Somebody removed these letters from the Dead Sea Scroll reading,
and they inserted three new letters, to read bene Yisrael, sons of Israel.
Okay, we don't know when that happened, but we know that it did.
This is ESV. And it says this; "When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance".
Okay, so, you know, what does that sound like?
"The most high gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind", okay?
And "he fixed the borders of the peoples." All right, now I know what's being alluded to.
It's Genesis 11:1-9. This is when God divides up humanity. Up to that point,
humanity was one, you know, one in mass entity.
At Babel, it gets divided, they get scattered. Now, God confuses the languages
and they become different nations. And those nations are listed for us
in the chapter prior to Genesis 11. Genesis 10. That's why it's called the Table of Nations,
is a list of nations.
So when the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, okay?
Divided them all up, he divides mankind. "He fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
But the Lord's portion, (okay, the Lord's portion, God's own portion) is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage."
Now, this is Deuteronomy 32:8-9. It is a reference back to the Babel event.
What happens right after the Babel event when God divides up the nations,
he calls Abraham (Abram), and he creates for himself a new people and a new nation,
they become his heritage.
So Deuteronomy 32:8-9 very plainly refer back to the Tower of Babel episode.
The question is; a lot of your translation, let's just go back, do not say this.
"When the Most High gave the nation's their inheritance, he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the Peoples according to the number of the sons of God."
Well, my translation doesn't say that, And it might not. Let's take a look at a few.
Okay, this is ESV. Let's just put a stopping point here at verse 8.
And let's take a look at a few. Let's go look at King James.
"When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people
according to the number of the children of Israel."
Well, you know, Israel doesn't exist yet.
Israel is not in existence when the nations are divided.
So that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Let's take a look at another one. I mean, just random to see what other versions have;
the Tanakh, this is the Jewish Publication Society. Yep.
"He fixed the borders of the peoples in relation to Israel's numbers."
Okay. Children of Israel. Little elastic translation there.
NIV, let's see what that has, "according to the number of the sons of Israel."
little footnote there. Let's see what it says Masoretic Text.
That's what the Masoretic Text has. The Dead Sea Scrolls, though, says "sons of God",
and also the Septuagint.
Let's do one more. New Revised Standard Version, NRSV,
"according to the number of the gods." Okay. So, they're taking "sons of God" and pluralizing it,
the number of the gods, okay? And it has the Masoretic text, you would say, the Israelites,
So you get, you know, a good bit of difference there. And you say, well, why the difference?
Why the difference? Why does the ESV have this
and these other translations have what they have?
Well, most of your English translations, at least kind of the older ones
that have a little mileage on them, are going to have sons of Israel
or a translation based on sons of Israel,
because that's what the traditional Hebrew text, the Masoretic Text has.
And that's typically, you know, and the ESV is really no different.
That's the text that's used to create an English translation. But what the ESV team did
was they made the decision; you know what? Everybody here knows
that the Dead Sea Scrolls, sons of God here, is the right reading.
So let's put it in. But put a footnote in there as to why our translation says sons of God,
but we are going with the Dead Sea Scrolls,
which is the oldest witness to this verse that is known to exist.
So they just did that. And this isn't the only place they do it.
They do it in other places too, which is why I kind of... I like the ESV, for Deuteronomy 32,
except for verse 17. And it's a terrible translation,
I did a whole peer-reviewed article on why the ESV is wrong in Deuteronomy 32:17.
But it's, it's bad. It produces a self-contradiction in the chapter, which is why it's bad.
But anyway, sons of God or sons of Israel? Again, on the left-hand column here you have
what the Dead Sea Scrolls have, you know, at the bottom, here's number 14,
from right to left is bene Elohim, sons of God.
And just so that, you know, I'm not drawing it.
Here is a decent photograph of the fragment of Deuteronomy 32:8 from the Dead Sea Scrolls,
bene Elohim. And we'll click again, here's a high-resolution photograph of the fragment
from the Dead Sea Scrolls website. You can actually get high-resolution photos
of the Dead Sea Scrolls that, you know, from where they're kept in Israel.
So we have bene Elohim. It's, it couldn't be any clearer.
And again, you had to read my article for today, I think.
I don't know if I put it in the optional reading or not, but probably not.
So what we have going on here is we have a text critical issue;
how did we go from bene Elohim to bene Yisrael?
And somewhere, we don't know when, we don't know if it was in
the intertestamental period,
or whether it was at the period of text standardization, 100 AD,
we don't know when this happened. But here's what a scribe did.
You notice in green here, "he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God", bene and then Elohim in green.
Somebody removed these letters from the Dead Sea Scroll reading,
and they inserted three new letters, they kept Aleph, Lamedh (el),
got rid of what goes on the back, and then they added Yodh-Shin-Resh,
to read bene Yisrael, sons of Israel.
Okay, we don't know when that happened, but we know that it did.
We know that it did because this is what the Masoretic Text has.
And this is what the Dead Sea Scrolls has.
So if you're going with the text, that is the oldest text that we have of the Hebrew Bible,
you should be reading sons of God in Deuteronomy 32:8.