translation

The doctrine of the virgin birth—that Mary conceived and bore Jesus without ever having had intercourse with a human male—is one of the oldest Christian doctrines. It dates all the way back to the early Church and has remained a part of many Christian orthodoxies even until modern times. It is also no revelation that the doctrine relies for its textual evidence upon a mistranslation.

I would like to examine two things. First, what exactly are the sources for this doctrine, and how did this mistranslation arise in the first place? And second, how and why did it continue to perpetuate itself through the years, even though its foundation has been known to be questionable for a very long time?

Let’s attack the sources first. The original text is the Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 (all translations are my own):

לָ֠כֵן יִתֵּ֨ן אֲדֹנָ֥י ה֛וּא לָכֶ֖ם א֑וֹת הִנֵּ֣ה הָֽעַלְמָ֗ה הָרָה֙ וְיֹלֶ֣דֶת בֵּ֔ן וְקָרָ֥את שְׁמ֖וֹ עִמָּ֥נוּ אֵֽל׃

Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: behold, the young woman (‘almah) shall become pregnant and bear a son, and name him Immanuel.

Note that the Hebrew word ‘almah means “young woman” and does not imply anything about the sexual status of the person in question. However, this all changed when the language moved out of Hebrew. In the third century and later, the Bible was translated into Greek for the benefit of most Jews, who no longer spoke Hebrew. This translation was called the Septuagint (LXX for short), and its version of Isaiah 7:14 runs like this:

δία τοῦτο δώσει Κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον· ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ λήψεται, καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ.

Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: behold, the virgin (parthenos) will conceive in the womb, and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel.

The Greek word parthenos means “virgin” specifically, and does not lack the ambiguity of the Hebrew word ‘almah. It is interesting to note that other Greek texts besides the LXX use the word νεᾶνις neanis, meaning “young woman” without any sexual connotations, but the parthenos reading came to dominate the textual tradition. This is obvious from looking at later translations, such as Jerome’s Latin Vulgate of the fourth century CE, which was translated directly out of the Hebrew but with a strong eye toward the previous textual tradition:

propter hoc dabit Dominus ipse vobis signum: ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium et vocabitis nomen eius Emmanuhel.

Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign: behold, the virgin (virgo) will conceive and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel.

By the time of the writing of (at least) the Gospel of Matthew, the conceit that Mary was a virgin was already built in to the theology, and in fact was a necessary condition of that theology to make the prophecies of the Old Testament be brought to fulfilment by the events in the New Testament. The best example of this is Matthew 1:20–23:

ταῦτα δὲ αὐτοῦ ἐνθυμηθέντος ἰδοὺ ἄγγελος κυρίου κατ’ ὄναρ ἐφάνη αὐτῷ λέγων, Ἰωσὴφ υἱὸς Δαυίδ, μὴ φοβηθῇς παραλαβεῖν Μαριὰμ τὴν γυναῖκά σου, τὸ γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ γεννηθὲν ἐκ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἁγίου· τέξεται δὲ υἱὸν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦν, αὐτὸς γὰρ σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν. τοῦτο δὲ ὅλον γέγονεν ἵνα πληρωθῇ τὸ ῥηθὲν ὑπὸ κυρίου διὰ τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος, Ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν, καὶ καλέσσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουήλ, ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον Μεθ’ ἡμῶν ὁ θεός.

But when he had made up his mind to do this [i.e. not to marry Mary and send her away], a messenger from the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph son of David, do not fear taking Mary as your wife, for the child conceived within her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you will call his name Jesus for he will save the people from their sins.” This took place to fulfil the word of the Lord through His prophet: “Behold, the virgin will conceive in her womb and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.”

So there you have it. A seemingly innocuous substitution—parthenos for ‘almah, “virgin” for “young woman”—and we have, by the time of the codification of the New Testament, a doctrine that Jesus was conceived of Mary, a virgin, via the Holy Spirit. Errors of textual transmission have been supplemented by theology to create a chimera of a whole different sort.

(The astute reader will have noticed that I did not attempt to deal with all the other transmission problems in this text, notably the identity and number of those doing the naming, and the exact phrasing for “conceive”. I am content to leave the tracking of and wrangling over these things as an exercise for the reader.)

Let me turn now (briefly, I promise) to my second question: why is this doctrine still around, and how does it keep itself going? The answer, as I alluded to above, is that it is essentially indestructible. Like the alien in Alien or the myth about Eskimo words for snow, once the “virgin” mistranslation was loose in the wild, there was no stopping it. And indeed, slaying this chimera is now all but impossible, since there have been so many layers of theological edifice constructed on top of it in the two thousand or so years since it first got its start. Right or wrong, this doctrine is here to stay.

Also, I suspect that a long undercurrent of anti-translationism in many parts of the Western world, which regarded the Vulgate as the only authoritative Bible for centuries and were responsible for the burning at the stake of anyone who owned or produced a translated Bible is partially responsible as well. Currently, this belief seems to take the form of an antipathy toward textual criticism in general, which has as its root the assumption that the Bible is a human document, produced by humans, and susceptible to human error. This is especially evident in the King James Only movement, but more generally in those who argue that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. We simply cannot begin to understand these issues unless you accept that the text of the Bible has changed over the centuries, as it has been passed through different hands and been translated into different languages.

“You may ask,” Tevye the dairyman once noted, “how do these traditions get started? I’ll tell you. I don’t know. But it’s a tradition.” Although Tevye didn’t believe in the virgin birth, and we do know how the tradition behind this doctrine got started, his larger point remains valid: it’s a tradition, and regardless of how unfounded or silly they are, traditions oftentimes take on lives all their own.

(X-posted to Feministe.)

Yedid Nefesh is a piyyut, or religious poem, written by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Rabbi Eliezer Azikri. The poem is traditionally sung on the Jewish Sabbath, and there are many beautiful melodies for this song. However, the version that is traditionally sung has undergone severe textual corruption, and much of the beauty of the manuscript version (that is, the way it was actually written) has been lost. I will save my rant about textual corruption for another post; for now, suffice it to say that the original version speaks of God in much more feminine terms than the corrupted, popular version. In the original, many of the possessive suffixes are feminine (-ach rather than -cha), which is necessary because of the strict meter of eight syllables per line. Only a couple of prayer books—notably the Conservative Movement’s Sim Shalom—reproduce the manuscript version; most print one corrupt text or another.

The text contains many biblical allusions and poetic images that are extremely condensed in the Hebrew, and consequently nearly impossible to render in line-for-line English without footnotes. Here is a strict but in places free translation of Yedid Nefesh, following the manuscript text.

יְדִיד נֶפֶשׁ, אָב הָרַחֲמָן, מְשׁוֹךְ עַבְדָּךְ אֶל רְצוֹנָךְ
יָרוּץ עַבְדָּךְ כְּמוֹ אַיָּל, יִשְׁתַּחֲוֶה אֶל מוּל הֲדָרָךְ
יֶעֶרַב לוֹ יְדִידוּתָךְ מִנֹּפֶת צוּף וְכָל־טָעַם.

הָדוּר, נָאֶה, זִיו הָעוֹלָם, נַפְשִׁי חוֹלַת אַהֲבָתָךְ
אָנָּא, אֵל נָא, רְפָא נָא לָהּ בְּהַרְאוֹת לָהּ נֹעַם זִוָךְ
אָז תִּתְחַזֵּק וְתִתְרַפֵּא, וְהָיְתָה לָךְ שִׁפְחַת עוֹלָם.

וָתִיק, יֶהֱמוּ רַחֲמֶיךָ, וְחוּס נָא עַל בֵּן אוֹהֲבָךְ
כִּי זֶה כַּמָּה נִכְסוֹף נִכְסַף לִרְאוֹת בְּתִפְאֶרֶת עֻזָּךְ
אָנָּא, אֵלִי, מַחְמַד לִבִּי, חוּשָׁה נָּא, וְאַל תִּתְעַלָּם.

הִגָּלֶה נָא וּפְרוֹשׂ, חָבִיב, עָלַי אֶת־סֻכַּת שְׁלוֹמָךְ
תָּאִיר אֶרֶץ מְכְּבוֹדָךְ, נָגִילָה וְנִשְׂמְחָה בָּךְ
מַהֵר, אָהוּב, כִּי בָא מוֹעֵד, וְחָנֵּנִי כִּימֵי עוֹלָם.

Soul mate, merciful father, draw near your servant to your will.
Your servant will race like a deer to prostrate himself before your majesty.
Your closeness is sweeter to him than flowing honey or any delicacy.

Regal one, fine, light of the world, my soul pines for your love.
Please, God, heal her now by showing her your radiance’s delight,
Thus she will be strengthened and healed, and your eternal maidservant.

Ancient one, arouse your mercy, take pity on your lover’s son,
For he has yearned ever so much to behold the glory of your strength.
Please, my God, my heart’s darling, sense me, and do not hide yourself.

Reveal yourself, and spread, my beloved, your shelter of peace over me.
Illuminate the earth with your honour; let us rejoice and be happy in you.
Hasten, my love, for the time is nigh, and show me grace as in days of old.

A manuscript has recently been discovered in (PKhit 4.187c verso) on which an old Klingon drinking song is written, which has now been confirmed to be the source of the modern song “Chad Gadya“. Chad Gadya, which tells the story of a chain of death and destruction that is finally stopped by the intervention of God, is traditionally sung at the end of the Passover seder by Jews, and many theories have been put forth about its origins. However, it is now known that the song is Klingon, which not only makes sense of the seemingly senseless violence but also tells the story of the foundation of the Klingon Empire, through Kahless the Unforgettable’s slaying of the tyrant Molor at the end of the song.

As reprinted here, the manuscript cuts off writing out all the repeats after the first two verses and skips right to the last verse. Some of the handwriting in the manuscript is difficult to make out; this transcription is as accurate as possible given the limitations of current understanding of Klingon papyrology and manuscript tradition. Errors in spelling or grammar should be put down to thousands of years of transmission—and the fact that this is a drinking song in the first place, designed to scan and sound euphonic.

At any rate, a great mystery of the cosmos can now be put to rest. A zissen Pesach, or as they say throughout the Klingon Empire, veb DIS veng wa’Dich Qo’noSDaq!—”Next year, in the First City of Kronos!

(Edited to add: Yes, this is an original translation of mine.)

vixi puellis nuper idoneus
et militavi non sine gloria,
     nunc arma defunctumque bello
     barbiton hic paries habebit,
laevom marinae qui Veneris latus
custodit. hic, hic ponite lucida
     funalia et vectis et arcus
     oppositis foribus minacis.
o quae beatum diva tenes Cyprum et
Memphin carentem Sithonia nive
     regina, sublimi flagello
     tange Chloen semel arrogante.

My erstwhile beauty and my skill I sing,
   When I once soldier’d on Love’s battlefield,
But Arms made obsolete by War I bring,
   My sword, my lyre, my spear, fife, drum and shield.
Now I consign them to their rightful place:
   Rest, rest, ye arms, on pegs by Venus’ side!
And near the Goddess, born of foam, a space
   For torches, threat’ning War where they abide.
O Goddess who in Cyprus blest doth dwell,
   And Memphis, far from Thracian mountains snowy,
Queen, take thy Whip against her to rebel,
   And with one humb’ling blow, I pray, strike Chloe.

—Horace, Ode 3.26

I rendered this poem into alternate rhyming lines of iambic pentameter so as to keep the line numbers the same, thereby imitating the styles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translators. It’s even better if you imagine it written out with elongated s and fl and ct ligatures, and the proper names in small caps. This poem would make a great sonnet, I think—there’s a pretty good volta right where the third quatrain would begin. Unfortunately, there are only twelve lines in the original, so if you wanted to stick your own ‘zinger’ couplet at the end, it’d have to be of your own devising.

The fourteenth-century B.C.E. Baal Cycle is one of the most important extra-Biblical sources for West Semitic religion in ancient times, and it ends with really terrific fight scene. The protagonist Baal (Master) has already fought and defeated Yamm (the Sea) and built his temple/palace on Mount Zaphon after getting permission from the head god, El. He is is forced to die by Mot (Death), but subsequently rises from the underworld, fights with Mot, and defeats him. (N.B.: This is mōt with a long o, not like Mr. Mot.) Baal and Mot fight until Shapsh (the Sun) breaks up the fight and tells Mot he cannot hope to win against Baal, whereupon Mot concedes defeat. (Actually, this isn’t the best fight scene in the story, but Anat’s fight with Mot will have to wait for another day.)

Text is from KTU 1.6 (tablet 6 col. 6), transcription from SBL (Parker et al., eds.), 1997, 162–163, with a few emendations and suppositions.

The eminent classicist and translator Frederick Ahl has recently published his new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Now I have a little confession to make: I don’t really like the Aeneid. Aeneas may be pius (’pious’) by epithet, but his defining characteristic is really being in a perpetual state of weeping, moping, and Agonizing About His Destiny. He’s also a jerk to basically everybody he meets, especially Dido—it’s been suggested that some parts of Book IV would make a really great angsty LiveJournal entry once Dido discovered that Aeneas had changed his Facebook ‘Relationship Status’ to ‘It’s Complicated’. Basically everything after Book VI is unreadable as well, because it’s all about random battles between people we don’t care about so Aeneas can found his city of Lavinium (code for Rome). And to top it off, the work is filled with the most transparent, perfidious, and insufferable propaganda for Augustus Caesar, filled with ‘prophecies’ that ‘predict’ how much the world will need this Augustus to lead and rule and generally be a great and terrific guy. It’s insufferable, really. This may well get me banned from the Great Fellowship Of Classicists, many of whom seem to have this thing for Virgil, but he’s simply not my thing.

If Virgil is your thing, however, you will probably have something to say about Ahl’s new translation. It is written in something approximating English dactylic hexameter, which gives him a lot of room to play with per line (the line count is the same as in the Latin original). Also, Ahl’s hexameters are a damn sight better and more natural-sounding than Longfellow’s awful

This is the forest primeval: the murmuring pines and the hemlock

But Ahl’s hexameters—especially in terms of versification—are not perfect, and he has to deal with the problem of sustaining the hexameter through thousands of lines in English, which can start to sound quite tiresome even after only a few verses. Additionally, there is a lot of unnecessarily technical vocabulary retained, significantly in some of the crazier battle scenes. Much of this is explained via endnotes linked to asterisks in the text, which seems clunky and inelegant poetry to me. But then again, what is a translator to do?

For example, let me quote twelve lines from Book IX, during one of the interminable ‘fight scenes’ (9.503–514):

Far off, the resonant bronze of a bugle has crackled staccato
Terror. There follows a thunderous cheer bellowed back by the heavens.
Quickly the Volscians approach in an interlocked tortoise formation,
Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts.
Some look for ways to get in and to scale outer walls upon ladders:
Points undermanned, where the crown of defence admits flickers of daylight
Through less dense crenellations of troops. In response, though, the Teucrians
Blast them with all kinds of weapon, prise ladders away with strong levers.
Holding a wall under siege was a skill they’d acquired in prolonged war.
Further, they tried hurling boulders of murderous heaviness, hoping
Somehow to break through this covered attack. But whatever they threw down,
Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled.

In the text, ‘Volscians’ has an asterisk and endnote, referring the reader to a different endnote, in which these people are identified, and a cross-reference to yet a third endnote to explain the ‘interlocked tortoise formation’. Yet I would be doing a disservice to Ahl to carp too much upon this: certainly there are many other features about this translation that are redeemable. The line ‘Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts’ has some terrific alliteration, nicely rendering the Latin alliterative vellere vallum in the same line, for example. Ahl is also a master of making the metre ‘paint’ his text, parallelling this feature in Virgil: the original ferre iuvet subter densa testudine casus, heavily spondaic as it is, is reflected as such in Ahl’s translation: ‘Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled’—a very heavily accentual and spondaic line to reflect the tightness of the soldiers’ formation.

What is more, the reader is drawn in to the action of the text, not left standing as an observer outside the text (this, I feel, is the downside of many modern translations, including Mandelbaum’s celebrated version and possibly even Fagles’ recent effort; a step backwards, in a way, from his masterful Iliad and Odyssey). But I can’t help feeling that this is compromised in some ways by awkwardnesses in the text—’all kinds of weapon’, for instance, does not strike me as particularly elegant English, and the two lines beginning with ‘Points undermanned’ does not read like natural language, and is complicated by needlessly obscure vocabulary (’crenellations‘, for example, are those square bits cut out of the tops of towers at castles; I don’t see how the word is really being applied here to this situation). Finally, there are some nice and some not-so-nice features about the versification—the enjambment of ’staccato / Terror’ is well done, but ‘In response, though, the Teucrians’ smacks of metrical filler, and ‘they’d acquired in prolonged war’ scans badly with respect to the line’s accentuation.

So take the new Ahl translation for what it’s worth (mine cost £16.99 plus postage and packing, though it seems now to be available in North America via the usual outlets)—hopefully it will be able to take its rightful place among the excellent efforts of the modern translators.

אֱהִי כֹּפֶר לְעֹפֶר קָם בְּלַיִל
לְקוֹל כִּנּוֹר וְעוּגָבִים מְטִיבִים
אֲשֶׁר רָאָה בְּיָדִי כוֹס וְאָמַר
שְׁתֵה מִבֵּין שְׂפָתַי דַּם עֲנָבִים
וְיָרֵחַ כְּמוֹ יוֹד נִכְתְּבָה עַל
כְּסוּת שַׁחַר בְּמֵימֵי הַזְּהָבִים.

I’d die for him, the fawn who woke at night
To the beautiful voice of strings and flutes,
Who saw the goblet in my hand, and spoke:
‘Drink, from between my lips, the blood of grapes!’
The moon looked like a letter yud inscribed
Upon the cloak of dawn in golden ink.

—Samuel ibn Naghrela (Shmuel Ha-Nagid, 993–1056)

קְרָב דּוֹמֶה בְרֹאשׁוֹ אֶל יְפֵיפָה
אֲשֶׁר כָּל אִישׁ לְשַׂחֶק בָּהּ יְאַוֶּה
וְסוֹפוֹ כַּזְּקֵנָה הַמְּאוּסָה
אֲשֶׁר כָּל שׁוֹחֲרָה יִבְכֶּה וְיִדְוֶה.

At first, War is a lovely girl;
Every man lusts to play with her.
But she ends up a horrible hag;
Her former suitors weep in pain.

—Samuel ibn Naghrela (Shmuel Ha-Nagid, 993–1056). From his collection Ben Mishlei, ‘Son of Proverbs’

מַה־יָּפ֧וּ פְעָמַ֛יִךְ בַּנְּעָלִ֖ים בַּת־נָדִ֑יב חַמּוּקֵ֣י יְרֵכַ֔יִךְ כְּמ֣וֹ חֲלָאִ֔ים מַֽעֲשֵׂ֖ה יְדֵ֥י אָמָּֽן׃ שָׁרְרֵךְ֙ אַגַּ֣ן הַסַּ֔הַר אַל־יֶחְסַ֖ר הַמָּ֑זֶג בִּטְנֵךְ֙ עֲרֵמַ֣ת חִטִּ֔ים סוּגָ֖ה בַּשּֽׁוֹשַׁנִּֽים׃ שְׁנֵ֥י שָׁדַ֛יִךְ כִּשְׁנֵ֥י עֳפָרִ֖ים תָּֽאֳמֵ֥י צְבִיָּֽה׃ צַוָּארֵ֖ךְ כְּמִגְדַּ֣ל הַשֵּׁ֑ן עֵינַ֜יִךְ בְּרֵכ֣וֹת בְּחֶשְׁבּ֗וֹן עַל־שַׁ֨עַר֙ בַּת־רַבִּ֔ים אַפֵּךְ֙ כְּמִגְדַּ֣ל הַלְּבָנ֔וֹן צוֹפֶ֖ה פְּנֵ֥י דַמָּֽשֶׂק׃ רֹאשֵׁ֤ךְ עָלַ֨יִךְ֙ כַּכַּרְמֶ֔ל וְדַלַּ֥ת רֹאשֵׁ֖ךְ כָּֽאַרְגָּמָ֑ן מֶ֖לֶךְ אָס֥וּר בָּֽרְהָטִֽים׃ מַה־יָּפִית֙ וּמַה־נָּעַ֔מְתְּ אַֽהֲבָ֖ה בַּתַּֽעֲנוּגִֽים׃ זֹ֤את קֽוֹמָתֵךְ֙ דָּֽמְתָ֣ה לְתָמָ֔ר וְשָׁדַ֖יִךְ לְאַשְׁכֹּלֽוֹת׃ אָמַ֨רְתִּי֙ אֶֽעֱלֶ֣ה בְתָמָ֔ר אֹֽחֲזָ֖ה בְּסַנְסִנָּ֑יו וְיִֽהְיוּ־נָ֤א שָׁדַ֨יִךְ֙ כְּאֶשְׁכְּל֣וֹת הַגֶּ֔פֶן וְרֵ֥יחַ אַפֵּ֖ךְ כַּתַּפּוּחִֽים׃ וְחִכֵּ֕ךְ כְּיֵ֥ין הַטּ֛וֹב הוֹלֵ֥ךְ לְדוֹדִ֖י לְמֵֽישָׁרִ֑ים דּוֹבֵ֖ב שִׂפְתֵ֥י יְשֵׁנִֽים׃ לְכָ֤ה דוֹדִי֙ נֵצֵ֣א הַשָּׂדֶ֔ה נָלִ֖ינָה בַּכְּפָרִֽים׃ נַשְׁכִּ֨ימָה֙ לַכְּרָמִ֔ים נִרְאֶ֞ה אִם־פָּֽרְחָ֤ה הַגֶּ֨פֶן֙ פִּתַּ֣ח הַסְּמָדַ֔ר הֵנֵ֖צוּ הָֽרִמּוֹנִ֑ים שָׁ֛ם אֶתֵּ֥ן אֶת־דֹּדַ֖י לָֽךְ׃

How fair are your feet in sandals, O daughter of a prince! The curves of your thighs are jewels, the work of a skilled craftsman. Your navel is a round goblet—let mixed wine not be lacking! Your belly is a heap of wheat encircled with lilies. Your two breasts are two fawns, twins born of a gazelle. Your neck is an ivory tower; your eyes are the pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bat-Rabbim; your nose is the tower of Lebanon which inclines its face towards Damascus. Your head is as Mount Carmel upon you, and the hair of your head is crimson—a king is held captive in your tresses.

How fair and how beautiful are you, O love, in pleasures! Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are grapefruits. I said, ‘I will climb the palm tree, I will grasp its branches. Please—let your breasts be like grape clusters on the vine, and the scent of your face like apples, and the roof of your mouth like the best wine, going down sweetly for my beloved, causing the sleeping lips to move.’

Come, my beloved, let us go out to the field; let us sojourn in the villages. Let us rise early and go to the vineyards. Let us see if the vine has blossomed, whether the grapes are appearing, whether the pomegranates are flowering, and there I will give you my love.

—Song of Solomon 7.1–9, 10–12

The famous Hanukkah hymn “Ma’oz Tzur”, or “Rock of Ages” in the best-known English version, is pretty much like any other hymn: thanks, God, because You did such great things for us by killing all our enemies, which is why we’re (a) still alive and (b) able to sing this song to you. Unfortunately, not that many people know how the actual text of the hymn translates into English, so I will translate some of the lyrics to Ma’oz Tzur here:

Innocuous enough, right, at least by the standards of some other hymns? Let’s skip down to the final verse—

ArtScroll helpfully provides you with the following comment:

This final stanza is generally regarded to be a later addition [about 1500] by a different author. The initial letters of the first three words for the acrostic חֲזַק, be strong. Since it contains a strong plea for Divine vengeance against Israel’s foes, this stanza was subject to much censorship by Christian authorities. Accordingly some siddurim have replaced certain stiches with others less offensive to the censors.

Whereas we, in our holy desire to remain as close to the original text as possible, have left in the original version of a forged last verse! Never mind that it’s bad poetry, or that it is genuinely offensive to anyone with modern sensibilities, or that after five previous verses of singing out the awful melody to the rest of Ma’oz Tzur you feel like giant cotton balls have been shoved down your ear canals. Look how extra-pious we are by leaving it in!

The Red One [what I have translated 'Edom' —S] refers to Esau/Edom, whose descendants brought the current exile. The seven shepherds (Micah 5:4) who will conquer Israel’s oppressors are David, Adam, Seth, Methusaleh, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses (Succah 52b).

That’s right—Isaac, Joseph, Solomon, Gideon, Ehud—you can all just go back home, because you’re clearly worthless. Come on in, Seth! Methuselah, you sure your 969-year-old self is up to this? What about your rib-cage, Adam? Okay, then, you can come too.

I guess what this reminds me most of is the last verse of ‘Il Canto degli Italiani’, the Italian national anthem. National anthems—especially older ones, like you would find in some parts of Europe—have this undeniable tendency to romanticise bloodthirstiness, especially against traditional enemies of the state. The last verse of the Italian anthem goes:

Now, of course, nobody sings this last verse of the Italian anthem anymore, but it’s still on the books. Many Jews, however, not knowing any better, do sing the last verse of Ma’oz Tzur, which praises more or less the exact same kinds of things. Ruthless destruction of one’s enemies is sanctioned because they’ve done wrong to you. Of course this offends our modern sensibilities, as well it should, but that’s not the point I want to make: the point is that when we can recognise that this is what’s going on, we should stop singing these kinds of hymns—or change them; it’s not as if they’re Torah revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai—instead of continuing with this nonsense.

ὑπερβολῇ λέγουσι τὸν Φιλόξενον
τῶν διθυράμβων τὸν ποιητὴν γεγονέναι
ὀψοφάγον. εἶτα πουλύποδα πηχῶν δυεῖν
ἐν ταῖς Συρακούσαις ποτ’ αὐτὸν ἀγοράσαι
καὶ σκευάσαντα καταφαγεῖν ὅλον σχεδὸν
πλὴν τῆς κεφαλῆς. ἁλόντα δ’ ὑπὸ δυσπεψίας
κακῶς σφόδρα σχεῖν· εἶτα δ’ ἰατροῦ τινος
πρὸς αὐτὸν εἰσελθόντος, ὃς φαύλως πάνυ
ὁρῶν φερόμενον αὐτὸν εἶπεν· εἴ τί σοι
ἀνοικονόμητόν ἐστι διατίθου ταχύ,
Φιλόξεν’· ἀποθανῇ γὰρ ὥρας ἑβδόμης.
κἀκεῖνος εἶπε· τέλος ἔχει τὰ πάντα μοι,
ἰατρέ, φησί, καὶ δεδιώκηται πάλαι·
τοὺς διθυράμβους σὺν θεοῖς καταλιμπάνω
ἠνδρωμένους καὶ πάντας ἐστεφανωμένους·
οὓς ἀνατίθημι ταῖς ἐμαυτοῦ συντρόφοις
Μούσαις Ἀφροδίτην καὶ Διόνυσον ἐπιτρόπους—
ταῦθ’ αἱ διαθῆκαι διασαφοῦσιν. ἀλλ’ ἐπεὶ
ὁ Τιμοθέου Χάρων σχολάζειν οὐκ ἐᾷ
οὑκ τῆς Νιόβης, χωρεῖν δὲ πορθμίδ’ ἀναβοᾷ,
καλεῖ δὲ μοῖρα νύχιος, ἧς κλύειν χρεών,
ἵν’ ἔχων ἀποτρέχω πάντα τἀμαυτοῦ κάτω,
τοῦ πουλύποδος μοι τὸ κατάλοιπον ἀπόδοτε.

They say that Philoxenus, the poet who wrote dithyrambs, was the biggest glutton of all time. This one time in Syracuse, they say that he bought and ate all of a two-foot-long octopus—almost, except the head. Seized by heartburn, he was in a bad way. A doctor came to him, and seeing that he wasn’t feeling so well, he said, ‘Philoxenus, if there’s anything you need to set straight in your domestic affairs, do it right away, because you’re going to die at the seventh hour.’ Philoxenus replied, ‘All of my belongings are in order, doctor, and were set straight long ago. I leave behind my grown-up dithyrambs, all crowned by the grace of the gods, which I have consecrated to the Muses and Aphrodite and Dionysus—but my will makes all that clear. Seeing as Charon (as in Timotheus’ Niobe) does not permit lingering, and is shouting that his boat is departing, and dark Fate calls, and we must heed her—and so that I can go below with all of my stuff, give me the leftovers of the octopus.’

—The comic poet Machon, in Athenaeus 8.341a–d

Tantalus had murdered his son Pelops and served him as a banquet to the gods. For this crime, he was sent to the underworld where he was sentenced to eternal hunger and thirst. Pelops, restored to life, bore Atreus and Thyestes. Because Thyestes had committed adultery with Atreus’ wife, Atreus was unsure of the legitimacy of his sons Agamemnon and Menelaus. To reconcile themselves, Atreus invites Thyestes and his sons to a banquet. Atreus murders Thyestes’ sons and serves them to the dim-witted Thyestes at the banquet, and after Atreus reveals the deed to Thyestes, the following dialogue ensues at the end of the play.

(Seneca, Thyestes 1096–1112, my own translation. The text is R. J. Tarrant’s 1985/1998 edition (APA).)

Psalms 120 through 134 each begin שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת (shir ha-ma’alot, ‘A song of ascents’). However Psalm 121 begins שִׁיר לַמַּעֲלוֹת (shir la-ma’alot, ‘A song to ascents’)—a troubling variant that should have alarm bells going off in the minds of the manuscript-oriented. Were this small prepositional variation correct, it would be quite interesting, but what a shame it’s probably nothing more than a scribal error.

The Hebrew text that reads ‘to ascents’ for the beginning of Psalm 121 is the Masoretic Text and its manuscript tradition, and it is the reading that has filtered down to us today. But the Septuagint (LXX Ps 120) reads Ὠδὴ τῶν ἀναβαθμῶν (ōdē tōn anabathmōn, ‘A song of ascents’)—the very same formula used to begin the entire sequence of Psalms 120 through 134 in the Septuagint (translating the Hebrew construct state by the Greek genitive), without altering it as the Masoretic Text does. The apparatus to the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the best Hebrew edition of the Masoretic Text ever compiled, notes rather cryptically, Q nonn Mss ‘הַמּ ut 122,1 etc, which essentially translates into ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls and some other manuscripts of the Masoretic Text read ‘of ascents’, like Psalm 122 verse 1 and the rest’. But it doesn’t tell you which Dead Sea Scroll—you have to look in more specific reference sources, which will tell you that 11QPs^a, one of the scrolls discovered in the eleventh cave at Qumrān, in its Psalter, uses the reading ‘of ascents’, in keeping with the pattern of the surrounding psalms.

Much has been made of this one letter’s difference in traditional and modern commentaries and in Jewish homiletics. I will provide but two small but representative examples. The ArtScroll Siddur, commenting on this psalm, says (emphases original), ‘This song differs from all others in this series because it is not called שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת, a song of ascents; but is dedicated לַמַּעֲלוֹת, to the ascents. It describes the means whereby Israel finds the strength to attain godly heights and ascend to His glorious Presence.’ However, we must keep in mind that the ArtScroll series is written by Orthodox Jews for other Orthodox Jews (and for more subliminal conversionary purposes, but that’s a separate rant), so we might look in the ecumenical Jewish Study Bible, which contains the (usually excellent) translation of the Jewish Publication Society along with a (usually excellent) modern commentary, for a more informed and balanced view. Yet they also make this one letter sing and dance: ‘Uniquely, the opening is A song for ascents rather than “to ascents.” It is unclear why the psalmist is looking to the mountains; some have suggested that this is a polemic against deities on the mountains (see esp. Ezek. 18.6), or this expresses the pilgrim as he moves toward Jerusalem in the Judean hills; more likely “it is the custom of anyone in straits to lift his eyes to see if help will come to repel the enemy” (Ibn Ezra).’ Not a word about the manuscript tradition—this is surprising given that the commentary on Psalm 145, which has a whole verse that has been deleted by the manuscript tradition, gives a rather thorough exposition of the fact that a verse has been dropped but exists in other manuscripts (though it hastens to add that its presence there is ‘most likely secondarily’).

One might raise an objection to the reading ‘of ascents’, even though it is apparently indicated in the older sources (the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint both precede the Masoretic Text by a good millenium), on the grounds of the old paleographic canard lectio difficilior preferenda est, ‘the more difficult reading is to be preferred’. Since the variant reading ‘to the ascents’ is definitely stranger and more difficult, one might be tempted to consider it the correct reading—especially since it is a quite noticeable deviation from a well-established pattern. However, I would argue that the overriding pattern of Psalms 120 through 134 is powerful evidence for the ‘of ascents’ reading; the Bible simply doesn’t like to deviate from its patterns, as much as we want to make hay out of a single mistranscribed letter. A better explanation, in my opinion, is that the reading we have is unsatisfactory and has been transmitted to us through a flawed manuscript tradition.

Do traditional Jews just not care about the manuscript tradition? Certainly they don’t. But why not? Is it so hard to conceive of the fact that scribes wrote things out and made mistakes doing it? Psalm 145, to which I alluded earlier, is a perfect example: its dropped verse begins with the letter nun, which is subsequently conspicuously missing from the psalm’s alphabetic acrostic scheme. Traditional Jews have made much out of it, e.g. claiming that the nun verse was intentionally left out because nun refers to n’filah, ‘downfall’, alluding to the possibility of Israel’s downfall. Never mind that in other alphabetic acrostics, such as Psalm 34, or chapters 1 through 4 of the book of Lamentations (despite the probable transposition of two verses in that book), or Psalm 119, all contain the letter nun: this one time it is left out, it could not possibly have been due to a scribal error. Never mind that every other source—the Greek Septuagint, the Syriac Peshitta, the Dead Sea Scrolls—include the verse. It has to not exist in the text because a homiletical point can be made. I suspect something similar has happened with Psalm 121’s ‘A psalm to ascents’—but don’t expect Jews to start changing the text around any time soon.

Good shabbos.