Well, If You Insist

Ben Merkle told the Septuagint crowd to go Eastern Orthodox. We’d like to RSVP.

Listen to this episode of the “Bad” Books of the Bible podcast below, or find archived episodes on the “Bad” Books YouTube channel.

Around the year 403, a bishop in the North African town of Oea stood up to read Jonah.

He had a new Latin translation in his hands, from Jerome, who had done something nobody in the Latin West had tried. He had translated the Old Testament straight from the Hebrew.

So the bishop read. Jonah sits outside Nineveh, sulking. God grows a plant over his head for shade. Everyone in that room had heard “gourd” their whole lives, and the new text said “ivy.”

The congregation lost it.

Augustine tells the story in a letter to Jerome, Letter 71, with the tired patience of a man who has broken up church fights before. The loudest protests came from the Greek speakers in the pews, who knew their Greek Bible said gourd. So the bishop asked the local Jews what the Hebrew said, and they told him it agreed with the gourd. Augustine suspects they said so out of ignorance, or maybe spite. The bishop corrected the reading rather than lose his flock over a vine.

Sixteen hundred years before X, and it already had a comments section.

Augustine had a bigger worry than one rowdy service. If the Latin West read an Old Testament made from the Hebrew while the Greek East kept the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, then the two halves of the Church would be arguing from different Bibles. One Church, two Old Testaments. He didn’t like the math.

Three Posts in Two Days

On the morning of October 15, Ben Merkle, president of New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, posted a long thesis on X. It opens like this:

Without post-70 AD, rabbinic Judaism, the Protestant church does not have a Bible.

Then he makes the case, and it’s a good one. The Hebrew text behind every modern translation is the Masoretic Text, preserved by the Masoretes, rabbis who worked from the seventh to the tenth century. When Christians went back to Hebrew in the sixteenth century, they learned it from Jewish books: David Kimhi’s grammar and his dictionary of Hebrew roots, and the Rabbinic Bible that the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg published in Venice in 1517–1518, the Masoretic Text surrounded by the Targum and the commentaries of Rashi, Kimhi, and Ibn Ezra. He says Bucer leaned on it and Calvin named Kimhi the best of the Jewish exegetes. His summary is blunt:

Delete the Rabbis, and you delete the Protestant ability to read and translate the Hebrew text.

He doesn’t pretend it was free. Kimhi’s commentary on the Psalms, he notes, argued against the Christian reading of the messianic psalms, and some young exegetes weren’t ready for it and drifted into heterodoxy on the deity of Christ. But most of the Reformed, he says, “figured out how to make good use of Jewish sources without losing their minds.” He closes where he started:

To repeat my opening claim—without post-70 AD, rabbinic Judaism, the Protestant church does not have a Bible. The Jews were still wrong about Jesus. But without them, you don’t have Bible.

The replies filled up with Septuagint partisans. A few hours later he posted a follow-up, and that one is the reason for this piece.

I don’t normally engage with the comments section much. But I notice that the majority of guys down there seem to think that in my earlier post somehow I wasn’t aware of the Septuagint, which is kind of funny. So, let’s walk through this.

Jerome had the same policy. And no, Merkle didn’t forget the Septuagint. He knows exactly what the LXX is. So when I explain it later, I’m explaining it to the rest of us, not to him.

He reminds his readers that he was talking to Protestants, “more specifically the Reformed,” and he quotes the Westminster Confession, chapter 1, section 8: the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New in Greek, “being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical.” Then:

You can’t hold this and insist on an Old Testament from the LXX at the same time.

He’s right. (He’s also the one who said “insist.” I’m only answering.)

He keeps going. The cry of the Reformation was ad fontes, back to the sources, and “the source of the Old Testament is the Hebrew text.” Drop the Hebrew, he warns, and “you will gradually cease to be a Protestant, and you will instantly cease to be confessionally Reformed.” Then the line people have been quoting back at him ever since:

So, by all means, if you have such an allergic reaction to the rabbis, please go Eastern Orthodox. Our churches will be better off.

The next afternoon he posted an X article called “Jokers To My Right.” Two things in it matter here. The first is a grammar lesson:

My claim that the Protestant church has relied on post-70 AD rabbis for the text of its Bible is an indicative statement and not an imperative.

Fair enough. He isn’t telling anyone to love the rabbis. He’s telling them what happened. I’ll read him that way, and before we’re done I’ll offer an indicative of my own.

The second is that he names our study Bible and then warns you it won’t help:

You can get yourself an Orthodox study Bible, with an Old Testament based on the LXX, and you can put as much distance between yourself and the Jews as you possibly can. But one of the things that you should notice is that you are leaving your Protestantism behind. And the other thing that you will eventually notice is that even with the LXX, you are still stuck with Jews.

Much of the rest of the article diagnoses his critics with what he calls the “Joo Floo.” That’s a quarrel inside his own house, and I’ll leave it there. Whatever is going around his replies, we don’t have it. Nobody becomes Orthodox to get away from Jews. It would be a strange plan. Our Old Testament was translated by Jews, and our church calendar is full of them, from the prophets to the Maccabees.

What He Gets Right

So let’s start with agreement, because there’s a lot of it.

Westminster 1.8 does tie the confessionally Reformed to the Hebrew. The Masoretic Text is the work of post-70 rabbis, and a superb piece of work. Christian Hebrew did come through Jewish teachers. Johannes Reuchlin’s Rudiments of Hebrew, the grammar and dictionary that taught Christians the language in 1506, leaned heavily on Kimhi. And Merkle’s point about who wanted Jewish books burned holds up here too. Reuchlin spent a decade defending those books, and his loudest attackers were the Dominicans of Cologne.

And yes, even with the LXX, you’re still stuck with Jews. He’s right. The Septuagint was made by Jews. Even our Greek Daniel isn’t the old Seventy. The churches have long read Daniel in the version of Theodotion, whom Irenaeus calls a Jewish proselyte, and Jerome noticed it in the fourth century.

Merkle said the quiet part out loud, which is more than most of us manage.

So the question was never whether your Old Testament came to you through Jews. Everyone’s did. The question is which text, and when. And Merkle chose his words carefully. Read his first line again.

Post-70. That qualifier is the whole conversation.

His “please go Eastern Orthodox” was probably a dismissal. I’ll take it as an invitation anyway. He said “please,” and when a man says please you answer the door. Come in. Let me show you around.

Back to the Sources

First, though, a word for the people who built the house Merkle lives in. I lived in it too. They weren’t fools.

Merkle calls ad fontes the cry of the Reformation, and it was. It was the cry of Renaissance humanism first. The humanists wanted Cicero in Cicero’s Latin and the Bible in its own languages, Greek for the New Testament and Hebrew for the Old. Erasmus printed his Greek New Testament in 1516. Luther and Calvin learned Hebrew. The Reformers were crate-diggers. They wanted the first pressing, and they’d learn a new alphabet to hear it.

Here’s the part that gets missed. Once the Hebrew text is your source, the shape of your Old Testament changes with it. Some books circulated in Greek but sat outside the rabbinic Hebrew canon: Wisdom, Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees, and our friend Sirach. Those got sorted into a separate bin. Luther’s 1534 Bible kept them between the Testaments, under a heading calling them useful and good to read but not equal to Holy Scripture. A century later Westminster went further and said the Apocrypha are “no part of the canon of the Scripture.” Hebrew fountain, Hebrew books.

Serious people made that decision for a serious reason. They wanted the original. Nobody in Wittenberg or Geneva set out to lose Sirach. They went looking for Moses in his own language, and Sirach fell out of the bag somewhere along the road.

So the Orthodox would ask one question, gently. Which source?

Which Fountain?

Start in Alexandria, about two hundred fifty years before Christ.

Alexandria had one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, and its Jews spoke Greek. Their grandparents’ Hebrew was slipping away. So Jewish scholars translated the Torah into Greek, for Jews, for use in the synagogue. The rest of the books followed over the next century or two, Sirach among them. The collection came to be called the Septuagint, “the Seventy,” which is where the Roman numeral comes from. The name comes from the legend that seventy-two elders did the work for King Ptolemy. The Letter of Aristeas tells that story, and later tellers improved it until all seventy-two translators came out word-for-word identical. It’s a legend, and a good one. The translation underneath it is real.

So Merkle is right. The Septuagint is a Jewish Bible, made by Jews for Jews, centuries before there was a church to argue with. It was Philo’s Bible. It was the Bible in the synagogues Paul walked into on Sabbath mornings. Choosing it doesn’t put distance between you and the Jews. It sits you down next to them.

The difference is the date—these Jews did their work before Christ, and the apostles picked it up.

You can check that with the book on your nightstand.

The Apostles’ Bible

Open to Hebrews 10, verse 5, where Christ comes into the world saying, “a body have you prepared for me.” Now flip back to the psalm he’s quoting, Psalm 40, verse 6. Your ESV says, “you have given me an open ear,” and the footnote admits the Hebrew reads “ears you have dug for me.” Ears, not a body. Hebrews is quoting the Greek Psalter, as the great Greek manuscripts have it, where the word is soma, body, and the whole argument of chapter 10 hangs on that word: the body of Jesus, offered once for all. Your Bible is quoting a Septuagint it doesn’t contain.

It keeps happening. Matthew 1, verse 23: “the virgin shall conceive.” The Hebrew word in Isaiah 7, verse 14, is almah, a young woman of marrying age. It can mean a virgin, but it doesn’t insist on it. The Jewish translators in Egypt, two centuries before Bethlehem, chose parthenos, the word that does insist. Later Jewish revisers changed it back to “young woman.” Christians have stood with the Seventy ever since.

Acts 15 is my favorite. The first council in the Church’s history is deciding whether Gentiles must become Jews first, and James settles it by quoting Amos 9: “that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord.” That’s the Greek. The Hebrew says “that they may possess the remnant of Edom.” In Hebrew consonants, Edom and adam, mankind, look the same, and “possess” and “seek” differ by one letter. The Jerusalem Council built its ruling on the Greek reading.

One more. Hebrews 1, verse 6: “Let all God’s angels worship him.” That line comes from Deuteronomy 32, verse 43, in its Greek form. It isn’t in the Masoretic Hebrew.

The usual reply is that the apostles quoted the Greek because their readers spoke Greek, the way a pastor today quotes whatever translation is in the pews. That works fine where the Greek and the Hebrew say the same thing. It doesn’t work here. Hebrews needs “body” to make its argument about the sacrifice of Christ. James needs “mankind” to open the door to the Gentiles. When an inspired writer builds doctrine on a reading, he isn’t just using a convenient translation. He’s telling you he trusts that reading.

A careful Reformed reader has a reply ready. The apostles were inspired, so their use of a reading carries authority, and that doesn’t make the whole Septuagint authoritative. Fair enough. But notice what it concedes. When the Spirit wanted the Church to hear Psalm 40 and Amos 9, he gave her the Greek. The Church simply kept reading the Bible he quoted.

Merkle’s own story shows why that matters. He tells us Kimhi’s commentary pushed back on the Christian reading of the messianic psalms, and that it shook some young Reformed exegetes. I believe him that most of the Reformed held the line. I only notice where the line came from. The Church’s reading of those psalms wasn’t something Christians had to defend against the Hebrew commentators after the fact. It’s printed in the New Testament, and when the New Testament quotes the Old, it usually quotes the Greek.

What the Caves Said

Now to the Hebrew, with respect.

Merkle already told you this part, and he told it straight. The Hebrew Bible on your shelf is the Masoretic Text, and the Masoretic Text is a medieval book. The oldest complete manuscript, the Leningrad Codex, is dated around 1008. The Aleppo Codex, older and once more complete, was copied around 930. The vowel points, the marks that tell you how to say every word, were worked out by the Masoretes of Tiberias between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries. Before that, written Hebrew Scripture was consonants only, and the vowels lived in the reader’s mouth. Think of the pointing as closed captioning added a thousand years after the broadcast. It’s superb captioning, since the Masoretes were the most careful copyists in history. But it’s still captioning.

Anyone reading an ESV, an NKJV, or a KJV, Merkle says, is “relying on post-70 AD rabbis” for his Bible. That’s his indicative, and it’s true. So let’s own it, and then ask what the text looked like before those rabbis went to work.

Enter the caves. Between 1947 and 1956, hundreds of scrolls came out of Qumran, all copied before the year 70. They showed a world with more than one Hebrew text in it. Many scrolls match the text the Masoretes would later preserve. Some don’t. A Jeremiah fragment, 4QJer-b, sides with the shorter Jeremiah you find in the Septuagint. The Greek Jeremiah runs roughly a seventh shorter than the Masoretic Text, with whole sections in a different order, and here is a Hebrew scroll with the shorter wording and the Greek’s order of verses in chapter 10. A Samuel scroll, 4QSam-a, sides with the Greek against the Masoretic Text again and again. And a scrap of Deuteronomy, 4QDeut-q, has that missing line from Hebrews, bow down to him, all you gods, sitting right there in Hebrew.

Open the ESV to Deuteronomy 32, verse 43: “bow down to him, all gods.” The footnote says the Masoretic Text lacks the line, and the translators went with the Dead Sea Scroll and the Septuagint. The scholars who gave you the ESV already do in a footnote what the Orthodox do in the pew.

So here’s the twist on ad fontes. Go back to the sources, past the medieval codices, past the second-century standardization, into the caves. What you find there is a Hebrew text in more than one form, and a Greek translation that often preserves a Hebrew text that was in circulation when Jesus stood up to read Isaiah in Nazareth. I’m not claiming the Greek is always older or always better. It isn’t. The honest claim is smaller, and harder to knock down.

Here’s my indicative:

Before the year 70, the text was plural, and the Church received the Greek.

A Footnote on Jerome

Merkle is right about the Vulgate, too. Jerome began by revising the Latin against the Greek, then translated the Old Testament fresh from what he called the Hebraica veritas, the Hebrew truth. Augustine’s fear more or less came true, and the Latin West ended up with a Hebrew-based Old Testament. The exception was the Psalms. The Latin Church kept singing those in a Latin made from the Greek for some fifteen hundred years, because nobody changes what a congregation knows by heart.

Where I’d push back is his claim that Jerome “became convinced that the Septuagint had been corrupted by anti-Christian sentiments by the rabbis.” That’s not how Jerome tells it. His reasons were a scholar’s reasons. He wanted the original language, and he was tired of debates where Jewish opponents rejected any reading taken from the Greek. He also grumbled that the Greek Bible of his day came in three regional editions that didn’t agree with each other. When ancient Christians did accuse Jewish teachers of tampering, the charge ran the other way. Justin Martyr, in the second century, said they had removed passages that pointed to Christ, passages the Septuagint, in his telling, had kept.

Augustine never budged. In City of God, Book 18, chapter 43, he argues that the same Spirit who spoke through the prophets spoke through the translators too. The great doctor of the Latin West was defending the Greek.

A Translator’s Note

If you’re worried the Orthodox think the Septuagint dropped out of heaven as a flawless autograph, relax. We don’t. You’ve already seen us read Daniel from a later Jewish reviser. The claim is that the Church, from the apostles onward, received the Greek Old Testament as her Scripture, read it aloud in her worship, and argued her councils from it. The canon came to us the same way. It was received. Orthodox scholars read the Hebrew gladly, and nobody is burning the Masoretes.

If you want an on-ramp, Merkle already named it: the Orthodox Study Bible, with an Old Testament translated from the Septuagint, and Sirach and the rest where the Church keeps them. Good recommendation.

Which brings me back to Sirach, this season’s book on the podcast. It opens with a translator’s note.

Around 132 BC, the grandson of Jesus ben Sira carried his grandfather’s Hebrew book to Egypt and turned it into Greek. In his prologue he apologizes in advance. Things first said in Hebrew, he says, don’t carry quite the same force in another language, and he adds that this is true of the Law and the Prophets and the rest of the books as well. So the first page of a book Protestant Bibles leave out is a Jewish translator telling you honestly what gets lost between Hebrew and Greek. The Church kept the book in Greek, and for centuries the Hebrew dropped out of sight. Then in 1896 leaves of it turned up in a Cairo synagogue’s storeroom, and in 1964 a Hebrew scroll of Sirach came out of the ruins at Masada.

And About That Plant

So, President Merkle, thank you. You were right about the confession, right about the Masoretes, right about what it costs a Protestant to change Bibles. The confession you quoted says God kept his Word “pure in all ages.” I know a Reformed reader hears that as providence watching over the Hebrew text, and I don’t mock it. We believe in that providence too. We just think the apostles already showed us which text they trusted, and the Church kept reading it.

The door was open before you mentioned it, but it’s kind of you to point. Anyone who wants to read the Bible the apostles quoted, in the Church that never stopped reading it, is welcome.

And about that plant. Jerome was probably right that it was no gourd. The botanists lean toward a castor-oil plant. Nobody in Oea cared about botany. They cared that words they’d prayed with for generations were being taken out of their mouths, and we should be slow to laugh at them. But read Jonah 4 to the end, in any language you like. God lets the plant wither, and then he asks Jonah whether he should not pity Nineveh, a great city of people who don’t know their right hand from their left. Whatever grew over Jonah’s head, the chapter ends with God talking about a city he refuses to give up on.

That’s the Bible we’re reading. Gourd, ivy, castor bean and all.

Come in. Mind the incense.

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Ben Merkle’s posts, in the order he wrote them: “Without post-70 AD, rabbinic Judaism…” (Oct 15, morning); “I don’t normally engage with the comments section much…” (Oct 15, afternoon); “Jokers To My Right” (Oct 16).