This post was originally written in May 2017. Navigate to the passage index.
And the posts thereof were toward the utter court; and palm trees were upon the posts thereof, on this side, and on that side: and the going up to it had eight steps. (Ezekiel 40:37, KJV).
This verse occurs inside a description of Ezekiel’s visionary plan for a future eschatological temple. More specifically, in this verse Ezekiel is describing some things he sees in his vision near the north gate of the temple.
Our subject for today is the word that the KJV translates as “the posts thereof.” That word is subject, in both appearances in this verse, to a Ketiv-Qere pair of variants. The Ketiv, the traditionally consonantal (read but unpronounced) text, reads aleph yod lamed waw. While the Qere reads aleph yod lamed yod waw, pronounced elav, with a silent yod.
Now, a Ketiv-Qere pair doesn’t always, but usually does, scream out to the reader, “Something is wrong here.” In this case, we might imagine that the Ketiv just reflects a sparer spelling, by a scribe who didn’t write in silent yods, and that the Qere just reflects a guide for the reader, converting the original into a later orthographic convention. Nothing to see here, move along.
However, the Septuagint tells a slightly different story. You can see this in English here. The Septuagint translators, as they sometimes did, stumbled here and couldn’t seem to translate two Hebrew words in front of them. Instead, they simply transliterated those words into Greek letters. So where the Hebrew reads elav . . . elav, the Septuagint translators wrote ailammo . . . aileu.
So where the KJV reads “posts . . . posts” following the Hebrew, the Septuagint translator seems to have been holding before him a manuscript that read “porch . . . post.” Here I’ve been following the NETS translation of the Septuagint, the premier English translation. I find the same situation if I look up the Rahlfs-Hanhart edition of the Septuagint in the original Greek (here). So I’m puzzled as to why the notes to the NET (not to be confused with the NETS) say that the LXX reads “porches” (plural). Does NETS rely on a different edition of the Septuagint? Is this just a mistake? I don’t know.
I’m going to guess that the NET just got this one wrong, and that the real Septuagint reading is ailammo, presupposing “its porch” (singular). Let me know if I’m wrong here.
Over at BibleHub, you can see a number of translations of the Bible in parallel, for any verse you pick. For Ezekiel 40:37, you can see that the NIV, NLT, ESV, Holman all follow the lead of the Septuagint, while KJV, RV, ASV, NASB, NET all follow the Masoretic Text. The Douay-Rheims Bible (and therefore by implication the Vulgate) follows the Septuagint here as well.
Now let’s complicate things further. I said that ESV follows the lead of the Septuagint. And that’s true, insofar as it is assuming an original Hebrew eilamo (equivalent to the Septuagint’s ailammo) before the current Masoretic Text’s ela(y)w. However, the ESV does go in a different direction from the other Septuagint-followers.
The more common option is to read the Septuagint’s ailammo as reflecting a Hebrew elam, a word which would presumably mean the same thing as ulam, or porch. So far I’ve just been simply writing as if elam is equivalent to ulam. But that equivalence has been contested.
Brown-Driver-Briggs (page 19) follows the opinion that elam is simply a variant form, found in Ezekiel, for ulam. But it notes the opinion of F. Böttcher, who claimed (in his NeueÄhrenlese, page 929) that elam is its own distinct word meaning vestibule. Likewise, Gesenius thought it was its own word, although he had his own idea about it’s meaning, which we won’t go into now. Regardless, ESV follows Böttcher’s approach and takes the Septuagint’s (implied) elam as meaning “vestibule.”