The grammar is disputed???
This is a weird use of objective. Translation is not objective. It always involves interpretation, which is inherently a subjective exercise that involves inferences. Some translation choices are more defensible or more preferable than others, but none of them are objective.
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Um, yes. There are those like @mtp1032 who adamantly believe that the grammar dictates that Abram is the subject of the verb in the second phrase…
And there are other quite noteworthy scholars, such as Nahum Sarna who wrote the JPS (Jewish Publication Society) Torah Commentary on Genesis, who disagree:
He reckoned it to his merit God is the subject of the verb. Hebrew tsedakah , usually “righteousness,” sometimes bears the sense of “merit.” The idea is that Abram’s act of faith made him worthy of God’s reward, which is secured through a covenant.
Hence, the grammar is “disputed.”
Here’s the LXX Greek:
και επιστευσεν Αβραμ τω θεω, και ελογισθη αυτω εις δικαιοσυνην.
Here is the verb’s entry in Thayer’s lexicon
ελογισθη
1 aorist elogisamēn; a deponent verb with 1 aorist passive elogisthēn and 1 future passive logisthēsomai; in Biblical Greek also the present is used passively (in secular authors the present participle is once used so, in Herodotus 3, 95; (cf. Veitch, under the word; Winer’s Grammar, 259 (243); Buttmann, 52 (46))); (logos); the Septuagint for ḥāšab; (a favorite word with the apostle Paul, being used (exclusive of quotations) some 27 times in his Epistles, and only four times in the rest of the N.T.);
Here is its correct [Breton’s] translation:
“it was reckoned”
Hence, my conclusion that Breton translated ελογισθη correctly (as a passive verb)
The LXX translated the Hebrew incorrectly (an active verb).
The LXX incorrectly translated an active Hebrew verb to a passive Greek verb.
Hope this helps.
M
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I’ll take the blame for this endless discussion. I failed to make the distinction between translation and interpretation. Your response @Christy reminded my of my imprecision.
To “render” a source in a target language that is faithful to the intent of the source author is thought to require two steps:
- Translation
- Interpretation
Translation is more objective, hence less disagreement.
Interpretation is more subjective, hence more disagreement
A good analogy is spelling. Consider the following sentence:
- Mary conceived … correctly spelled, correctly interpreted
- Mary concieved … incorrectly spelled, but [almost certainly] correctly interpreted.
In conclusion, I find debates of interpretation to be perfectly reasonable. OTOH, since grammar is more objective than interpretation, all the disagreeing parties should be able to justify their position.
Cheers,
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Well…
Would you want to explain that to @mtp1032 ? Or am I wrong for thinking that this is making a rather objective and absolute sounding claim?
It sure sounds to me as though he is claiming that the LXX is “objectively“ incorrect, by shifting the verb into passive from the MT’s active…
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Yeah, I disagree and think this is a false binary. The cognitive processes that go into accessing meaning in an utterance/text are interpretive. We interpret meaning in our own language to communicate, no translation involved. Translation is interpreting meaning and then attempting to trigger the same inferences about meaning using another language. You cannot translate unless you have interpreted the meaning of the utterance/text. You can gloss. That’s neither interpreting nor translating. And even glossing is not objective because words aren’t objective meaning units and how they should be glossed depends on how they are used, which requires interpreting the utterance and making inferences about intended meaning. Translators are constantly making choices and there is constantly disagreement, both about the intended meaning of the original speaker and about the best way to communicate that meaning using a target language and their culturally dependent conceptual toolkit.
I don’t understand this analogy. Spelling is just a system of orthographic conventions that abstracts language use into an idealized written form. Spelling and reading are a separate mental tasks from both translating and interpreting.
Saying grammar is objective makes no sense to a linguist. Grammar is just an attempt to codify patterns of natural language use and treat human language as an abstract system. Understanding language in use is far more complicated (and subjective) than decoding based on grammar rules and semantics, which is why a huge percentage of human communication is asking for or giving clarification about intended meaning.
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I agree with you. The translator of the LXX rendered the verse or the idea in the verse differently than the writer of the Hebrew text wrote it. It could be a very loose (potentially midguided) translation or it could be a translation of a different variant of the text. It’s a not totally warranted assumption that every quote in the NT we say is LXX is really a direct Greek translation of the MT text or even came from the text we identify as the authoritative LXX today. The MT is a modern compilation of ancient texts. The LXX is a modern compilation of ancient texts. We know people in Jesus’ time had access to Aramaic oral translations and mutiple variants of the Septuagint. Textual variants are not necessarily “mistranslations,” they can be alternate translations of alternate texts. Also, it’s wrong to pretend that the Hebrew verbal system mapped perfectly to the Greek verbal system, because it didn’t, and you don’t necessarily swap out passives and actives one to one because there are different discourse and tense/aspect features associated with use of active/passive voice in the two languages that need to be taken into consideration.
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The intended meaning is what is disputed, not the grammar. We know what it says.
The verb “accounted” doesn’t have an overt subject in the MT and the preposition to doesn’t have an overt object of the preposition (it’s just 3SGM), so it is an opinion that God is intended to be inferred as the one accounting and Abram is who it was accounted to. The verb “accounted” has 3SGM subject marking and 3SGF object marking. So “he accounted it” (feminine noun). It’s totally ambiguous who did what to whom.
YHWH has been invoked just prior as the object of the preposition, so it could make sense by participant tracking rules of Hebrew (something I am no expert in, so I don’t know one way or another) that the closest overtly named participant would be the inferred subject of the next conjoined verb. It’s equally logical and attested in many languages (though maybe not specific to Hebrew, I don’t know) that the last subject of a clause would be inferred to continue in the subject position unless there was an overt change of subject participant, and the last subject in this context was the subject of the verb “believed” which contextually has to be Abram.
So the Hebrew grammar allows both the understanding “God accounted it [?] to Abram righteousness” and "Abram accounted it [?] to God righteousness. What the feminine “it” refers to is also ambiguous. So, yes, how to interpret the intended meaning and translate it is disputed. Many English translations leave it ambiguous and just go with “Abram believe God and he credited it to him as righteousness.” Michael’s understanding of what this could mean (Abram gave God credit in advance for keeping his future promises because of his righteousness) is quite plausible given the context. But you can’t get that interpretation easily from the LXX translation Paul quoted, so if he wants to argue that’s how we should understand the Hebrew, he has to explain the LXX and Romans, and it sounds like he is going with “mistranslation.” That’s one approach. It’s really an Evangelical game to insist on “harmonizing” the theology of the Hebrew Scriptures and the NT, it’s not as big of a deal to point out differences in the wider world of biblical scholarship.
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So the more correct way to put it would IF the MT accurately gives us the text that the LXX ‘team’ had to work with, then they made a mistranslation. (I had a chuckle at that last word; I’ve been reading some sci-fi where “translation” means making a near-instantaneous jump between two locations in space, and a “mistranslation” is when the navigator gets something wrong and the ship arrives in the wrong place.)
So the LXX ‘team’ may have intended to clear up the ambiguity.
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It does work that way in a couple of ANE languages; I forget the rule in Hebrew but I suspect if that was the case then Michael would have mentioned it by now.
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Well, it wouldn’t work for his argument, so he might want to avoid it. He is saying the subject isn’t YHWH (the traditional understanding) he’s saying it’s Abram.
Mistranslation is kind of harsh. (The translators got where they intended to go, unlike your sci-fi pilot). More like they disambiguated, perhaps incorrectly. It’s only a mistranslation if the rendering means something the original clearly can’t mean, which is not the case here.
Exactly! It’s a deliberate act to change the meaning of the verse. To do this, the verb’s voice was changed from active to passive - a mistranslation! The interpretation is just fine if you accept the mistranslation of the verse.
If you think it is valid to diminish the authority of the original source, I’ve misunderstood you. Nevertheless, you guys seem to want to go down this rabbit hole? So, let’s have a go. We’ll begin with Tov and Troxel:
The LXX translators often made interpretive choices to clarify or emphasize theological points.
- Emanuel Tov, a leading authority in textual criticism, asserts that the Septuagint frequently reflects theological exegesis embedded within its translations. He notes that the LXX often serves not merely as a translation but as an interpretive commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, providing insight into how Jewish communities of the Second Temple period understood their sacred texts.
- Ronald L. Troxel, in his analysis of LXX Isaiah, emphasizes that the translators employed strategies that went beyond literal translation. He argues that the LXX Isaiah exhibits deliberate theological shaping, with choices that reflect interpretive decisions aimed at conveying particular theological emphases.
I have three more citations and would be happy to share them, but this should be enough to add credibility to the notion that the LXX takes liberty with the Hebrew in order to justify a particular rationale.
Back to 15:6: The LXX rendered the Hebrew active voice with a Greek passive, potentially to underscore that the act of reckoning was something God did for Abraham, thus aligning with a theological emphasis on justification by faith.
Given the Hebrew source, the LXX’s passive voice does not represent the morphology of the corresponding verb. From a strictly philological perspective, this is an interpretive translation rather than a direct grammatical equivalent. Whether this counts as a “mistranslation” depends on your criteria. By my lights, the LXX guys mistranslated the verse and likely deliberately.
From my point of view, translation is a mechanical operation that almost anyone with a lexicon can do. Interpretation is far more difficult because (again in my mind) good interpretations are constrained by the grammar, vocabulary, context and last but not least a willingness to let the source speak for itself. Grammar, evidently, counts for little in your views.
Summary:
- Grammatically: Yes, it’s a mistake because it deviates from the Hebrew voice for no reason other than mistake, a lack of understanding, or deliberate misrepresentation.
- Theologically or interpretively: No, it’s not a mistake. It’s a deliberate act to align to a particular understanding—later echoed in Pauline theology (Romans 4:3)—where the passive voice serves the theological argument.
So, what then is your criteria? Is it a grammatical or interpretive issue? I argue that it is grammatical. Put another way, I have no interpretive lens that looks for an interpretation consistent with what I think the verse ought to mean.
I get it. If your view is that no objective standard exists, I can live with that, but a conversation about what the influence the verse has on human salvation is pointless. In the absence of standards, there can be no clarity.
Peace,
M
Yes it does. The subject is the masculine, 3rd person, singular indefinite pronoun, “he”.
The question is who is the antecedent of “he?” As it happens, Hebrew has a perfectly good grammatical rule that disambiguates the antecedent in this case. It is called the rule of subject continuity and states that subject nouns do NOT change across perfect-wayyiqtol boundaries. By that grammatical rule (subject continuity) the antecedent resolves to Abram. Abram does the reckoning. Since English does not have the concept of a wayyiqtol clause and so the subject continuity goes by the practice (but not rule) that the noun closest to the verb must be the subject.
Of course, if grammar is pointless then have it any way that meets your preconceptions.
Blessings,
M
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well, I don’t disagree with you in principle, and your observations below about the ambiguity of the words in the MT is exactly correct…
But what I was addressing was @mtp1032 's Contention that the rules of grammar demand, (and are beyond any dispute whatsoever), That Abram must without any ambiguity be the subject of the verb “reckoned” in the MT of genesis 15:6… because, “Grammar!”
that said, i would respectfully disagree with your take on the LXX below… though not sure if I fully follow what you meant (Partly, as I am, not sure, you are following Michael’s argument… Though, perhaps I’m the one not following it…)
point is, as I read the LXX (and both Paul and James for that matter), it sounds just like what you described here…
The LXX also seems to follow that same choice you mention, as they leave the verbiage ambiguous. They did change it to passive (changing “he reckoned” to “it was reckoned”)… but, following the MT, they, indeed also kept the recipient as ambiguous ( ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ … it was credited to “him”). By the Greek itself, αὐτῷ could similarly be understood either as God or as Abram.
In his paper, Michael seems to agree 100% with me here… discussing the LXX’s translation, he notes…
The passive construction obscures who is doing the reckoning and what is being reckoned. The accompanying dative pronoun αὐτῷ (autō, “him”) indicates the recipient of the action but does not clarify the agent or the object. This openness permits a range of interpretations: either God reckoned something to ‘Avram, or ‘Avram reckoned something to God—there is no grammatical constraint within the Greek to settle the matter.
Exactly! There is no grammatical constraints within the LXX/Greek to settle whether Abram reckoned something to God or whether God reckon something to Abram. Just like in the Hebrew/MT!
Hence, unless I am missing something, it seems to me that the LXX did a decent job of simply keeping ambiguous in their translation what was ambiguous in the original.
… but if I am following his argument correctly (And do please correct me if I have misunderstood.)…The problem is that @mtp1032 is so absolutely convinced that the Hebrew is actually not ambiguous - that the rules of grammar are so strict and formulaic and exacting - that it is beyond any dispute or discussion that Abram is objectively, in fact, indisputably the subject of the clause…
And on that basis, he is insisting that the LXX mistranslated… specifically because the LXX kept something ambiguous that in his opinion - (because of certain unyielding formulaic laws of grammar,) is actually not ambiguous in the Hebrew/MT.
That is my objection to his claims about the LXX “mistranslating” Gen 15:6…, again, unless I have completely misunderstood his argument?
@Christy, I think he is confirming my point. He is so convinced that some particular rule of grammar is so absolute and unyielding that he is utterly convinced that the subject of the verb “accounted” is in fact not ambiguous at all, but that the subject is unambiguously and indisputably “Abram.”
Hence, by his logic, the LXX “mistranslated” this passage, because they left it ambiguous, contrary to his opinion that the MT’s grammar unambiguously demands Abram to be the subject.
do I misunderstand?
But you are tracking that @mtp1032’s very complaint about the LXX is that it kept the ambiguity, right?
No it’s not, they translated the meaning they understood, and Paul quoted the meaning he had learned. Disambiguating is not “changing” the meaning, it’s clarifying an inferred meaning. That’s not a mistranslation, it’s just a translation choice. It happens all the time because languages do not have one to one correspondences.
Verbal systems and discourse strategies differ from language to language. There is absolutely no translation rule that says you have to translate an active verb with an active verb. You translate in a way that best communicates the intended meaning using the target language and meaning is more than semantics and grammar, it’s also discourse features and pragmatics. Insisting on using the “same” verb forms can actually lead to mistranslations because different languages trigger different assumptions about intended meaning and different verb forms are used at the discourse level to establish things like backgrounded and foregrounded information structure, given and new information, and participant tracking. For example, in many languages using a direct imperative is totally inappropriate pragmatically if you are talking to adults (as opposed to dogs or children) so imperatives in Hebrew or Greek need to be changed to subjunctives or some other verb form, otherwise the translation would miscommunicate rudeness that was not intended by the source text. These kinds of adjustments are made all the time.
I don’t know why we are talking about the authority of the original source. The MT says what it says. I accept that your proposed understanding of the verse is plausible. I disagree that the LXX with its rendering of the verb as an aorist passive does anything to really disambiguate the ambiguous subjects. “Abram believe in YHWH and it was counted to him righteousness” does not make who the “him” is or who did the counting explicit, it’s still ambiguous. I agree that the rabinnical tradition Paul was a part of played fast and loose with “author intent” to make their own points. They were not in the habit of expositing texts by Baptist preacher rules. Paul is the one interpreting the LXX as Abram getting credit from God for his faith, but we know how he interprets the verse not from how he quotes it (it’s still ambiguous) but because the fact that he understands it to mean (or wants it to mean in this case) that God credits Abraham’s faith as righteousness, not his works, is clear from the next verse: “However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness.” It’s not the LXX translators you have a beef with, it’s Paul. Now probably Paul is referencing how he has learned the text from his teachers and sure, he probably learned the text with commentary on what it meant. I know and accept the ideas behind your quotes, I just don’t think they apply to the translation of this verse.
I don’t see it. The LXX translators didn’t have a concept of justification by faith, so why would they be deliberately aligning their translation with it? They were 3rd and 2nd century BC Jews. Post-Reformation English Bible translators and exegetes of Paul, that’s another story. But how an ambiguous verse is taught and translated into English is not the ancient LXX translators’ problem or fault.
Yes of course it is. So what? A translation is not a gloss. It doesn’t have to be and it won’t actually function as a translation if all it does is gloss words and change out lexemes for “equivalent” lexemes. That isn’t how human language or translating human language works.
Then you are definitely going to be destroyed in peer review because this is a categorically wrong idea
I’m a linguist, I like grammar. But it’s a tool for communication, it’s not communication. And grammatical rules alone cannot justify the asertions you are making about meaning.
If I were translating the verse, I would try to maintain the ambiguity of the MT (like the LXX did.) If I were explaining the significance of the verse (like Paul) I would have to pick a lane and put my cards on the table about how I understood it. I’ve always understood it as God counted Abraham righteous because of his faith, with faith being defined as loyalty to the covenant relationship God established with him. You are essentially saying that Paul got the meaning of the MT wrong, which is a conundrum for the inerrancy/authority of Scripture crowd, because Paul’s words and the argument he built on his understanding are inerrant Scripture by their reckoning too. I’m actually fine entertaining the idea that the MT could have been saying Abraham counted on God’s righteousness and that is true, and it’s also true what Paul said about Abraham being saved by faith/faithfulness not works and his use of the LXX to support his argument was fine by the exegetical standards of the day, which are different than ours because we care a lot more than they did about texts and author intent. I mean, Romans 4:3 is not even the most egregious riff on something the MT did not actually mean.
An overt subject, when you are talking about discourse analysis and participant tracking, is a noun or a name (proper noun), and overt subjects are usually followed by pronomial subjects, clitics, or verb markers. There is no overt subject like “the man” or “Abram” or “YHWH” in Gen 15:6. “He” is not an overt subject, it’s a pronoun. YHWH is the object of a preposition, not a subject.
Yes, this is a good particpant tracking argument for you to make a case. But “rules” like this one are observed patterns, they aren’t absolute objective realities. We have a relatively small corpus to derive these patterns from, and just because you don’t see it happen in a small corpus doesn’t prove it never happened. What you can say is there are no oberved examples,(if that is even true, you’d have to check), and that makes your argument more plausible, but it doesn’t get you to the certainty and absoluteness you are claiming, especially not since Jewish interpreters of the time who were much closer to the discourse context and cultural frame of reference clearly didn’t take it that way. The reason we value the inferences the LXX translators made and the inferences Paul made is because they didn’t make those inferences in a vacuum, they made them with more direct access (in time, place, bilingualism, and continuity) to a cognitive and cultural/religious landscape we don’t have direct access to.
Yes, I agree with you, it’s wrong. You can’t make those kind of absolute assertions and be taken seriously.
Yeah, I was wrong and confusing because I was remembering an English translation. I looked at the Greek and it was ambiguous, as I described above. but what Paul thought it meant is not ambiguous, given how he used the quote in his argument. So what I should have said is you can’t get Michael’s interpretation of the MT from Paul’s interpretation of the LXX. I don’t see how you make his argument for the “real” meaning of Gen 15:6 without saying “Paul was wrong” and that’s a whole can of worms, good luck with that. Other people have argued (convincingly) that Paul was misinterpreted by Reformed exegetes so what we have been taught Paul meant was not really what Paul meant (wrt faith, works, righteousness, law, etc), but if you want to argue with Reformed interpreters, argue with Reformed interpreters, not the translators of the LXX or Paul. That’s kind of been NT Wright’s whole brand, right?
Agreed.
It seems to be the case. I only read the abstract and am just going by what has been discussed here. I figured I lacked the expertise in Hebrew to get in the weeds and slog through the article, and I fundamentally disagree with the approach to texts and translation being advocated. If I reject the given, it’s not going to matter if the argument follows.
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id suggest you need to read further into the new testament.
The apostle Paul died in the A.D 60’s
The apostle John after A.D 100
The Apostle John wrote the following in Revelation 14:12 (he wrote the book of Revelation on the Isle of Patmos in the A.D 90’s before his release…about 30 years after Paul had died)
12 This calls for patient endurance on the part of the people of God who keep his commands and remain faithful to Jesus.
So let me ask you this…which of the above is more authoritative? The apostle Paul or Christs most favoured disciple (who also lived the longest) John?
I dont have to make a choice between the above, because i do not read the wrong theology into Pauls writings…i cross reference his writings with others to ensure that i am understanding Pauls statements correctly!
condemnation is a personal choice…individuals do that to themselves. I have nothing to do with it. Christ said to all of his disciples…“come follow me”.
I dont think thats a difficult choice to make and yet individuals here (myself included) are quite consumed with the idea that following Christ means preaching Darwinian evolution or YECism. We are all so consumed with the idea that we must defend our origins that we forget about what our real mission is.
Christ taught us to love our neighbor as ourself, in doing that we follow in his footsteps (we stumble obviously, but he understands that)