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“Christians have
mistranslated the Hebrew Scriptures in order to prove that Jesus is the
Messiah”
An irate rabbi once phoned to
scold me for telling Jewish people about Jesus. “You don’t even know
Hebrew,” he said. When I told him that I did, he challenged me to prove
it, so I quoted Genesis 1:1 in Hebrew. “So you think you know
everything do you!” he replied.
A classic objection to the
gospel is that Christians have mistranslated the Hebrew Scriptures in
order to prove that Jesus is the Messiah. Christians, they say, don’t
understand Hebrew and force the Old Testament text to say what they
want it to. A prime and prickly example of this claim is the
controversy over Psalm 22:16 (verse 17 in the Hebrew text).
A comparison of “Christian”
translations of the Old Testament and Jewish translations reveals two
different readings of Psalm 22:16. The translations with which
Christians are familiar read, “They have pierced my hands and my feet”.
However the translation published by the Jewish Publication Society in
1985, for example, reads, “Like lions [they maul] my hands and feet”.
The issue is complicated by
the fact that the Hebrew of Psalm 22:16 is notoriously difficult. The
majority of Hebrew manuscripts have the word kaari (“like a
lion”) while a minority have karu (“dug through/pierced”).
Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the Septuagint,
follow the minority Hebrew reading by translating karu as oruxan,
meaning “to dig a hole” or “to pierce”.
The fact that the
pre-Christian Septuagint supports the Christian argument should solve
the problem but Isaiah 38:13 appears to set a precedent for Jewish
scholars to translate Psalm 22:16 as “like a lion”. In Isaiah 38:13 kaari
is translated, “Like a lion, so he breaks all my bones”. Here, “k”
means “like” and “ari” means “lion”.
The standard Hebrew word for
lion is areyeh, a word that appears twice in Psalm 22, in
verses 14 and 22. From those verses, we can see that King David knew
how to spell “lion” correctly, so why would he spell it differently in
verse sixteen? Some Christian translators have suggested that the “k”
in kaari is not a preposition but is actually the first letter
of the word, and that the last letter yod should be
a vav but that it was mis-copied by a scribe, thus making
the word kaari instead of karu.
Are you confused? I told you
it was complicated. But it is so easy to get lost in the details that
we miss the larger picture. Ultimately, the sense of Psalm 22 does not
depend on whether the word in verse 16 is kaari or karu.
Even if Psalm 22:16 should be translated as “like a lion [they are at]
my hands and my feet”, the meaning of the verse remains the same
because of the context in which it is set. Evil ones and dogs have
surrounded a helpless victim and, like a lion, are at his hands and
feet.
What would a lion do to your
hands and feet if he got at them? Lick them?
This is a lion, not a pussy
cat!
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