A mistake about 134 emendations of the Sopherim...
2023-09-13
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When I was in my teens, a family friend introduced me to the Companion Bible, a fascinating work by E. W. Bullinger, published in or around 1910. I cannot recommend it as a reliable resource, but it is very interesting.
It can be found online:
Reading along in 1 Kings, we find something interesting in the tenth verse of chapter three:
That image above is from the Companion Bible. Compare this to what you would find in a more normal KJV, such as, say, an 1860 Oxford copy of the KJV, as shown below:
Where an ordinary KJV reads "Lord", the Companion Bible has a small-caps "LORD". In the normal methodology of the KJV, a "normal" "Lord" (in the Hebrew Bible) is a signal that the underlying Hebrew word is a common noun -- such as Adonai. On the other hand, a small-caps "LORD" is used to represent the proper name YHWH, commonly vocalized (in English) as Yahweh or Jehovah.
So what's going on here?
There is a marginal note here in the Companion Bible that begins to explain:
That is, when you open an ordinary Hebrew Bible, you read here, Adonai, not YHWH. But, the Companion Bible asserts, there were once some Sopherim -- whatever those might be -- who have written in "Adonai" where originally "Jehovah" stood.
The reader is directed to Appendix 32 of the Companion Bible, where we find the following:
In case the image does not render well for you, here's what that says, with some sloppiness about exact details of formatting, and some details left out:
Out of extreme (but mistaken) reverence for the Ineffable Name "Jehovah", the ancient custodians of the Sacred Text substituted in many places "Adonai" (see Ap. 4. viii. 2). These, in the A. V. and R. V., are all printed "Lord". In all these places we have printed it "LORD" [small-caps], marking the word with an asterisk in addition to the note in the margin, to inform the reader of the fact.
The official list in the Massorah (sections 107-15, Ginsburg's edition) contains the 134.
[Here follows a big list\]
(See Ginsburg's ed. of The Massorah, sections 107-115.)
[Here follows some similar material about the word "Elohim".]
We are living in the golden age of historical research. Anyone with normal access to the internet can check this. It might take a little fishing, because the citation to "Ginsburg's ed. of The Massorah, sections 107-115" is not quite complete.
Like many valuable historical documents, the one we seek here is to be found on archive.org:
In particular, consider the beginning of section 115 of the fourth volume of Ginsburg's Massorah. You can see this here, but I will just excerpt a bit, once again taking a few liberties with formatting -- you may see the magnificent original formatting in the facsimile just linked to.
[Adonai]. Lord is one hundred and thirty times written so. This Rubric distinguishes the one hundred and thirty-four passages where Adonai stands by itself from the three hundred and four instances in which is combined with Jehovah.
In other words, there are 134 places where the term Adonai appears by itself, and three hundred and four cases where it appears with YHWH. In other words there are 134 places like 1 Kings 3:10, where Adonai appears without Jehovah -- the verse reads: "And the speech pleased Adonai, that Solomon had asked this thing." But there are 304 places like Genesis 15:2, where they appear together -- the verse reads "And Abram said, Adonai YHWH, what wilt thou give me", etc.
This is not what the Companion Bible has put in Ginsburg's mouth. Ginsburg here says there are 134 cases of Adonai appearing without Jehovah -- not that in all 134 cases Adonai was substituted for Jehovah.
Now, Ginsburg does allow that this has occurred in some cases. As he continues in the same section:
We have seen that in many of these one hundred and thirty-four instances in which the present received text reads Adonai in according with this Massorah, some of the best MSS. and early editions read the Tetragrammaton, and the question arises how did this variation obtain? The explanation is not far to seek. From time immemorial the Jewish canons decreed that the incommunicable name is to be pronounced Adonai as if it were were [Aleph Dalet Nun Yod] instead of [Yod He Vav He]. Nothing was, therefore, more natural for the copyists than to substitute the expression which exhibited the pronunciation for the Tetragrammaton which they were forbidden to pronounce. This is confirmed by the fact that the Massorah itself in giving the catchword of a passage substitutes [Aleph Dalet Nun Yod] for [Yod He Vav He] ... and that the Easterns read [Adonai] where the Westerns have [YHWH] and vice versa. Hence we may safely assume that the Scribe wrote Adonai for [YHWH] he would not insert the incommunicable name instead of [Adonai]. The reading, therefore, in the conflicting passages is in favour of the Tetragrammaton.
In other words, Ginsburg argues that, in some subset of cases where Hebrew texts disagree among themselves, one should judge it more likely that "YHWH" is the original reading, rather than that "Adonai" is the original reading. But this is a principle only for those cases where a disagreement between manuscripts exists -- it's not a blanket conclusion about all 134 cases.
The Companion Bible has badly misread Ginsburg on this point. It has so badly misread Ginsburg that it winds up performing a grotesque inversion of what it is that KJV capitalization of "LORD" is supposed to do. Rather than using "LORD" for YHWH and "Lord" for Adonai, the Companion Bible tries to capitalize all 134 instances of Adonai without Yahweh.
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