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May 2, 2008

Isaiah 38:9-20: An Abnormal View

Warning: Please don't take this post too seriously. It is little more than a thought experiment. Like many things I do here, I am playing around with an idea. As such, you will see even more than my usual amount of equivocation. On the one hand, with a lot more work, this idea may prove fruitful. On the other hand, no amount of work may save this idea from being yet another example of the most natural form of fertilizer. Most likely, my bright idea will go nowhere because it may reflect a low probability solution to a severely underdetermined problem. While major parts of it are not really original to me and certain scholarly interests may be supportive, my abnormal idea is not well aligned with other current scholarly trajectories.

John Hobbins, of Ancient Hebrew Poetry fame, has a series on Isaiah 38:9-20. He uses this text primarily as a foil for a discussion of "Silent Emendations" in translations. He seeks to show where and how various translations deviate from the Masoretic Text (MT) and how well or poorly they document those deviations. Finally, he provides an example of how he thinks translations should do this. Some of the discussion in comments to a few of his posts has been rather acrimonious, particularly regarding John's efforts to defend certain aspects and uses of the ESV (English Standard Version) translation. So please read all of John's posts and the comments that follow them if you are interested in the details of this controversy. You may want to look at Iyov and Suzanne McCarthy's sites also. This discussion is significant and I do have an opinion on the general subject of translations but that opinion is not the subject of this post. The subject of this post is the genre of Isaiah 38:9-20 and some abnormally interesting implications of that genre. Also, to understand fully this, my current post, it will be necessary to read at least two of John's posts where he has done a lot of the heavy lifting some of which I purloin in what follows.

With that prolonged introduction, I'd like to suggest something abnormal. In it's most radical and likely irresponsible form my suggestion goes like this. A semiliterate King Hezekiah wrote Isaiah 38:10-20 himself and in his own hand. If the overwhelming force and pristine clarity of this statement doesn't convince you, perhaps a few more words will be of help.

First, I agree with John that the MT has more than a few problematic readings including a probable error in not reflecting an "archaic spelling," הַמְחַיֵּי, in verse 16 (within a letter string whose division into words was misunderstood) and a very high density of hapax legomenon and dis legomenon words and expressions and confused letters. It likely also uses עלי as a divine appellative. There are, of course, other texts in the Hebrew Bible that have many just plain weird things in them. But in these twelve verses, the density of weird things is unusually high. Some of John's emendations are supportive of my modest proposal; others, while understandable enough on their own, may not help in the recovery of the earliest stratum of the textual tradition. See my sixth point below.

Second, the genre of Isaiah 38:10-20 is a vow and not necessarily a prayer; or perhaps better, not only a prayer. John's genre definition is a little longer, "not prayer per se, but the account of a prayer and of an answer to the prayer, and of a commitment to praise God forever in response to divine healing." That sounds like a vow to me. And I agree that if we start with Isaiah 38:9 it is an account of a vow, specifically the vow that follows in verses 10-20. On verses 10-20 being a vow: see particularly verse 20, "The Lord is ready to save me, and my songs we will sing all the days of our lives before the temple of the Lord." I use John's "straight-up translation of" this verse in the "MT warts and all." The vow seems to begin with a lament followed by a plea for help and finally a promise. The vow is addressed to Yahweh and is in the first person. See for comparison the vow in Jonah 2:2-10. Here in the Jonah's vow, also addressed to Yahweh in the first person, the elements of lament and plea are more entangled than they are in Isaiah 38:10-20. In addition, compare Psalms 56, 57, 58, and 59. All are vows with a heading that tells us that they are written (מכתם) and three of them command us not to destroy (the text? the stele?). Because of the command not to destroy, all appear to have been written for a public audience and in a place where they might be destroyed. See Altaman, 71-72, for an interesting example of an inscription from Carthage that seeks to impost a fine for destroying or removing the inscription. Psalm 16, like Psalms 56, 57, 58, 59 and 60, is also called a מכתם. I think Psalm 16 and 60 both contain enough elements of a vow to be identified with that genre also. Following Altman, 48, passim and table 1, I take Isaiah 38:10-20 to be a type 1 ("a prayer for aid of some sort"), private, inscribed on something we know not what, commemorative vow. In commemoration of Hezekiah's (impending) recovery from sickness, "we will sing all the days of our lives before the temple of the Lord."

Third, Altman, 44 and elsewhere, argues, that the person making a written vow must write it in their own hand. The Siloam Tunnel Inscription provides an example of a dedicatory-victory vow, in this case written in the hand of an educated and literate person, not a scribe, but perhaps the project engineer. It may be significant for the topic of this post that the Siloam Tunnel Inscription is from the time of Hezekiah.

Fourth, the likely use of the divine name עלי and the use of the equally likely archaic form, הַמְחַיֵּי, point to a pre-exilic composition.

Fifth, the idea that Isaiah 38:10-20 and other "Psalms and Inscriptions of Petition and Acknowledgment" were public documents, even stelae, goes back to at least H. L. Ginsberg's 1945 paper. As Zevit, 356, points out, Ginsberg made his suggestion well before the discovery of inscriptions like those found at Khirbet el-Qôm and elsewhere. The first line of 8th/7th century BCE el-Qôm 3 tomb inscription is instructive: עריהו העשר כתבה, which Zevit, 361, renders, "Uryahu, the prosperous, his inscription (or an inscription)" but Zevit admits that the syntax is strange and other interpretations are possible. What is not possible is to read this line as other than a reference to the writing that follows it. And that text is a vow of the dedicatory memorial sub-genre. The hand of the inscription is, how to say it politely, not that of a trained scribe. There remains controversy about literacy among the ruling class even in places where there is considerable evidence for it. For example, on the question of the literacy of Ashurbanipal, see the recent paper by Alasdair Livingstone referenced below. You may remember that I tentatively suggested the possibility that a King of Ugarit wrote his own vow. Schniedewind's review article, also referenced below, provides a good survey of fairly recent discussion of literacy of in ancient Israel and Judah. However, there can no longer be any real doubt that by Hezekiah's time certain professionals and some military officers could both read and write.

Sixth, it may be better to consider several of the difficult readings in the MT as pointing to the work of a semiliterate rather than a learned scribe or even a literate professional whose words became garbled in transmission. I would propose that where John sees "א/נ confusion," " י/ו confusion," " פ/ב confusion", "aural errors," and perhaps even metathesis, one might see the hand of a semiliterate and not some later textual tradition (yeah, everything but the " י/ו confusion," is reaching for it). (I'm not so sure about "ו/פ confusion," "כ/ד confusion." If this happened, it likely happened in postexilic times or later.) Who might that semiliterate be? Well given that this text is a vow; contains some archaic forms and words; that the introduction says, "An inscription of Hezekiah, king of Judah," and there is some evidence that professionals did write and that even kings may have been able to write, it might just be none other than Hezekiah himself who wrote Isaiah 38:10-20. Is there any other evidence that Hezekiah might have been semiliterate? None that I know of, but if one is not willing to proclaim him fully literate and one thinks he may have written Isaiah 38:10-20 then semiliterate is a kind of compromise however lame. A couple of the "textual errors" mentioned above may support the validly of this compromise but then they may not.

Some might think I have just presented a circular argument. I prefer to look at it as a bootstrapping argument.

Oh, I just noticed that Professor Definitive Text Critic has been looking over my shoulder. He now humbly expresses his learned opinion of my discussion so far. "You're nuts! John's readings for Isaiah 38:10-20 are all obviously correct, well supported and only a complete fool would doubt any of them. And only a bigger fool would try to use strange, archaic and unusual forms to support the idea of semiliterate authorship. You can't just go picking and choosing which of John's reading you like and which you don't like on the basis of some cock and bull hypothesis. And who says Hezekiah could write even a little anyway."

"Okay, Okay," I say, "you're the professor and I trust your judgment about Isaiah 38:10-20. But can I have my way with Isaiah 38:9?"

Definitive, we're now on a first name basis, rolls his eyes upward and sarcastically answers, "Why should I?"

Well, even if we assume that John is correct in all his proposed readings for Isaiah 38:10-20, we still have a vow. It's just that we have a vow written by a literate person that got somewhat screwed up in the course of transmission. It's not as clear in John's "fully footnoted translation" as it is in his emended Hebrew text that this is a vow. But it is. And whoever wrote Isaiah 38:9 knew that vows were written in the hand of the person making the vow. So in keeping with that knowledge some editor wrote מִכְתָּב לְחִזְקִיָּהוּ, "a writing of Hezekiah . . ." Sure, he may have placed the vow on Hezekiah's quill (or stylus) for theological or other reasons but that editor knew to associate Isaiah 38:10-20 with a literary, meaning written and likely public, genre. And if not the "first" editor, someone early in the tradition knew a thing or two about vows.

So, my abnormal reader, what do I think of this sketch of an abnormal interpretation of the text? Here is my own evaluation. My argument is weak and must be bolstered (or discredited) by a very detailed discussion of, among other things, the specific indications that the MT reflects here and perhaps elsewhere the work of semiliterates. A special, text based, as opposed to a primarily orthography based, methodology is needed for this chore. Even if one agrees with me that Isaiah 38:10-20 is a vow and the work of a semiliterate or just a vow, it is only in the introductory verse, verse 9, that we learn that the vow is both a written document and attributed to Hezekiah. As such, an editor may have misattributed the vow to Hezekiah. With the number and nature of underdetermined problems that the very text of Isaiah 38:9-20 presents, no understanding may be able to claim even a 50% probability of representing what early editors, readers or copyists of the text thought of it. So, I make no claim for the likelihood of my modest proposal reflecting anything but my own abnormal interests.

Reference:

Posted by Duane Smith at May 2, 2008 8:46 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |

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Comments

Posted by: John Hobbins at May 2, 2008 10:40 PM

Posted by: G.M. Grena at May 4, 2008 9:34 AM

Posted by: Duane at May 4, 2008 11:12 AM

Posted by: G.M. Grena at May 5, 2008 9:43 PM

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