sun, so I'm gonna stick with the rabbinic text?

40:46 Well, when you actually look at the Greek, it actually sounds like God. Sounds like the Jesus Christ that we know. This Christ is one who is not capricious in his anger. His anger is kindled based on sin in rejecting his rebukes. That makes sense. And so when we don't want to perish on the righteous way, we're blessed when we trust in him. That's good news. It's actually a gospel passage instead of pure law where Christ is just terrifying. We can also very clearly see a change in sort of the underlying assumptions in the text that is in the Hebrew and the actual Greek text of Scripture. If you read through some of the exeges, some of the commenters on this particular psalm, they struggle a little bit with Kiss the

41:36 Sun, because as Will pointed out, it seems like it makes God capricious or the sort of ruler you expect from, say, a Near Eastern or Middle Eastern Empire, and they resort to historical examples in order to explain this. Because of course, if you look and just see Kiss the Sun, how do you explain that? The only The only way you can really explain it is by recognizing some of the customs of that region in which you would either kiss the hand or the ring or the garment or even the feet of a king, in order to be in full submission to that king. This was one of the things that was frequently required of a conquered people in that region. And so if you look at it in that way, are we supposed to submit to God in that way?

42:21 Of course, he's God, and we are creatures. But it makes him into this capricious God who simply destroys and conquers. Whereas in the Greek we have this completely vital point, what does God want from you? He wants you to obey because he wants you to follow in the righteous way, not simply because I'm God and I told you to Now that's not entirely wrong, but the issue is what is it that God is telling you to do? God is always telling you to do that which is right, because God isn't capricious, God follows rules, God follows laws. The moral law flows from God's nature. And so this righteousness is behaving in accord with the moral law. It is a fundamentally different verse in the Greek from what we

43:14 have in the Hebrew. And so submitting to God isn't the problem here. The problem is why are you submitting to God? What does submission to God entail? It entails righteousness, which is completely and totally absent from the translation that we have in most of our English versions of the Bible, which follow the rabbinic text. So the next scripture section that we have, the next selection we have in this section of the episode is from the book of Isaiah, and we will be going through a few different examples in this episode from Isaiah. It's one of the books that changes in ways that are indeed salient. And so from Isaiah six verses eight through ten I'll be reading first from the ESV. And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I

44:05 send, and who will go for us? Then I said, Here I am, send me. And he said, Go and say to this people, Keep on hearing, but do not understand, keep on seeing, but do not perceive, make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed. And now I will read from the Septuagint the Brenton translation. And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go to this people? And I said, Behold I am here, send me. And he said, Go and say to this people, ye shall hear indeed, but ye shall not understand, and ye shall see indeed, but ye shall not perceive, for the heart of this people has become

44:56 gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them. Now if you listened carefully to those two sections, those two translations, or if you go and read them for yourself, which is probably helpful for some of these longer passages, the fault clearly lies with the people. The fault is not with God. God is not the one who begrudges these people salvation. These people have hardened themselves. God is simply confirming them in their sin, in their wickedness. It's the same sort of issue that we have when we read through the passages involving Pharaoh.

45:40 There are those who will say, How can Pharaoh be to blame if God is the one who hardened him? Well go and read those passages but read carefully. Pharaoh hardens his heart. God confirms him in his error. That's what's happening here. But if you just read it in the translation of the rabbinic text in the English, in the English Standard Version, and many others, then it looks like God begrudges these people salvation. It looks like God is the one who for whatever his own purposes happen to be, that are not declared here He's damning these people of his own volition of his own will, and that's not the case. He is confirming them in their wickedness, which is consonant with what we see all over the Old Testament.

46:23 When men act wickedly, God will confirm them in their wickedness, but God is not the one who causes them to fall into that wickedness. That is a fundamentally different claim, and it goes against the very nature of God. I'm gonna reread just two brief portions of that just to make sure that it comes through clearly because this is a huge deal. The beginning of verse ten. The reading from the ESV it says, make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy and blind their eyes, lest they see with their eyes. So it goes on. But as Cory said, it's God causing it. It's God hardening. Not remotely what's happening in the Greek. It begins effectively with a lamentation, for the heart of this people

47:07 has become grossed and their ears are dull of hearing and their eyes have been closed. And then verse ten ends lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and be converted, and I should heal them. This is a lamentation of God that these Jews are so hard hearted that he can't get through to them. Which is completely gone when you look at ten in the ESV, which is based on the rabbinic text, which even says at the end, less they see and turn and be healed. Well, who's doing the healing? It's a dilution, it's not a complete inversion, but it's so substantial in reducing God's action on one hand of his lamentation, on the other hand of causing them to be hard-hearted, that it flips the

47:51 thing on its head without even seeming like it. And that's the case in a lot of the passages, many more than we're going to get into today. It's a very common thing that you will find that the edits made in the rabbinic text lessen the guilt of the Jews and really put more of it on God, or they just make God worse and them better. That is a recurring theme, which is why we began with those couple famous passages, because every time I look I find another terrible example of this. I hadn't actually found this example in Cory Found that I didn't. But it's typical. When you start comparing side by side, you will frequently find this sort of thing. God is worse, the Jews are better, they're victims, they're fine, they're

48:33 blameless. When God says their hearts are gross, he is not wrong. So the next passage it's worth highlighting is from Isaiah 9 6. There's another very famous one that includes one of the fourfold titles of God. It's how it's known. You'll recognize this right off the bat, but I'm actually just going to read from the Septuagint from Brenton instead, and I'll show you the contrast that's present in the ESV based on the rabbinic text. Isaiah nine six for a child is born to us and a son is given to us, whose government is upon his shoulder, and his name is called the messenger of great counsel, for I will bring peace upon the princes and health to him. Now you recognize that passage, but probably sounded a little bit shorter,

49:18 which is why we're highlighting it. What was missing? The rabbinic text says instead of messenger of great counsel, it says and you will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, Prince of Peace, which is something always comes up at Christmas time, it's famous, it's beautiful, but it's only present in the rabbinic text. So on one hand, this is a loss if we choose to keep Jesus and the apostles and follow the Septuagint. On the other hand, in the context of the passage, when it says he's a messenger of great counsel, and then describes the fruit of that counsel, his great counsel will bring peace upon the princes and health to him. Another thing that for a long time early church fathers, once they

50:08 began to adopt the rabbinic text for this, would excuse the presence of everlasting father as a title for the son. Say, oh well, that's not confusing the persons of the Trinity. Here's a reason why it's fine. he's he's a father of a new age in creation, but that's different from being the father. I don't want to pick that fight, but it's just interesting that we don't have to have any of those concerns if we simply resort to the title the Greek gives him, which is messenger of great counsel. And so this is an example where we all know the other passage. We all know he will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. We know it, we love it. And so it's necessary to just coldly confront are we going to

50:53 let attachment be the basis? Or are we going to have to rely on other things as a basis for determining which is actually Scripture? Which one did God breathe out? As we'll see hence a number of other examples where the New Testament quotes Isaiah, we've already had a couple, it only quotes the Septuagint. It doesn't quote the rabbinic text. So personally, and my argument to you is that some of these changes that do seem more Christological, they're acting as bait. They're acting as the same kind of bait that we had with the literal reading being present in those rabbinic commentaries. Oh, it's great. The rabbis have all this stuff sorted out. We can get a better read on scripture by listening to them.

51:36 So what happens? We have Christians picky choosy with their Bible. They just take whatever translation they prefer, which everyone has more Jesus, and if it turns out that we have to go to the rabbinic text to do it, well great. I was reading their commentaries anyway. Why shouldn't I use their text too? If that is the basis for scripture, then we have bigger problems, which we now do. If we keep Jesus and the apostles, we don't make that decision. When we see the title of Christ as messenger here, it's important to bear in mind the underlying Greek word, because the underlying Greek word is Angelos, from which we get the word angel. The angel of the Lord is an ordinary title for Christ all

52:20 throughout the Old Testament. We see Christ appear, we see Christophanes in many places in the Old Testament where he is called the angel of the Lord. I would actually say it would be a very productive use of your time to go and read those. You will see many places in which the angel of the Lord is saying things as if he were God or speaking as God because in fact he is God. That is the preincarnate Christ. We've gone into that before it's part of the two powers in heaven interpretation that the Jews used to use before Christ came and they couldn't use that anymore because it made people into Christians. But we've gone over that previously, so it's a topic for another episode, another time.

53:04 The next example is also from Isaiah. In this case, I very strongly encourage you to go read Isaiah 53 in whatever your English translation is and then in the Septuagint. Because it's very difficult to hold large chunks of text in your mind and compare them when listening to them being read aloud. It's much easier if you can have them side by side and actually look back and forth. And so we're going to focus in on verse 5 only, but again, I recommend you read the entire chapter in both versions, in an English translation and in an English translation of the Septuagint. So first from the ESV, but he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his

53:55 wounds we are healed. Then I will read from the Lexum in this case. But he was wounded because of our sins, and he became weakened because of our lawless acts. The discipline of our peace was upon him. By his bruise we were healed. The reason for highlighting this verse is that again I'm going to encourage you to go to Bible Hub and look up Isaiah 53.5 and just scroll through how they're rendered. You'll find that there's no consistency between using both pierced and stripes. And those are terms that are used in English in many of the translations, but not consistently. No one will have both of them. And it's not that the underlying words are fundamentally different. Stripes in this case, and bruise and wound are essentially the same

54:48 thing. Depending on context, they could be the same thing. So while this is maybe a very slight weakening of a crystallological nature, it's only if you choose to translate the wound as stripes in the beginning, which is typically how it's done with the Septuagint. I highlighted this because one, this is another phrase, the last phrase in that is directly quoted in first Peter two twenty four. He quotes by his stripes we are healed, which again the underlying is basically bruised. So if you hone in on well, I want to see stripes everywhere in my Bible, you may find that that falls away in the Septuagint. And again, it's almost subjective at this point because depending on how you want to translate, you could get it either way.

55:34 And that's where a lot of the translation committee decisions go from they were clearly being imprecise with importing the New Testament renderings back into the old. A lot of times it's just it's a translation of one language into another and there's nuance. You know, I could say a very simple English sentence, he hit the ball, or I could say he struck the ball, or I could say he smashed the ball, or I could say he destroyed the ball. In the context of a baseball game, all four of those would make perfect sense. And yet what have I done? I've gone from hit to struck to smash to destroyed. You could come along and say, well, you say he destroyed the ball, but you know, what I meant was he hit it over

56:17 the fence. It was a four hundred and fifty foot home run. But you could say, well, they went and they found the ball and it wasn't destroyed at all. It was perfectly intact. Well, if I'm talking about a batter playing baseball, I say destroyed, I don't necessarily mean that the ball was obliterated. I mean that the pitch was obliterated. The pitch was destroyed. The pitcher was destroyed. The ball was intact. But if I say he destroyed the ball, it's in the context of the whole thing. It's another case of synactity. Language works that way. And we understand it instinctively. And so this is Christological. It's not necessarily much weakened by the Septuagint, but you have to be careful when you're looking at the translations, just to know the

57:01 take it as it is. Take the words as God presents them in the original language, and then we should try to come up with faithful translations. And personally I would be fine with it saying both pierced and stripes. I think that's probably fine. But the pierced versus wounded is less of an easy sell than the wounds versus stripes. And when you go and look at verse five here, at the very least also read verse six, because if you look at the specific wording of verse six, the difference between the rabbinic text and the Greek text, you do indeed get a stronger Christological prophecy with regard to verse six, because in the Rabbinic text it says the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all, which is very clearly

57:49 Christological, very clearly true But in the rendering of the Greek, you get, and the Lord handed him over for our sins, which is very clearly more Christological than the Hebrew in this case, because Christ was indeed handed over for our sins. If you simply have he has laid on him the iniquity of us all, that doesn't tell you as much about what Christ is going to do from the perspective of when this was written. Whereas handed him over for his sins very clearly tells us, in fact, exactly what happened with Christ and his passion. And so for the next example, we're actually going to turn to the book of Zechariah. This is one of the examples that will bother some people initially, but it really shouldn't.

58:43 For some of the reasons we've already explained, and we'll go over some of that again after I read the text here, first from the ESV, from Zechariah 12:10. And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn. And now from the translation of the Septuagint. And I will pour out upon the house of David, and upon the ones who dwell in Jerusalem, a spirit of grace and of mercy, and they will look attentively to me, because they dance triumphantly, and they will mourn for it with a mourning, as for a

59:29 beloved friend, and they will be grieved with a grief, as for the firstborn. Now you can clearly see there are some differences between these two translations. The one that is going to jump out immediately to most Christians, of course, is again with the word pierced. It is there in the rabbinic, it is not there in the Greek, because the verb in Greek is properly translated dance triumphantly. There are some translations that play games with this, and they will translate it as pierced, but that's not the underlying Greek verb there. However, what we have here in the Greek is still very clearly an accurate prophecy with regard to the behavior of the Jews. Look at their behavior in many places in the Old Testament, look

1:00:16 at their behavior today. Dancing triumphantly is indeed what they do when they think they have committed some great evil and got one over on their enemies. That is undoubtedly what they were doing on Golgotha, when they looked at Christ on the cross, in addition to mocking him and everything else that is recorded in the pages of the New Testament. This is indeed an accurate prophecy about what happened to Christ. It is It is simply that we do not have the word pierced in the Greek, which is something that Christians are used to seeing in the translations of the rabbinic. This again is one of those cases where you have that hook to get you to look at this and and accept something that is handed down through oral tradition from those who hate Christ, who

1:01:02 crucified Christ, who blaspheme him, as opposed to what we actually have in the Greek, the actual word of God. Don't fall for the bait. The reason that this verse in particular is so important to highlight when we're looking at the Septuagint versus the Rabbinic text is that this is one of the only cases in the New Testament, we'll highlight this again in the last couple episodes, where there is actually a quotation of the underlying ancient Hebrew, over the Reptuagint. So John nineteen thirty seven does quote an old Hebrew text. It says, and again another scripture says, They will look on him whom they have pierced. So that's a case where it quotes what we're calling the rabbinic text. And this is John.

1:01:53 This only appears in John. It's not in the other gospels, but that's sufficient. We're not going to say, well, you don't need a majority vote of gospels to determine what's true. If it's in John, it's true. So this is a case where they will look upon him who they have pierced is fulfillment of prophecy, and it's a prophecy that is recorded in what we have left of the Hebrew. As Corey said, unlike the examples where we're having complete corruptions of prophecy in the rabbinic text and the fix in the Septuagint. Both are true. But because John nineteen thirty seven attests to the Hebrew version of Zechariah twelve ten, we don't need to do anything to the Greek at all. The Greek is the Greek, and the Greek says that they mocked

1:02:37 me, they danced triumphantly in mockery. When we are making an English translation of this in the future, I think that it is entirely reasonable to choose to follow the lead of John, to say, okay, John vets that this passage that was recorded from the Hebrew and not in the Septuagint says pierced instead of mocked. I think that is perfectly reasonable for a translation committee to choose pierced. I think that's just fine. Even though it is contradictory to the specific word present in the Old Testament. The real question here is not what do we do with this one word? The real question is, well, if John nineteen thirty seven says that the Hebrew is okay, doesn't mean this whole Septuagint thing is just

1:03:23 fake and it's all canceled. I think the opposite is true. I think this is one of the only examples where we do actually have an older version of Hebrew that is preserved faithfully, incidentally in Greek in the New Testament. So it's perfectly fine, I think, for us to backport that understanding, that rendition into Zechariah when we do a new English translation. Again, we don't go mess with the Greek. I wouldn't change the Greek text at all. But when we're looking at it and we're trying to understand it, it's true. But as Corey said, it's true either way. I mean both are true. That's not an excuse for ignoring John. But both pierced and mocked by dancing triumphantly, they're both true. But pierced is what John says.

1:04:05 I think when we're looking at English translation as a point we'll reiterate in the bonus episode, I think that we personally, I would stick with John's rendering of Zechariah. But the reason for highlighting this, this is one of the only examples in the entire New Testament where this happens. You would think that they would be quoting the Hebrew left and right, because they're all Hebrews, right? They're all Jews speaking Hebrew, it's all they knew. No. They almost exclusively quote Greek. So it's important to highlight this counterexample because we have to deal with it. We can't just pretend it's not there. But what do we do with it? I think is a very simple answer. I think that we respect John.

1:04:40 I think that we trust that when he says and again another scripture says, that that is breathed out by God, and indeed it was fulfilled in Christ's crucifixion. The Jews did pierce him. They did murder him in that way. So yeah, that's absolutely correct. No argument. So it's not a concern at all. And part of the reason for highlighting the earlier examples is that pointing out these translation committees are already doing this left and right. So although many of you listening may not have thought about these things before, you can rest assured that the Bible in your house today is doing these sorts of things all the time. It's choosing a Greek translation over the Rabbinic text because it's more

1:05:20 Christian. That's not a bad thing. It's just the question of when should be concerned that we're being o so inconsistent that maybe the text itself is not valid. That doesn't mean the Hebrew never existed. And this would be a case that however that was being used, Corey's speculation where we began recording was it was probably preserved in the Aramaic Targums, which is what they would have been teaching from in some cases. Not the Hebrew, but from Aramaic. So yeah, it's fine. It is scripture because scripture says it's scripture. That's why it's going to be our closing argument. So we can't play games here and say, well, we're going to ignore that and say what's in the Greek for the New Testament.

1:05:59 No. It says pierced, so it's pierced. It does not then follow that we cancel the rest of the Septuagint, quite the opposite. And so the last of the examples we'll be using for this second section of this episode is from the book of Genesis. In the In this case, Genesis 49, verse 10. I will again read first from the ESV and then from a translation of the Septuagint. The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. Then from the Lexim Translation of the Septuagint A ruler will not cease from Judah, and one who leads from his thighs, until the things laid away for him come, and he is the expectation of

1:06:49 nations. Now initially I should note that Oftentimes, particularly the Lexum, will not necessarily translate into English idiom that which is Greek idiom. And so leads from his thighs is a Greek idiom that is not translated into English idiom here. So it sounds a little strange to the English ear, but in a future proper English translation, obviously idiom would be translated as well. Idiom often does not work across languages, in fact, it is one of the things that seldom works across languages, unless they are very closely related languages. Even when reading German versus reading English, idiom has to be translated because there are things that don't work even between those two languages which are extremely close together.

1:07:44 And so for instance, one of the funnier examples from German is if you want to say that something doesn't matter to you or basically an idiomatic way of saying whatever Esis Mirwurst it's sausage to me, which sounds funny because Germans cared very deeply about sausage, but it's one way to say that. It just doesn't translate into English, because in English, if you said it's sausage to me, everyone would look at you like you had three heads because it means nothing in English idiom because it's a German idiom. The same thing here for leads from his thighs. It's a saying about his strength and his rulership, his kingship, the fact that he is a mighty ruler, a mighty king. But you will also notice that there are some language differences here

1:08:29 beyond just that one. You have until tribute comes to him is the translation in the ESV, the rendering in the ESV, which is not identical to what we have here in the Greek, because in the Greek it is says, this time from the Breton, until there come the things stored up for him. This is a fundamentally different sort of statement. If you say that there is something that is stored up, that is meant for, that is reserved for a king, for a ruler, that's one thing. But if you say tribute, that has a very different tenor to it. And so the Greek is saying that there are things that are stored up, there are things that rightfully belong to Christ, and will be given to him at his advent or at his exaltation.

1:09:16 That's a different thing from claiming simply tribute. Tribute is the conquering king crushing enemies and exacting things from them. If there are things that are laid away for him, that could very well be interpreted as the elect, those who are Those who are saved in Christ, a different thing from tribute. And you also have the obedience of the peoples versus the expectation of the nations. This is something that we see very frequently in these changes in the Rabbinic text. They will weaken the places in which Christ is clearly the hope of the nations. Christ is clearly meant for all peoples. And notably, I'm using peoples not in the way they're using it here, because if they had wanted to use peoples in the sense

1:10:04 of nations, they would have said goi goiem, and they don't say that, it is amim, which is a different word. Whereas in the Greek, we do indeed have the word that we translate as nations, ethnos. That is what this means. Christ is the hope of all nations, of all races, that is weakened in the rendering of the Rabbinic text, and indeed it is weakened intentionally. This is something that they do again, frequently, when there are differences between the rabbinic text and the Septuagint. We have yet to do a study on this and we're not gonna whatever I do will be personal. I'm not gonna publish anything about it. But another friend has pointed out what Corey just said in this verse is replete in the rabbinic text, that ethnos, meaning nations,

1:10:54 meaning all of the non-Jewish races on the planet, are expecting the Christ. You see that over and over and over and over again in these passages in the Septuagint, and they just vanish from the rabbinic text. Very frequently, ethnos is removed entirely and something else is stuck in there, sometimes completely seemingly at random. Doesn't have anything to do with nations or people or anything. It's just it goes away. So you would never know anyone but Jews existed. Another reason I wanted to highlight this verse is I actually picked two other translations than Corey did for this. So I'm going to give you my translations that I happen to have notes for. The first is the New King James, which is very similar to

1:11:38 the King James and most of the other English translations for one For one word, the scepter shall not depart from Judah nor a law giver from between his feet, which is Quarry saying was an idiom that gets lost completely, until Shiloh comes, and to hill shall be the obedience of the people. Now Shiloh is since the King James been considered to be the Christological prophecy here, quite directly, and some refer to Shiloh as a specific name of Christ. Interestingly, when I was looking this up a day or two ago, I found a sermon from Spurgeon where he actually refers to the Septuagint and disregards that stuff. He disregards the rabbinic text for that and says that this is actually much more about Christ.

1:12:28 The other funny part about I had chosen Brenton's verses Corey choosing Lexum, Brenton's makes it very clear. It says our ruler should not fail from Judah nor a prince from his loins, which is quite clearly offspring. So the Christological element, if you want to focus on the name Shiloh, will have been erased because there's no Shiloh, there's nothing remotely like Shiloh in the Septuagint. If, on the other hand, you realize that he is the expectation of nations is the gospel, isn't it? This is a very Christological passage in the Septuagint, but you have to let go of the word Shiloh to get there. And it's funny Corey's translation that he chose, which is common but less common, omits that for another word.

1:13:18 Some of these things are just translation committees disagreeing. Some of them are underlying text, dual bases disagreeing. Overwhelmingly what we find is when we prefer I don't mean in terms of I like it better, when we say yes, I'm gonna use the Septuagint, we find it's not only more Christological, but it's more gospel centric. It's more focused on God. And He is the expectation of nations. That's the same voice that you find in the New Testament. He is the expectation of nations could be I mean that's like you said, that's the gospel. That is God speaking to us in the Greek, whether it's old or new testament. For the balance of this episode, we are going to go over cases in which the Septuagint has

1:14:04 More than the Rabbinic text, which is to say the Septuagint has better prophecies of the Christ than does the rabbinic text. And we will be starting with the book of Zechariah, in this case chapter nine, I will again read from the ESV and then I will read from the Brenton. Sometimes I choose the Brenton over the Lexum because as I've mentioned before, the Lexum is meant to be more academic, and so it can be a little bit stilted in places in the English, which is one of the reasons that we need a new English translation of the Septuagint, because the existing translations have deficits in certain ways. The Breton is somewhat archaic, the Lexim is a little academic and stilted, which isn't bad.

1:14:48 Sometimes it's good to have that sort of translation, but it's not the sort of translation that you want to use every day. It's not the sort of translation from which you read in the gathered congregation. Partly because it's just difficult because stilted language causes men to stumble when they read aloud. And so that's the reason I'll choose one over the other. But anyway, first from the ESV Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem, Behold your king is coming to you, righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. And then from the Brenton translation of the Septuagint, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, proclaim it aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem, behold the

1:15:36 king is coming to thee, just and a Savior, he is meek and riding on an ass and on a young foal. There are a couple of problems here because the translation committees have decided to obscure something that is present in the Hebrew, that is present in the Rabbinic text. This is another case where they have simply gone with the Greek instead of the Hebrew. The Greek there for and a savior could also be translated as saving, so it could be just and saving is he, instead of just and a savior, both translations are fine. Clearly that's Christological, that sort of goes without saying. But the underlying Hebrew is Sadiq Venosha. And I won't even ask you to forgive my pronunciation because it's Hebrew and I don't care.

1:16:26 What it says there is righteous and being saved is he. There's a pretty fundamental difference between saying that someone is a savior or is saving versus being saved. The rabbinic text completely destroys this Christological prophecy, and it is simply hidden in many modern English translations because they've simply gone with the Greek, because the Greek is clearly scripture here, and the rabbinic text is something else. But you wouldn't notice that if you were just reading, say, the ESV, because in the ESV, it doesn't say being saved is he. It says righteous and having salvation is he, which sounds very much like a Christological prophecy because it is supposed to be, and very clearly is in the Greek.

1:17:19 I found this to be one of the most upsetting translation decisions made by really since the King James, ESV Falls King James. That having salvation, I've always heard that. It just as you would like, oh well, obviously he's a savior, he has salvation, he's he's the one bringing salvation with him. That's what having salvation means in our heads because we're Christians. They were absolutely unfaithful and they were deliberately unfaithful to the text. The way Corey phrased that it made it sort of sound like they were following the Greek. If they'd been following the Greek, they would have called him the Savior. They would not have said having salvation. Using that tense there is covering up for the fact that it says he is just

1:18:01 and saved. He is just and being saved. That's what's in the Hebrew versus he is just and saving. So you see, sometimes these differences are very, very small. What's the difference between saved and saving? Well it's a pretty big difference if you're drowning. If you're drowning and I say, oh I'm gonna save you or I'm gonna be saved, two different things. When things are obscured for the sake of just trying to paper over differences, again, they were covering for the rabbinic text. They should have just bit the bullet and said, Well, if we look at the Greek, we obviously have to say he's a savior. It boggles my mind that this stuff has gone on for so long and everyone has just stared at these passages over and over

1:18:45 again, and not asked the fundamental question, what are we doing here with this rabbinic text? It keeps causing all these problems. Why are we still relying on it? That's why we spent, you know, how seven hours or so in the first couple historical episodes to deal with that. Because it is a mess, and what do you do with it? And what we found was they weren't faithless and they weren't stupid. They were just not careful about this. They were careful about other things, like they were careful about making sure that this is Christological. He's righteous and having salvation. Okay, we his Jesus on the donkey, we know that now once it's fulfilled. So obviously this is a Christological prophecy.

1:19:24 But what the rabbinic text does to it is a demonic inversion, saying that Jesus on the donkey is the one being saved. That is it's wicked. And again, we're not suggesting be picky choosy about well, I'm gonna pick the Bible as more Christology. But when you look at the New Testament, it's very clearly he's the Savior and He's not saved. You have to then doubt in the sense of veracity, not in the sense of uncertainty in your own self, but if the Rabbinic text is deleting Savior, do you think maybe that's something that should matter to Christians? When it happens consistently? When the gospel to all the nations is just deleted consistently? Do you think at some point maybe we decide, all right, this

1:20:10 is too much? You know, if our podcast episodes, if we had thirty or forty major glaring errors in every one, nobody would listen. Cause even whatever we got right would be just a crapshoot. You know, you can't get stuff wrong and still be taken seriously. And that's just for something as trivial as a podcast. We're talking about scripture here. We're talking about God's word, the basis for our Bibles, the basis for our faith. Cannot be so riddled with errors the centuries of translation committees have to run interference for the rabbinic text just so we can stay Christian. And on one hand, I thank God that they did. If we had a purely rabbinic text based Bible, I think the church would be long gone.

1:20:51 So God did not permit that. Even as he permitted the curse of this rabbinic text to infest the church, he still kept it at basic. Because over and over Krishnaman, like, yeah, we're not doing that. We're gonna we're gonna do it's in the Greek and just pretend we didn't. That's not a basis for faithfulness and consistency, but at least it's kept us on life support. But we can do better. So the next example comes from the book of Psalms, and it is worth mentioning again that Psalms Psalms is one of those books where the differences are pervasive. This runs throughout basically all of the wisdom literature. So this is present in Psalms, it's present in Proverbs, it's present in the book of Job.

1:21:38 We will be getting into that obviously more in the second episode in this three-part section of the series dealing with the Old Testament, which deals specifically or will deal specifically with the wisdom literature. But we're going to draw in one example here to sort of give you a foretaste of that. This is from Psalm forty verses six through eight. Now it's worth noting that the numbering is different in the Septuagint. This is one thing where there is a difference between the two where you may have to have a little chart. It's worth noting, again, for all those who have forgotten or perhaps are listening to the episode for the first time out of order, and have never heard this before. The numbers in scripture with regard to chapters and verses are not

1:22:25 inspired. They were added by men later so that we could do things like tell you I am reading from Psalm 40 right now, and you could find it, as opposed to having to page through the entirety of the book of the Psalms and attempt to find it. So the numbering doesn't matter. We could in fact change that with a future version, a future translation Septuagint, and that would be completely fine. These numbers are simply human conventions for the sake of convenience. But so reading first from the ESV again, Psalm forty starting with verse six. In sacrifice an offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear, burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, Behold, I have come, in the scroll of

1:23:11 the book it is written of me. I delight to do your will, O my God, your law is within my heart. Now I will read from the Lexum Translation of the Septuagint. You did not want sacrifice an offering, but you restored a body to me. You did not ask for whole burnt offering, and an offering concerning sin. Then I said, Look, I have arrived. In the scroll of the document it has been written concerning me. I wish to do your will, O my God, and your law is in the middle of my heart. Now some of these differences in wording are simply a matter of a difference in idiom. So in the middle of my heart versus within my heart, that's just an idiomatic difference. We could translate the Greek the exact same way we have it

1:23:56 in the ESV, that would be completely fine. But focus for a second on that second section there of verse six. In the ESV, but you have given me an open ear, in the Septuagint, but you restored a body to me. These are two very different claims. One of these is very clearly again Christological, hence the inclusion in this episode. The other is not so clearly so. This is something that we have in the Septuagint and we lose in the rabbinic text. There may perhaps be a reason that the rabbis would not want to have something like an incarnate God might not want to have something about God having a body. Well here we have it, but you restored a body to me, a Christological prophecy of Christ's incarnation and of his resurrection, that is

1:24:52 not present in the rabbinic text, because the rabbinic text just says an open ear. So God's listening. We have that all over scripture, of course God is listening, he listens to prayer. We lose this prophecy if we use the rabbinic text. And although most of that did not change between the rabbinic and the Septuagint, the reason for including six, seven, and 8 is that this is quoted directly in Hebrews 10, verses 5 through 7. It quotes the Septuagint verbatim. And I'm gonna read from Hebrews now, sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me. Hebrews makes very clear that this was about Jesus Christ, and it specifically refers to his body. All the codices of the Septuagint say soma, which is Greek for

1:25:43 body. This stuff about years being dug, you know, we see that stuff, including in your old testaments are mostly going to follow the rabbinic text here. They're not going to match. If you look at your Psalm 40 specifically verse six, it's probably not going to say anything about a body because it's actually using the rabbinic text there. It's corrupt, it's wicked, it is false. You've dug an ear. And so the idiom is explained away. Okay, well it's just you know it's another culture, so it's strange and you have to explain it to people. Okay, that'd be fine if it were true. But when Hebrews 10 validates and says no, a body you have prepared for me. In Hebrews ten says this is Jesus' body it's being spoken of,

1:26:27 we can't mess with it. So this is a case where not only is the New Testament consistent with the Septuagint, but it's very expressly Christological as stated by the New Testament. So more and more of these examples are going to get worse and worse in this way for the rabbinic text. And less and less you're going to find your own Bible has papered over it. It's going to be kind of a crapshoot depending on the translation committee for whichever Bible you have. But a lot of times they're just going to stick with the rabbinic. And then when you find that you look at your old testament, your new testament, they don't match at all. And we've all just kind of lived with this and not asked any questions.

1:27:08 I think one of the earliest examples that kind of smacked me in the face without me realizing what was happening, was the passage about the Star of Remphan. In Acts in Stephen's, I think it's in Acts seven, roughly, Stephen is giving his sermon about the Jews murdering Christ right before they murder him for saying that. And one of the things he says is your star of Remphan, and he talks about Moloch, calls them Remphan and Moloch worshippers, and says that their god has a star. And that's quoting Amos, I believe Amos five. When you look at Amos, it doesn't say Rempan, it doesn't say Moloch, it says other things. It's like Tikun or something, weird weird words that only appear once in scripture.

1:27:51 They don't match because Stephen, the martyr, was quoting the Septuagint against the Jews who understood Greek. So I looked at that and oh well that's interesting, and I guess this is a difference in the Septuagint, and it didn't register. I looked right at it and I saw nothing at all. Because why would I ever question this? We've spent our entire lives being conditioned never to question why the old and new testaments don't match when they quote each other. This is why. And so the reason for closing with these is that when you start quoting the old testament from Greek as it does in the New Testament, you're using the Septuagint. It's circular, but it's true. That's why our closing argument is it's the Bible of Jesus and

1:28:33 the Apostles. The New Testament quotes almost exclusively scripture of the Greek. The next example is another one of those. I won't bury the lead, I guess, this time, is another one of those examples in which the rabbinic text has very clearly removed something that is a prophecy concerning the Christ being a blessing for all nations. And so now you have an idea of where we're going with this reading. And so listen carefully as I go through Amos 9, 11 through 12, and you'll catch where there's a difference in the rabbinic text, verses what is actually present in the Greek text, and so again first from the ESV. In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen, and repair its breaches, and raise up its ruins, and

1:29:24 rebuild it as in the days of old, that they may possess the remnant of Edom, and all the nations who are called by my name, declares the Lord who does this. And now from the Septuagint. On that day I will raise up the tent of David that has fallen, and I will rebuild its things that have fallen, and I will raise up its things that have been destroyed, and I will rebuild it just as the days of eternity, so that the remnant of the people, and all the nations upon whom my name was invoked upon them will search for me, says the Lord who is making these things. Edom is not there, in the Greek. You see this ancient feud that the Jews have with Edom brought into the Rabbinic text, and it removes part of the prophecy that

1:30:14 is very clearly about the Christ being a blessing coming for the nations, the remnant of the people. It's not a remnant of Edom that these people are going to possess, that they're going to destroy're ancient enemies, that's not what the prophecy is. The prophecy is about the Christ coming and taking from every tribe, language, and nation people for himself, and all the nations upon whom my name was invoked. This is another case in which the rabbis have changed something that is meant for all peoples, that is a blessing for all the races of men, and attempted to change it into something that applies only to the to the Jews. Because again this is something that they do frequently with regard to

1:31:01 these prophecies in the Old Testament. This is one of the common threads you can find where they have changed things in their rabbinic text. It is simply not there in the Greek. The Greek is a very clear prophecy. The rabbinic text is something else, because it was changed with a purpose in mind. There's malice behind some of these changes, and in particular, this change and this sort of change is a malicious change. This is a subversion of scripture. And we have Christians who will look at this and see no problem? These materials have been available for centuries. Any Christian could have gone and looked at this and figured out there's a problem with this thing the rabbis are telling us is

1:31:46 scripture. Because it keeps trying all of these prophecies of a particular character in a particular way. That is not coincidence, that is not accident, that is deliberate action of the enemy And one of the easiest places that any Christian might have found this would be in Acts 15. Verses 16 and 17 directly quote Amos 9, 11, and 12, and they explicitly quote the Septuagint. Because the purpose of the passage in Acts 15 is the gospel to the nations. It's the gospel to every non-Jew, which is Corey said is precisely what was deleted from this. I'm going to read again from the ESV just the last portion of that, as is derived from the rabbinic text, that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called

1:32:36 by my name. So who's the main character there? It's obviously the Jews that they can possess Edom. They're doing the stuff and the nations who are called by my name, the way it's rendered in the rabbinic text, it makes it sound like the Jews are gonna have everybody's territory. That's the way Amos 9 reads, unless you look at the Septuagint, where it's makes very clear. God says in the Greek, just as he says in Acts fifteen again in Greek, that the remnant of men and all the nations upon whom my name is called may earnestly seek me. It's fundamentally different. It's the gospel. Once again, it's the gospel to the nations. It's about us. It's not about to the Jews. So many of the perversions of the rabbinic text are specifically about

1:33:24 this. This is not a small matter. And the reason that Acts fifteen disagrees with your Bible in Amos is that your Bible in Amos is not the Bible. That portion has been corrupted by Christ killers. It's evil. There's no other way around it. That's the reason that there's a mismatch. It's not simply oh they're textual differences and you know you got scrolls and passage of time and yeah, who knows? No, they deleted the gospel, they made the Jews the central characters, they made God the bad guy. It's wicked stuff. And like we're not cherry picking here. This we've not even scratched the surface. And we're not gonna bother going much further because there's another century or more of Christian theology, Christian research needs to be done into

1:34:09 this stuff to rediscover all the places where we've lost sight of Scripture. It's why we keep talking about King Josiah. The Bible was literally lost by the By these people, incidentally, they lost it and they forgot that he even had it. We've done much the same, except it was never misplaced, except from our hearts. The Greek has always existed, in fact the Eastern Orthodox never got rid of it, but they turned out even worse because they stopped believing it. So I've had people being stupid on social media saying, Oh well the the EO have it, so why don't you just put me Eastern Orthodox? Did you not listen to our episode about them? The great The Greek does not preserve your faith if you don't

1:34:53 believe it. The point of this is to believe God. So I'm not telling anybody to go learn Greek. We just need an English translation. All I want is an English translation that has this stuff because it's God's word and the New Testament attests to that fact. The next example is in the same vein, but this one is just about as bold as you can possibly get with regard to the edit in the rabbinic text. And so just to switch it up this time, I'm actually going to read first from the Septuagint, and then I will read from the ESV, the translation of the Rabbinic Text Delight O heavens with him, and worship him you sons of God, delight O nations with his people, and prevail with him all you angels of God, for he will avenge the blood of his sons,

1:35:43 and he will avenge, and he will repay the enemies with vengeance, and he will repay those who hate, and the Lord will cleanse out the land of his people. This is Deuteronomy thirty two forty three and now from the ESV. Rejoice with him, O heavens, bow down to him all gods, for he avenges the blood of his children, and takes vengeance on his adversaries. He repays those who hate him, and cleanses his people's land. You may have noticed that the reading from the ESV was shorter. Well that's because they simply deleted two lines. Delight, O nations, with his people, and prevail with him all you angels of God. Same vain as some of the other changes. They simply deleted this time a prophecy concerning the fact that the Christ is the Savior of

1:36:35 all nations. As opposed to changing it, which they've done in a few other places, many other places we could go through many other examples, here they were so bold simply to delete some of the words of God. Think about that curse from Revelation that Woe cited in the beginning of this episode. That applies to the people who did this. That applies to those who decided they would just remove this part that says that the Christ is not just for the Jews. The Christ is for all peoples. Think of the sort of wickedness that you have to have in your heart. To start deleting promises from Scripture because you don't like the fact that you aren't the only one included in them. That is the sort of people with whom we are dealing when

1:37:22 we use the rabbinic text instead instead of the church text, instead of the text of Christ and the Apostles, instead of the Septuagint, instead of the Greek. You have this promise, this great gospel promise present in the Septuagint, and it is simply deleted by the rabbis from their text. Or he quoted the Lexum there. I'm going to quote Brenton's because it's more consistent. It says, Rejoice ye heavens with him, and let all the angels of God worship him. The reason that I can say that this is better is that this is quoted in the first chapter of Hebrews. Again, the book titled Hebrews, written to the Hebrews, all it does is quote the Greek. Maybe think about why that is. And here's what it says in the beginning of Hebrews.

1:38:12 The author, whomever he was, when I'm going to pick that fight, Hebrews says for to which of the angels did God ever say? And then skipping down, let all the angels worship him. That's a direct quote of Deuteronomy thirty two forty three, quoted in Hebrews 1 about Jesus Christ. So I'm going to read from the King James what it does to that first line. Rejoice, O ye nations. It doesn't say heavens. The Bible says heavens. The King James quoting the rabbinic text says rejoice, O ye nations, completely inverts it. It moves it from heaven to earth. That's false. That's not what it says. And the reason that you have to have heavens there is that the next thing it says, and let all the angels of God

1:38:58 worship him. It's very clearly in heaven about Jesus, as Hebrews says. So we're given some spoilers for the New Testament closing argument here, but come on. This is what we're dealing with, and the reason that I pulled these forward and we're dealing with this in the Christological episode is it's so important. Look at how many of these passages about Jesus Christ, who was the promised Christ, the promised anointed one for these Jews? When he came they destroyed the scripture to pretend it didn't happen, and then passed it off to us, and then we adopted it. This is layers of evil in the very New Testament that we all agree on. That's why it's our closing army. You don't need to accept anything we say.

1:39:41 All you have to do is believe the New Testament, and you already have the Septuagint. There's your spoiler. You cannot possibly be a Christian and reject the Septuagint because you lose the New Testament if you do it. And when you look at the places where the New Testament quotes the old, where it quotes the Septuagint, it's over and over again about Jesus, it's about the gospel. It's about the gospel being spread to every race on the planet, not just the Jews. Those are the three things that are deleted over and over again from the rabbinic text. You know why that is. Just one last thing. Again, and if you look at Bible Hub, look at this passage, and even when you look at you know relative recent translations like

1:40:23 ESV, it simply ignores the rabbinic text. And then it adds bow down to him all gods. So they ignore what their own textual basis says, but they have this confusing stuff about all gods, like no, his angels. It's very clearly what the Septuagint says. So this is so often we find that these translation committees they're very clearly caught in a brutal cognitive dissonance, where they know that they're liars. They know that basing any of their work on the rabbinic text is wicked, and so they try to paper it over. They avoid some of the lies, but they still have to slip some stuff in, even if it's random. What's the stuff? bowed down to him, all gods. No. Let all God's angels worship him. That's what Hebrews says, because it's what the Septuagint says.

1:41:13 These men knew better, and yet their very contact with the Hebrew, with this wicked rabbinic text, caused them to become liars in the Bible in your house. And that's why we keep pointing the New Testament. The New Testament preserves us from this malicious change by simply showing us that we do have the Old Testament. We have it intact. We don't need to dig it out of the rubble. We just need to believe it. Yeah, we need to translate it because it's in Greek. There's almost an additional level of irony here as between the ESV And the King James, because they essentially choose different chunks of the Greek to borrow, and then don't really translate them well in the case of the ESV for that second line, all gods.

1:41:56 Yes, of course, you could draw out the argument saying that well the sons of God are the angels and the angels can be called gods and no, just translate what it actually says. Whereas the King James goes ahead and says, Okay, fine, we'll take rejoice, O ye nations, which of course is rejoice ye nations, which is part that is removed from the rabbinic text, but then it doesn't include the rest of it. Each one of them has four lines when there are more than that in the original. They just don't take the fullness of what we actually have in the text, depending on how they break it up, the ESV breaks it up into six when they're eight in the Greek. All they had to do was translate faithfully what they already had

1:42:42 and what they were clearly looking at, and trying to figure out how to harmonize this? You don't have to harmonize it. We have God's Word. It's quoted in the New Testament. It's right there. All that is required of us is to translate it. And as we pointed out many times before, we're dealing with Greek. We're not dealing with some unknown language that's difficult to translate, that no one knows what it's mean. We're dealing with Greek. There are many tens of thousands of men who can read Greek at a perfectly proficient level and English as well? This is not a difficult task, this is not esoteric, it's right there. Many of those listening to the podcast right now could painstakingly, admittedly, but could painstakingly translate from the Greek using modern tools.

1:43:34 I'm looking at Logos right now as we're going through these verses, as we're recording this episode, because it's easy to look at different versions side by side. I can look at Hebrew and click on words and know what they mean. Granted that's with the caveat of what we went over in previous episodes, but doing that with the Greek is trivial. This is not a difficult task. All we have to believe is that Christ and the apostles knew what they were doing when they quoted the Greek, when they gave the Greek their stamp of approval, not the Hebrew, not some special text that only the rabbis had, that was preserved with oral tradition, no the Greek, the Septuagint. The Greek is the Bible the scripture of the church because it

1:44:21 was the scripture of the apostles and of Christ? All we have to do is be faithful to that. And so as I mentioned earlier, we will be turning again to Isaiah because a number of these examples today are from the book of Isaiah. And so returning to chapter fifty three, this time verse eight, reading first from the ESV. By By oppression and judgment he was taken away, and as for his generation who considered, that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. And then second from the Brenton In his humiliation his judgment was taken away who shall declare his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth because of the iniquities of my people he was led to death

1:45:10 So there are a couple interesting things happening with this passage. First, the rabbinic text ends with stricken for the transgression of my people. And transgression means sin. So that's fine. Stricken, okay, yeah, he was stricken, but what is missing when you don't have the Septuagint? Because of the iniquities of my people he was led to death. It's a very explicit prophecy. 'Cause you can be stricken, smitten and afflicted. That's a phrase that we all know, it's a song. But stricken doesn't mean killed. Yeah, we talked about stripes and bruises and whatnot earlier when the Septuagint says because of the sins of my people he was led to death Well, that's the gospel, isn't it? So it's a small change, but it's also a huge change.

1:46:00 To lose he was led to death. It's the denial of Christ, quite simply. And again, this is Isaiah 53, this is Isaiah. This is not some small potatoes minor prophet. They're messing with the very core of scripture here. And yet again, this is a passage where you know how you can believe the Septuagint? You already do. Because Acts 8, when you look at the discussion between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, he was reading precisely this passage. This is what the eunuch was reading right as he talked to Philip and said, Hey, what about this stuff? Who is this about? Tell me who it is. Well Well, Acts 8 omits the very last portion about death, as everything else, and it's a verbatim quote from the Septuagint.

1:46:48 So once again, what are we dealing with? Jesus and the apostles use the Greek. We should use the Greek. If you believe Acts eight, you reject the rabbinic text. And in so we're doing, it turns out you have more Christ. Coincidentally, not that that's a goal, but when that's how it turns out it should come as no surprise. Because of the sins of my people he was led to death. When the Ethiopian eunuch asked Philip, Who's this about? he heard about Jesus Christ. The gospel And I am going to renew my recommendation from earlier in the episode that you go and read the entirety of chapter fifty three of Isaiah in both whatever version you have on hand and the Septuagint, but you do not have to go out and buy.

1:47:34 You can find English translations on many different websites for free. But if you proceed on to verse 9, you will note a couple of changes with regard to the diction here, and I want to highlight just one before we move on to the next example, which is incidentally also from Isaiah. In the ESV, it says although he had done no violence, and that is typically the way that it is translated. The word there in Hebrew is Hamas. I'm going to choose not to read anything into that with regard to modern politics. But more importantly, in the Septuagint this word is indeed anomion, which is lawlessness, this is iniquity, this is a prophecy of Christ, saying that he is sinless. You don't have that in the rabbinic text.

1:48:29 You have that very clearly in the Greek. You have that very clearly in the actual text of Scripture. This is a prophecy of Christ saying that He is killed, He is led to death for the sins of the people, despite the fact that He Himself is sinless. You simply lose this if you're looking at the rabbinic text. And so next we go back a little bit in the book of Isaiah this time, chapter eleven, I will read first from the ESV again and then from the Brenton Isaiah eleven ten. In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand is a signal for the peoples, of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious. Now from the Brenton, and in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, and he that shall arise to rule over the

1:49:23 nations, in him shall the nations trust, and his rest shall be glorious. There's a bit of a difference there between the wording of those two verses. In the rabbinic text, we have Shall the Nations Inquire? Okay, sure, the nations will inquire of this man. The nations inquire of many men. We inquire of historical figures, of great leaders, of all sorts of men. But what does it actually say in the Greek? He shall arise to rule over the nations, in him shall the nations trust. That's a fundamentally different statement. Saying that the nations will trust in Christ and that He will rule over them, obviously this is Christological, but this is also the gospel. It's simply removed from the rabbinic text.

1:50:18 Yet another case in which the rabbis have looked at Scripture, seen a prophecy that wasn't for the Jews, and decided to remove it. This should be a theme that is very obvious by now. If you go through the Septuagint yourself and start comparing it to what you have in the Old Testament, particularly if you manage to find an actually word-for-word translation of the rabbinic text instead of this sort of hodgepodge that we have sometimes from translation committees that have pulled from the Greek when they didn't like what the Jews had to say. You'll notice that they just go ahead and delete prophecies concerning the nations whenever they don't like them. This is yet another blatant example of that, because the nations will

1:51:05 inquire of him is not the same thing, as in him shall the nations trust. They're deleting the gospel from the Old Testament. And again, as I said at the very beginning of this series, thank God for preserving his word even in spite of these changes. We're Christians despite having only looked at the rabbinic text because we also have the New Testament that verifies that these places where it's corrupted, they're then clarified. And we have gotten into the habit of thinking, oh, well, the New Testament sort of makes it clear, you know, it reveals what was concealed before. Well, there wasn't nearly as much concealed if you actually have the Greek. If you're using the Septuagint, you don't have nearly as many

1:51:47 surprises when you get to the New Testament. Because over and over it's Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, the Christ is coming, and he's coming to all of the nations. All these non-Jewish races are preserved as the object of God's love in the Greek, because it's God's word. The last The last verse that we're going to cover today is one that came up as we were doing this research. I pointed out something interesting to a friend. He pointed out something interesting, and I posted about it, and a third friend posted a pointed out something that blew my mind. So the verse that we're gonna look here at to finish is one that I couldn't find any record of anyone having ever said it was a Christological prophecy before.

1:52:32 So you're gonna have to make it that what you will. Either I'm making stuff up, either we're fabricating here, or when a number of Christian men look at the Greek, look at the scripture breathed out by God, we find God in places where he was obscured because we weren't looking at it. The twenty-third Psalm, you might have heard of it. Just going to focus on chapter five here. And for the rabbinic text I'm gonna use the King James because it's what everyone knows and loves and is memorized, including me, despite of all the things I say about the King James, the twenty third Psalm's rendering in the King James is beautiful, and we all understand it. That's crucial. Part of the obscuration of this language in archaic terms, whether it's

1:53:19 King James or Brenton, they're both defective in that regard, is it makes it difficult to understand things. But we've all dealt with Psalm 23 for so long that we understand it. Even with these and thousands, it's not really very heavily layered with other archaic terms, but the differences between the Rabbinic text and the Septuagint are profound. Psalm twenty three five. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies, thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. So we all know that, we love it, it's a great passage. Listen to what it says in Brenton, since case I'm leaving in the these and thou so it matches up. This is a septuagent. Thou hast prepared a table for me in the presence of them

1:54:03 that afflict me, thou hast thoroughly anointed my head with oil, it's all the same. And thy cup inebriates me, how excellent it is. What? That's wildly different. Read that again. And thy cup inebriates me, how excellent it is. Versus my cup runneth over. It's a lot more words, and it means very different things. So let's unpack what's happening here in the Greek. Septuagin says, thy cup, your cup inebriates me. So it completely changes. Not my cup anymore, it's your cup. Which is crucial for when we get to what's actually going on with this as a prophecy. Because remember this is the Christological prophecy episode. Psalm 23, verse 5 is a Christological prophecy that was fulfilled at the wedding at Cana.

1:54:53 And that's part of the reason that my cup to your cup is so important. When you look at what happens in the wedding at Cana, we have Jesus' very first miracle. And one of the profound things that realizing what was going on with this verse in Psalm 23, the impact it had on me is that suddenly the wedding of Cana wasn't just out of the blue anymore. It seems like Jesus' ministry starts very abruptly, doesn't it? Like one day, like he's having a conversation with his mom at a party and she kinda gets on his nerves and he just spontaneously performs a miracle and I guess he's off to the races. 'Cause once he's done one, he does a bunch more, and well now he's proving that he's a Christ. He's the Christ.

1:55:36 He's not simply a carpenter's son anymore. He's something more. When you change thy cup, he in the Septuagint to my cup, it makes the entire thing first person. And it's very clear from Psalm 23 that it's not speaking about Christ in the first person. It's speaking about someone who's afflicted, who's being protected by God, going through danger and temptation, all sorts of bad things. And although Jesus endured those things, the way that God looks after the man, the psalmist, I think it makes the most sense is we always have to realize that this is principally about us. That's why we find it so comforting. It's why it's probably one that almost all of you have memorized. If you haven't, you should.

1:56:23 When the rabbinic texts changed thy cup to my cup runneth over, it deletes the connection to the Wenyakana. When it's thy cup, and is thy cup inebriates me how excellent it is, suddenly the service of the cup is from God. It's not simply that we have a man who's being protected by God and things are going well, and he has a cup and it's overflowing. That seems like blessings and bounty, and we've all talked about that forever. We understand what that means. My cup runneth over. When it's thy cup, now the wedding at Cana door is opened. And what does it say? Thy cup inebrates me how excellent it is. And the how excellent it is, you know, the phrasing of the Greek isn't it's very clearly connected to the wine itself.

1:57:09 The word there is inebriate. It is about drunkenness. And so I initially latched onto that like haha, take that Baptist. Not that I'm supporting drunkenness, but what do we have here? I don't know what to make of this. That my first thought was Psalm twenty-three is about getting drunk, which is not what I'm saying, but it says thy cup inebrates me how excellent it is. What do we have happening at the wedding at Cana? Jesus is there, his ministry has not yet begun. They run out of wine. His mom says, Hey, do something. I hope no one feels I'm being disrespectful saying his mom, Mary, the blessed mother Mary, like she was his mother, and that was their interaction. You know, they were humans.

1:57:50 Jesus was human too. He was the son of Mary, the son, just like you're a son. When your mom comes and tells you something, maybe you're excited, maybe you're annoyed, you gotta deal with her because you're she's your mother. And so you deal with her respectfully, and you should generally do what she says. Mary's last words incidentally in the Bible were do whatever he tells you. And then Jesus said, Go fill those jars. It was probably 120 to 180 gallons of water was put into those jars because they were for ritual purification. Those six jars, many theologians going back for two thousand years have said that those represented different elements of the Levitical law. And this was very particularly one aspect of the Levitical Law regarding

1:58:39 ritual purity. What he does was he turned the water into wine. And so thy and my matter because suddenly this is God who's doing the service of the wine. Thy cup is the cup that Jesus provided at the wedding at Cana. It was his cup. And And the end of Psalm 23, 5 says, How excellent is this wine, this cup, your cup that inebriates me, how excellent it is. That was exactly the response of the master of the wedding. He came to him and he was blown away. He's like, no one ever saves the best wine for last. This is this is very good wine. So the last element of this that I want to highlight is that this is something another friend pointed out. This was a wedding in Cana in Galilee, not that far north

1:59:31 from Jerusalem. It was three years before the crucifixion, so you can expect that a lot of people there were not super old. They probably mostly had not died of old age three years later, when Jesus was crucified, there's a very good chance, there's a very real likelihood that there were people who were at the wedding of Cana that Jesus served this wine who were also present shouting for his blood during the trial with Prometheus Pilate. And so the other part of the twenty-third Psalm is about a table being prepared in the presence of mine enemies. It's very likely that those friends, those guests who are present at the wedding, later on became his enemies. And one of the reasons I think there's a very strong argument

2:00:18 to be made that this is a Christological prophecy, is this bookends both the table with my enemies assuming the possibility that there were guests at the wedding at Cain. It was a big party. Like if they had 180 gallons of wine, there were a fair number of people there. And the the parties lasted for several days, but still, that's a whole lot of drinking, even with dilution. It was a big party. It's reasonable to believe that some of those would have been when they were calling for his crucifixion. So that would have been a case at the beginning of Jesus' ministry at the wedding at Cana in Galilee, that he was in the presence of his enemies at a table. He was also in the presence of his enemies on the last

2:01:00 night. When he was betrayed, he was sitting there with Judas. So this prophecy was fulfilled twice over. It was fulfilled the Psalm twenty three, not only verse five, but all of Psalm twenty three was fulfilled with Jesus being in the presence of his enemies at the wedding, and then on the last night, with Judas sitting at the table. And interestingly, if you look at Matthew twenty six, gonna skip a little bit, but I'm gonna read two different things that Jesus said about a cop in Matthew twenty six. And going a little farther, he fell on his face and prayed, saying, My father, if it be possible Let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will. Again for the second time he went away and prayed, My father,

2:01:45 if this cannot pass until I drink it, your will be done. I think the symmetry of thy cup inebriating me and how excellent it is with Jesus suffering on the last night where he compares his suffering to a cup that is overflowing with the worst form of misery and torment and dread, he was frightened of what was to come. He knew what was to come. And so when he says twice for the Father to take this cup from him, I see that as the exact opposite sort of cup that we see in Psalm twenty three. There's a lot to unpack there if you conclude that it's possible this is a Christological prophecy. I think once you realize that it's not my cup, but it's thy cup, and that Jesus is serving it, how excellent that wine

2:02:36 is, suddenly the wedding of Cana is not out of the blue anymore. It's the fulfillment, very obviously even in the moment of this prophecy, that ends with the last time that he had wine apart from the vinegar on the cross was when he was together with the apostles on the night when he was betrayed sitting next to Judas. I think that Psalm twenty three is one of the most important Christological prophecies in the entire Bible. It bookends his entire earthly ministry. Psalm 23 is a great place for us to end this episode because it is one of the clearest examples where we can reiterate a point that we have been making throughout this series. There are centuries ahead of the church of work in dealing with

2:03:24 the Septuagint, in dealing with the actual Old Testament, and that's not bad news. No one should hear that as bad news or as a problem, that is great news for the Church. This is similar to one of the points that we make with regard to the fact that baptism and the sacrament of the table are both means of grace. There are those who will ask who will raise the issue, well, isn't it faith alone? Of course. It is solafide. Solograti, it's by grace alone, through faith alone. But God is superabundant in how He presents His gifts to us, and so we don't look at God and say why are you doing it this way? We are thankful for the bounty that He has given us. In the same way we are thankful for what God has preserved

2:04:12 for the church in the Septuagint, in the actual Old Testament. We have more and greater gifts from God than we thought we had. We thought we had only this text that was handed to us by rabbis and we had to interpret it in light of the New Testament and use the lens of the New Testament in order to fix these things that seemed like they were problems and none of None of that matters because we have the actual Word of God which doesn't have those problems, and God preserved it for us despite our unfaithfulness. That is great news. Psalm twenty-three has books that will be written about it in the future by faithful men. I'm not saying that I will be writing one of those books certainly, I'm disinclined to do so.

2:05:01 As Woe and I have said before, we are not the men who will be making some of these calls in the future. We will be making some recommendations in the last episode in this series. But this is work for men who have not yet even been born. There will be a translation in our lifetimes of the Septuagint that is faithful, that is in modern, comprehensible, fluid English. But that will need to be done again in a hundred years. For reasons that we've explained and will go into greater depth in the future episode. But I want to highlight one more thing with regard to Psalm 23. When it says, Thy cup cheers me like the best wine. There's another fulfillment of that. That's fulfilled every single Sunday in the Divine Service.

2:05:52 That's a Eucharistic prophecy. Because many prophecies in Scripture have not one fulfillment, but many fulfillments. Many times they are fulfilled chiefly in Christ, and that is certainly the case with regard to Psalm twenty three. But then there's the additional fulfillment when Christ brings his gifts to you in the sacrament of the table. That is his cup, that is thy cup which cheers me. You can say it in that way as well, because it is Christ's cup, with which He is cheering you with the forgiveness of sins. Again I want to reiterate, all of this should be cause for hope and joy, because the things that we have, the things that God has preserved for us are wonderful gifts, are great gifts,

2:06:41 are super abundant, are more than we thought that we had. And so just because there are some issues to be resolved does not mean there are any problems. The Greek doesn't present us problems. The Greek presents us with what God has saved for us, what God used to build the early church, what God himself in the person of Christ used during his earthly ministry, what his apostles used following his example. The church is built on this foundation because it is built on the foundation of God's Word, and this is in fact God's Word, because He promised that it would be preserved, and it has in fact been preserved. Again, this is good news. All of this is good news. It may seem like we're highlighting problems with this text or that

2:07:35 text, or there's a word difference here, a change there, this diction here, whatever it happens to be. Yes, those things are worth examining, but not because there are problems, not because there are deficits, but because, on the one hand, with the rabbinic text, Satan has worked his evil work over a course of centuries in an attempt to corrupt and subvert. But on the other hand, with the Greek text, God has been faithful to his promises and has preserved everything that we need, because nothing of His Word has been lost. And we know that, because again it is the very word that He That He Himself quotes in the New Testament. It is the very word upon which the Apostles relied. It is the very word upon which the church is built.

2:08:26 And all we have to do is take God at His Word, believe in His promises, and undo the things that Satan has done. Undo and reverse the things that Satan has brought into the church. And it's not very difficult to do, because all it requires us to do is rely upon the word that God preserved in the Greek, rejecting the evil that the rabbis have attempted to bring into the church. We should never have believed those who murdered Christ in the first place. We should have stopped believing them centuries ago. All we have to do is be faithful. God has promised and God has delivered. And more than that, He promises us that He will bless us for faithfulness. All we have to do is be faithful. Read the Greek.

2:09:20 Read the Old Testament, that is the Old Testament of Christ and the Apostles. It is a better book. Because of course it's a better book. Because it's the Word of God.