Hi Joseph,
Your article on Ps 22 was interesting but leaves a number of questions unanswered.
1) Certainly there are large letters at key verses in the MT, as you examples show, but the little letters seem less obvious. Why would a scribe put diminutive vavs at Jer 50:11, given the risk that these would inevitably be likely to be misread as yod's? How would your theory distinguish between miswritten vav's (which are by no means uncommon in the MT) and diminutive vavs?
(By the way, I think there is a typo in your article: you wrote "The waw was therefore a diminished jot, so to represent the nails in Christ’s hands and feet", but it's the other way round: a yod would be a diminshed vav, not vice versa).
2) Why would Jewish Masoretic scribes (according to your theory) utilize diminished vavs "to represent the nails in Christ’s hands and feet", especially in passages that have no connection to the crucifixion like Jer 50:11?
3) The vav/yod issue is not the only one with ka'ari; in fact, if that were the only problem, it would be more simply explained as a poorly written vav. You still have to explain the unexpected 'aleph. And of course, even if you account for that, krh doesn't mean to pierce but to dig, as in a pit (Jer 18:20; Ps 57:7), well (Gen 26:25; Num 21:18), or grave (Gen 50:5). HALOT lists 11 other Biblical examples, none of which means "pierce". Ps 40:7 has sometimes been thought to mean "Pierce" through a false parallel with Ex 21:6, but the latter uses an entirely different Hebrew verb.
4) Jerome's rendering is interesting, but he wouldn't be the only one to depart from the MT at this point. The KJV does the same thing, even though elsewhere it is generally very attached to the Second Rabbinic Bible text. I don't think it definitively proves he was working from a different text than the later majority MT, though it is not impossible.
Hi Dr. Duguid,
Thank you for commenting; I read your book on Christ in the Old Testament when I was a new believer - thank you for writing this.
Regarding your points, firstly I've corrected the jot-waw mistake in my writing, so I'm glad you spotted it!
1) The little letters, as per my article, I think have diverse meanings: the little dalet in Proverbs 28:17 showing a man is diminished and somewhat less than a real man if he sheds blood through unlawful violence. The little heh in
behibaram in Genesis 2:4 highlights the decay and perishing of all created things. The little beit in
hav shows how covetousness diminishes people through taking from them unlawfully. So there can be various meanings for why a little letter is used.
In Jeremiah 50:11, I believe the diminished waw represents how God will bring the haughty Babylonians down low: the next verse (50:12) speaks of confounding and putting to shame Babylon's mother. And in Psalm 22:16, there's a representation of Christ's nails - and thinking about it, not so much because they look like nails (I'd say a waw looks more like a nail than a jot), but because this is the final stage of Christ's humiliation, as per Philippians 2:8: "and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross;" see also 2 Cor. 5:21.
Regarding miswritten waws, I'd be glad to consider some concrete examples of such, but in many cases I think they would be eliminated by comparing different manuscripts and spotting the error that way, whereas I'd expect to see diminutive waws either occur more frequently, or to have been expressly noted as such by scholars who witnessed them (such as Glassius here, or the Masoretic annotators in other places, and Buxtorf following them).
2) I think that the diminutive waws are original to the Masoretic Text, via David's pen, from the Holy Spirit. I think I've answered
why this occurs already in my answer for Point 1: because the Holy Spirit intends us to understand a particular message drawn out of the text, with the diminution of the letter representative of a diminution that the Scripture is pointing out, relating to the literal sense of the text.
3) I think extra letters and missing letters are just occasional occurrences, such as the apparently missing aleph in Jeremiah 18:3, which is written והנהו instead of וְהִנֵּה-הוּא (see BHS vs. the JPS, Ibn Ezra in
Tsakooth). Then there is an extra aleph in the word for
fish in Nehemiah 13:16, so it's spelled dalet-aleph-gimmel, whereas it's generally spelt dalet-gimmel (Genesis 9:2, Job 4:7, and even Nehemiah 3:3 & 12:39). Saadia Gaon tries to derive a meaning from it to suggest it causes extra worry when you try to sell fish on the sabbath (because now it's like the root word for worrying). I'm not sure about that, but I don't think it's wholly impossible for the sense of a roaring lion to be implied by the extra aleph either - especially given what occurs in Psalm 22:16. I don't see such a strong difference between digging and piercing, as to dig means to bore a hole, and the nail digs into Christ's skin. And yes, Psalm 40:6 to me indicates that if you dig into someone's ear, you pierce it, as per BDB on the qal of karah.
4) I don't think Jerome was working from a later Masoretic Text; rather, I believe that the Masoretic Text with its vowel points has been passed down throughout the ages - though I do realize this opens up another topic of discussion. I am highlighting it to counter the claim that the Masoretic Text was tampered with to deny Christ, seeing as Jerome - translating from the Hebrew - renders it with much the same reading, centuries before the claimed corruption occurred. I do think it's plausible that the Vulgate of the papists was a corrupted version of Jerome's vulgate, following William Whitaker's argument, though again, this opens up yet another topic.
Many thanks for your interaction.
Blessings,
Joseph
reformedmasora.substack.com
