Theology

Does Isaiah Predict the Virgin Birth?

Against the modern consensus, a close study of Isaiah 7:14 suggests the prophet directly predicted a virgin birth in the distant future.

When Christians celebrate Christmas, we are celebrating the miraculous birth of a child to a young woman who was a virgin—according to the New Testament (Matthew 1:18–25, Luke 1:26–38). The Gospel of Matthew specifically connects this birth with a prophecy given by Isaiah (7:14) that “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (Matt. 1:23).

But debates have raged for centuries over the details in Isaiah 7, especially around the translation of the key term “virgin.” This translation debate goes back at least to the second century with the Christian apologist Justin Martyr (Dialogue 68.7; 84.3) and remains with us today. It was a flashpoint when the RSV came out in 1952 because it printed “young woman” in the main text and relegated “virgin” to a footnote. Conservatives at the time panned the translation for this and other issues, accusing it of liberalism. But, by the twenty-first century, whether conservative or liberal, a consensus had formed in agreement with the RSV translators that the Hebrew word ʿalmâ in v. 14 does, in fact, mean “young woman” and does not necessarily indicate a virgin.

By the twenty-first century, whether conservative or liberal, a consensus had formed in agreement with the RSV translators.

The firm position of modern scholarship raises real questions. If the consensus is correct, then why did the Greek translator in the second century BC employ a Greek word that clearly means virgin (parthenos) in Hellenistic Greek? And was Matthew misled in thinking that this text predicted the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth?

The spectrum of views

For a commentator such as Hans Wildberger—at one end of the spectrum—a contradiction between the Old and New Testaments is no problem:

the traditional interpretation of the church, based upon Matt. 1:23, takes the עָלְמָה/ παρθένος [ʿalmâ/parthenos] to be Mary and Immanuel to be Jesus. In some quarters, it is still considered correct today, even if there are certain reservations and an awareness that Isaiah would have not been able to anticipate the specific way in which the predictions would be fulfilled.¹

For an interpreter such as James M. Hamilton, Jr.—a conservative at the other end of the spectrum from Wildberger—one must find a satisfactory way to hold to the unity of the Old and New Testaments. He correlates Immanuel with the son born in Isaiah 8:1–4 and believes that the text of Matthew can be explained satisfactorily as a typological fulfillment.²

The consensus, however, has been challenged recently by the linguist Christophe Rico who has applied modern semantic theory to the study of ʿalmâ.³ Exhaustive analysis from modern linguistic methodology reveals that the word can only mean “young virgin.” But, before exploring that, we first need to appreciate the context of Isaiah’s prophecy.

Isaiah’s context

The brief conversation recorded between King Ahaz of Judah and Isaiah is a pivotal point in the narrative plot-structure of the Old Testament that causes the tree of the Davidic dynasty to be cut down. In the Old Testament, kings and kingdoms are portrayed as stately trees.⁴ The Assyrians are pictured as lofty trees in Isaiah 10:33–34 and in Isaiah 11:1, we come to the first reference of the stump of Jesse.⁵ This text employs an identical metaphor to show that the kingdom of the House of David is a tree cut down; all that remains is a stump.

Characteristic of Hebrew literature is to treat topics recursively. An opening section may go around a topic followed by a second section on the same topic, from a different angle or perspective or point of view. Although the sections are presented sequentially, they function like the left and right speakers of a stereo system, giving full Dolby Surround Sound, so to speak. Thus, “the whole truth” is presented in a full-orbed and three-dimensional way.

The prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 comes from the third repetitive section of Isaiah where he promises judgement for covenant breaking (idolatry and social injustice) and looks beyond the judgement of exile to a coming king who would restore a righteous Zion. There are three panels that portray the coming king: (1) Immanuel Section (Isa. 7:1–8:18); (2) Mighty God Section (Isa. 8:19–10:19); and (3) Shoot from Stump of Jesse Section (Isa. 10:20–11:16). In these three sections prediction of a coming king in the distant future is contrasted with imminent destruction and exile brought by the Assyrians as the Lord’s instrument of judgement. In Isaiah 10:5 Yahweh calls Assyria the rod of his anger that is employed against Judah.

“The Prophecy of Isaiah” (1778 –1779) by Francisco Bayeu. Museo Nacional del Prado

The background of the Immanuel Section is the awakening of the Assyrian giant and the beginning of Neo-Assyrian domination in the ancient Near East (744–612 BC). Syria with its capital in Damascus joined forces with the Northern Kingdom of Israel with its capital in Samaria to create an anti-Assyrian coalition. They wanted Ahaz, King of Judah to join them, but he refused. The plan was to eliminate him and put a puppet in his place. It looked like the end of the Davidic Dynasty! The paragraph in Isaiah 7:10–16 comes as Isaiah meets Ahaz while he is out inspecting his city’s source of water and preparing for a siege. Isaiah promises him deliverance if he will rely on Yahweh alone and ask for a sign: anything at all in the universe.

The answer given by Ahaz appears pious, but is insincere and completely lacking in covenant loyalty to Yahweh. He declares that he will not put the Lord to the test (Isa. 7:12). It may seem that Ahaz is acting very piously by refusing to put God to the test, but in reality, he is demonstrating that he is a willfully unbelieving man. He has already decided what he will do. He is going to hold out against a siege from Syria and Israel and become a vassal of the King of Assyria in order to get the alliance of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and Syria (Syro-Ephraimite Coalition) off his back.

In view of Ahaz’s refusal to trust the Lord, Isaiah announces in vv. 17–25 that Judah will soon be overrun and devastated by that very Assyria which Ahaz has foolishly decided to turn to for help. Set in between the Threat to the Davidic House in vv. 1–9 and the Announcement of Desolation by Attacking Armies in vv. 17–25 is the paragraph in vv. 10–16 where Isaiah presents the Immanuel Sign.

The Immanuel sign

We come now to Isaiah 7:13–16 which speak of the Immanuel Sign. These verses are the heart of the section. Verses 1–12 lead up to them and vv. 17–25 which follow indicate the results of Ahaz’s decision. From the New Testament, we know that this prophecy finds fulfillment ultimately in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ (Matt. 1:21–23), but what is the meaning of the prophecy according to the Book of Isaiah and in the time of Ahaz?

When Matthew and the other writers of the New Testament say that a particular prophecy in the Old Testament is fulfilled, they do not discuss how to interpret the text in the Old Testament. Some prophecies are what we might call direct prediction, and some involve typological prediction, which means that events or people in the Old Testament serve as a model or pattern for what will happen in a greater event or person at a later time and so are said to foreshadow or predict the later event or person.⁶ When an Old Testament prophecy is fulfilled, the authors in the New Testament do not pause to say explicitly whether it is a direct prediction or a typological prediction.

Various explanations of Isaiah 7:14

It is impossible in a brief space to describe and assess all explanations given in the history of interpretation for Isaiah 7:14, but some of the most common ones are as follows:

Immanuel is Hezekiah and it is simply a wife of Ahaz who will bear a son.
Immanuel is Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz mentioned in Isaiah 8:1 and so it is a wife of Isaiah who will bear a son.
Immanuel is a son born to an unknown woman who was a contemporary of Isaiah.
Immanuel is the Messiah born to a virgin in the (distant) future.
A birth contemporary with Isaiah is a model or type of the future birth of the Messiah.

Each interpretation depends heavily on how certain issues are handled. The first three options can be firmly rejected and the reader is referred to the excellent critique of Gary Smith in his Isaiah commentary.⁷ Furthermore, careful analysis shows many differences between Immanuel and 8:1–4. These differences mean that the child born to Isaiah’s wife is best considered a harbinger of the future miraculous birth announced in 7:14.

Six questions for Isaiah 7:10–16

1. Who’s the audience?

It is not always possible from a modern English translation to track the pronominal references in Hebrew throughout the brief segment of vv. 10–16. Verse 10 begins, “And Yahweh continued to speak to Ahaz saying…” This introduction clearly marks the beginning of a new segment of conversation or discourse. The conversation partners are clearly identified as Yahweh and King Ahaz. From the context, the mediator of the message is Isaiah the prophet; he is the one through whom these words are presented to Ahaz.

Verse 11 continues, “Ask for yourself a sign from Yahweh your God. Make it deep to Sheol or make it high above / upwards.” These three clauses contain imperative verbs—all second person masculine singular in form, as well as two pronouns, also both second masculine singular. Clearly, these commands are issued directly and specifically to Ahaz. It is Ahaz who is to ask for a sign.

Verse 12 contains the brief response of King Ahaz: And Ahaz said, “I will not ask nor will I test Yahweh.” The verbs are first person common singular in form and Yahweh is referred to in the third person since the medium between him and God is the prophet.

Verse 13 continues the conversation by the simple verb “And he said.” This is obviously Yahweh / Isaiah speaking and giving a response to the answer given by Ahaz. The quoted speech begins as follows: “Hear, O House of David, Is it too trivial for you to weary humans that you must also weary my God?” The two verbs, “hear” (שִׁמְעוּ) and “you must weary” (תַּלְאוּ) are second person plural in form. The one pronoun employed with the infinitive “to weary” is also second person plural. Yahweh/Isaiah is no longer addressing Ahaz directly or specifically; he is addressing the entire dynasty of David: past, present, and future—the whole family line or House of David.

“King Ahaz sacrifices his son to Moloch” by Rombout van Troyen. Image source

The pronoun in verse 14 is also second masculine plural in form. The sign in verse 11 was offered specifically to Ahaz. Ahaz declined. In spite of Ahaz’s response, Yahweh gave a sign. The sign he gave was for the entire family line of David and is therefore not at all tied to the time of Ahaz.

Verses 15–16a go on to speak about the promised child. Then remarkably, verse 16b switches back to second masculine singular in form. The translation of this sentence is problematic, but it clearly is addressed specifically to Ahaz.

This analysis of the pronouns resolves one very important issue: the sign given in vv. 14–15 is not necessarily for Isaiah’s contemporaries or time. It is a sign that spans the entire history of the remaining Davidic family tree, an issue to be clarified in the prophecy in Isaiah 11:1.

2. What verbs belong in verse 14?

Having addressed who Isaiah’s audience is, we must consider the difficulties in the second half of v. 14. The first five words form a verbless clause: “Look! A virgin will conceive and bear a son.” The verbs “conceive” and “bear” are in fact participles. The helping verb “to be” required by English has to be supplied from the context. One could translate the clause with present progressive tenses in English: “A virgin is conceiving and bearing a son.” Or one could construe the participles as describing a future, as is normal syntax in Hebrew: “A virgin will conceive and bear a son.” Both options are grammatically possible.⁸ It is the nature of Hebrew prophecy, however, for a prophet to describe what he has seen in his vision using a past or a present, even though the vision applies to the future. Here since the following finite verb is future, a future tense is probable. And it is a young virgin who conceives.

The next verb is wəqara’t (“and you will call”). First this is a waw-consecutive Perfect and must be translated as a future tense. Thus, construing the preceding participles as future is also highly probable. Second, the verb could be second person feminine singular or third person feminine singular: “You shall call,” addressing the virgin, or “She will call,” where the referent is the virgin. The former seems contextually out of place and the latter is contrary to practice in a patriarchal society. There is, moreover, a problem in the transmission of the text which we must discuss.⁹

The Masoretic Text, best witnessed by the Aleppo and Cairo Codices, is supported by the Jewish Revisers Aquila and Symmachus and the Aramaic Targum.

The opening of Numbers in the Yonah Pentateuch (14th c.), showing its ornate micrography. BL Add MS 21160. Public domain
The Extraordinary Hebrew Text behind Your English Bible
The Masoretic Text is the fruit of the genius of Jewish textual scholars who codified the pronunciation of the Hebrew text.
Kim Phillips

Yet the Great Isaiah Scroll from about 100 BC attests wqr’ (וקרא). This is a third masculine singular verb either Qal or Pual. If the former, it is an indefinite subject verb functioning as a passive; if the latter, it is automatically passive. Variation plagues the witness of the Septuagint and Old Latin. The critical edition by Ziegler gives second person singular but the manuscript support is largely hexaplaric which suggests influence from Aquila and Symmachus. Some Greek manuscripts have kalesetai (καλέσεται “he/she will call”) which could be a translation of a text exactly like the Isaiah Scroll. There are also manuscripts which have a second person plural, but this might be a spelling variant. Finally, some manuscripts have a third person plural, but may be influenced by the New Testament.

The reading that best explains how the others arose is the third person singular passive. Similarly in the Old Latin, the oldest strand of text has the third person singular passive but some later manuscripts attest second person singular or plural as in manuscripts of the LXX. Jerome’s Vulgate is plagued by the same variants. The Syriac Peshitta clearly supports the Great Isaiah Scroll. There is, therefore, very early witness for a text with an indefinite subject like the translation in Matthew and this is supported by the Isaiah Scroll and Syriac and possibly Septuagint (and Old Latin).

The reading in the Masoretic Text could be an error of adding a tau from the previous verb and could have occurred equally in the Paleo-Hebrew script or the later Aramaic Square script. In any case, as noted, a second person singular or third person singular is not contextually suitable. The reading best attested is that of the Dead Sea Scroll supported by the LXX (and Old Latin), Syriac Peshitta and Matthew’s Gospel, while the reading of Aquila, Symmachus (= Jerome), Masoretic Text, and Targum is most likely secondary.

3. Does ʿalmâ mean just ‘young girl’?

There is a consensus among scholars today (regardless of whether one is conservative or liberal) that the word ʿalmâ (עַלְמָה) means only “young girl” or perhaps “young woman” and does not necessarily entail virginity. Four arguments are normally used to support this view: (1) an argument based on etymology; (2) an argument that there already exists in Hebrew a word for virgin in the word bĕtûlâ (בְּתוּלָה); (3) an argument that assumes the word ʿalmâ in Proverbs 30:19 refers to a girl who is not a virgin; and (4) an argument from Jewish tradition—both ancient and reliable—that does not permit an equation between ʿalmâ and parthenos, the Greek word for virgin.

But, as mentioned, the consensus has recently been challenged by Christophe Rico. His work represents the first comprehensive and exhaustive research done on the basis of modern linguistic semantic principles.

The consensus has recently been challenged.

The first argument that has been used to support that ʿalmâ does not imply virginity is based on the etymological background of this word. Rico’s analysis, particularly of Ugaritic, shows that the argument of the consensus is faulty in etymology. At any rate, arguments from etymology are at best secondary and do not necessarily determine meaning. (The English word “nice” comes from Latin nescius and means “ignorant.” This is no indication of its meaning today.)

The second argument that has been given as an inadequate reason for thinking that ʿalmâ cannot also mean virgin relates to the Hebrew word bĕtûlâ. The fact that there is already a word in Hebrew for virgin is an inadequate reason for thinking that ʿalmâ cannot also mean virgin. Study of usage shows that the word bĕtûlâ indicates a virgin regardless of age, whereas the word ʿalmâ denotes specifically a young virgin.¹⁰ The following evidence from Rico shows that it is common to have both words in many languages and that it is possible also in Semitic languages.¹¹

	“Young girl”	“Young virgin”	“Virgin”
Russian	devuška	devica	devstevenica
Classical English	girl	maid	virgin
Classical French	jeune fille	pucelle	vierge
Classical Spanish	muchacha	doncella	virgen
Catalan	noia	poncella	verge
Classical Italian	giovinetta	pulzèlla	vergine
Japanese	shōjo	otome	shŏjo
Arabic	fatâ’ah	bikr	‘adra’

Languages like Hebrew that lexically distinguish “young girl,” “young virgin,” and “virgin”

The third argument that scholars have regularly used against the view that ʿalmâ means “virgin” rests on the interpretation of Proverbs 30:19. This is the only instance of the word where “young woman” and not virgin is either the necessary or best suitable meaning. Yet it is unwise to rely on this verse since it contains a problem in the history of the transmission of the text.¹² The textual evidence is summarized as follows.¹³

30,19 cor בעלמיו [C] G Syh Th Aq Syriac Vulg T // err-graph: Sym M בעלמה

This can be simplified into the following table:

“in a maid” (בעלמה)	Symmachus, Masoretic Text
“in his youth” (בעלמיו)	Greek, Theodotion, Aquila, Syriac, Origen’s Hexapla, Latin Vulgate

What this means is that the following manuscripts support the reading “in his youth” (בעלמיו): the Septuagint (G), the Jewish revisions of the Septuagint by Theodotion (Th) and Aquila (A) made before 120 AD, the Syro-Hexapla, the Syriac translation (S) coming from the Second Century, the Latin Vulgate (Vulg), based on a Hebrew Text from the Fourth Century AD, and even the Aramaic Targum. Alternately, only two witnesses support the reading “in an ʿalmâ” (בעלמה): the Masoretic Text attested from about 900 AD and Symmachus (S), a Jewish revisor from perhaps 200 AD. The difference between the readings is a hē for ʿalmâ at the end of the word while a combination of waw and yodh ends the word reading “in his youth.”

Anyone familiar with the Herodian script of the Dead Sea Scrolls would know how easy it is to confuse these two paleographically. The reading that has the earliest support widespread among six witnesses and also best explains how the less meaningful reading in Masoretic Text arose is “in his youth.” In any case, it is unwise to claim a text that is uncertain in textual transmission as a strong argument against ʿalmâ as “young virgin.”

The following image shows how easily hē (ח) and a combination of waw (ו) and yodh (י) could be confused in the Herodian script.

From column 1, line 18 of “The Community Rule” (Serekh Hayahad, 1QS). Image source

There are other problems with the Masoretic Text. The preposition bə (בְּ) meaning “in” is not normal with the word derek (דֶּ֫רֶךְ “way”).¹⁴ Moreover, the clause in Proverbs 30:19d in the Masoretic Text breaks the obvious poetic pattern as pointed out by Rico:¹⁵

Eagle               Aerial Pathway
Snake             Terrestrial Pathway
Ship                 Aquatic Pathway
Youth             Developmental Pathway
Adulteress      Ethical Pathway

The “way of a man in a young woman” as in Masoretic Text does not fit this sequence.

The fourth argument that scholars have often used to argue against interpreting ʿalmâ as “virgin” has been based on Rabbinic tradition. Rico shows, however, that because the phonological difference between the consonants ʿayin and ġayin was lost in Hebrew already in the Second Century BC, analysis of the word ʿalmâ in both Rabbinic and Christian circles is frequently based on a popular etymology (the hidden young girl) and is erroneous. Before the coming of Jesus of Nazareth whom the Jewish tradition rejects as fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, the Septuagint got the translation of Isaiah right. Nonetheless, roughly one-third of medieval rabbis, including Rashi and Ben Gershon, do ascribe the meaning virgin to the word ʿalmâ.¹⁶

4. What do the verbs in verses 6 and 16 mean?

Two verbs are crucial to our understanding of the entire passage from 7:1–25. They are in 7:6 and 7:16. Most lexica derive these forms from the root qwṣ (קוץ) meaning “to be disgusted, feel loathing.”¹⁷ The form in v. 6 is usually analysed as a Hiphil Imperfect and the form in v. 16 as a Qal Participle. The lexica argue that “be in dread” (Qal) or “frighten, terrify” (Hiphil) is an appropriate secondary sense for these two texts. The ESV is a good example of translations that illustrate this:

6. Let us go up against Judah and terrify it, and let us conquer it for ourselves, and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it,”
16. … the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted.

An exhaustive analysis shows a better solution: the root is probably qyṣ as in Old South Arabic and not qwṣ.¹⁸ Therefore, both the form in v. 6 and the form in v. 16 are Qal and mean “cut” or better “break, split,” hence “tear apart, demolish, destroy.” (This resolves the problem of a form in the Hiphil that is apparently not causative.) As some lexicographers have already realised, this meaning fits better in v. 6. It also fits better in v. 16, as Zorell recognised,¹⁹ depending on how we render the relative sentence. The meaning is to break or destroy in both passages. This proposal is supported in antiquity because for Isaiah 7:6 Symmachus uses klaō (κλάω “break”) and Theodotion has koptō (κόπτω “cut down” » “destroy”). Thus, the meaning of break » destroy for qyṣ was known in antiquity. We will see next how a better meaning for this verb affects interpretation of Isaiah 7:16.

5. How should we translate the last sentence in 7:16?

The last half of Isaiah 7:16 is translated in the NRSV as

For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted (תֵּעָזֵ֤ב הָאֲדָמָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר אַתָּ֣ה קָ֔ץ מִפְּנֵ֖י שְׁנֵ֥י מְלָכֶֽיהָ)

Instead, we propose, along with Murray Adamthwaite,²⁰ “the land which you (Ahaz) are tearing apart (by your unbelieving policies) will be ridden of the presence of her two kings.”

The pronoun “her” on the suffixed noun, “her kings” must refer to “land” since the pronoun is feminine singular. So, the two kings are the king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the king of the Southern Kingdom of Judah. The two kings cannot be the King of Israel and the King of Aram, the two kings in the Syro-Ephraimite coalition, because they are not the kings of one country. This could only be said of the territory known as Israel after the time of Solomon. Thus, the interpretation of the NRSV is highly unlikely because it contradicts the grammar of the text.

6. What does it mean to “eat curds and honey” in verses 15–16?

Insufficient thought has been given by interpreters to the statement that the child born to the virgin will “eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.” First, refusing evil and choosing good is connected to the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2:9, 16. It refers to making moral choices on one’s own and hence refers to the age of accountability.²¹ In biblical culture, this is around 13 years old, the time of a boy’s Bar Mitzvah in later Judaism.

Nogah Hareuveni has best explained “eating curds and honey.”²² Curds are a product of pastoralists, those who herd flocks of goats or sheep and cattle. Honey comes from bees and refers to the forests as opposed to cultivated land because honey bees flourished in the wild. In the land of Canaan there was always a struggle over the use of land. Pastoralists, those who grazed animals, would look for uncultivated areas for pasturage. Farmers, on the other hand, were terracing the hillsides and turning areas that grew wild into cultivated fields and vineyards. What Isaiah is saying is that the region will be so devastated by the Assyrians that there will be few farmers and the cultivated fields will return to regions left to grow wild. This would allow bees and pastoralists more territory.

So, eating curds and honey is not a statement of blessing, but rather a sign of devastation and judgement in the land. The fact that the child will eat curds and honey means that the land will be dominated by pastoralists and not farmers. This is an indication of the devastation and destruction resulting in exile and the conquest by the Assyrians and Babylonians. Therefore, a person reduced to eating curds and honey is a person in exile, not a person enjoying the good life. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, this is fulfilled in the fact that the country was dominated by foreign overlords and in exile before the boy reached the age of accountability.²³

In the case of Jesus, this is fulfilled in the fact that the country was dominated by foreign overlords and in exile before the boy reached the age of accountability.

The larger literary structure

The interpretation proposed fits the larger literary structure better since Isaiah 7:14 is construed as a prediction of the distant future.²⁴ First, it is the normal pattern of the author to place predictions of events to be fulfilled in the far future side by side with predictions of events to be fulfilled in the near future. There are three panels or sections announcing the coming king: (1) the birth of Immanuel in 7:10–17, (2) the gift of the son El-Gibbor (Mighty God) in 9:1–7, and (3) the future reign of a shoot from the stump of Jesse in 11:1–9.²⁵ In each case, these predictions of the far future are placed side by side with predictions relating to the near future, such as the invasion of the Assyrians in 8:5–8. Note that in Isaiah 8:8, the country of Judah is designated as Immanuel’s land. Such a designation would be appropriate for a king or even Yahweh himself—El Gibbor! Also note that the third section on the coming king predicts a shoot from the stump of Jesse. The shoot comes from the stump of Jesse because what is needed is not another David, but a new David!

Conclusion

Textual analysis has shown the original text of Isaiah 7:14 may be even closer to the citation of Matthew than what we have in the Masoretic Text. Moreover, Proverbs 30:19 does not support the view that ʿalmâ is only a young woman and not necessarily a virgin. Semantic analysis of all instances demonstrates the meaning “young virgin.” In the larger structure of Isaiah, we see a switching back and forth between promises for the distant future and promises for the near future. The exegesis points to an interpretation of Isaiah 7:14 as a direct prediction for the distant future.

The coming king predicted in Isaiah 7–12 is associated with the end of exile. In Isaiah, this end of exile is also clearly correlated with the forgiveness of sins, the renewing of the covenant, the rebuilding of the temple, and the return of Yahweh to Zion to dwell in the midst of his people. This is a great harbinger of the birth of the child that first Christmas.

Notes

1
Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 1–12: A Commentary, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 308 (italics his).
2
James M. Hamilton, Jr., “ ‘The Virgin Will Conceive’: Typological Fulfillment in Matthew 1:18–23,” in Built Upon the Rock: Studies in the Gospel of Matthew edited by Daniel M. Gurtner and John Nolland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 228–247.
3
Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14: « ‛Almâ » et « Parthenos » dans l’universe biblique: un point de vue linguistique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2013). English Translation and Updated Version: Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14 ʿalmâ and Parthenos in the World of the Bible: A Linguistic Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020)
4
See William R. Osborne, “Trees and Kings: A Comparative Analysis of Tree Imagery in Israel’s Prophetic Tradition and the Ancient Near East,” Ph.D. diss. Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015.
5
Isaiah 6:13 is difficult to interpret but may contain an earlier reference to the cutting down of the tree of the Davidic dynasty/kingdom.
6
See discussion in Peter J. Gentry, How to Read and Understand the Biblical Prophets (Wheaton: Crossway, 2017).
7
Gary V. Smith, Isaiah 1–39 (NAC; Nashville: B&H, 2007), 201–211.
8
See P. Joüon, Grammaire de l’hébreu biblique (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1923), § 121e and Christo H. J. van der Merwe, Jackie A. Naudé and Jan H. Kroeze, A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar (Second Edition; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 187–88.
9
For an exhaustive examination of all evidence, see Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14 ‘almâ and Parthenos in the World of the Bible: A Linguistic Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020), 189–196.
10
For the evidence, and analysis of that evidence, see Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14.
11
The charts are adapted from Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 45–46.
12
This problem is not treated in Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament. Tome 5: Job, Proverbes, Qohélet et Cantique des Cantiques. Rapport final du Comité pour l’analyse textuelle de l’Ancien Testament hébreu institué par l’Alliance Biblique Universelle, établi en cooperation avec Alexander R. Hulst, Norbert Lohfink, William D. McHardy, Hans Peter Rüger et James A. Sanders. Edited by Clemens Locher, Stephen D. Ryan and Adrian Schenker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / Fribourg: Academic Press Fribourg, 2015).
13
This codification and nomenclature is derived from Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de L’ancien Testament. 1. Josué, Juges, Ruth, Samuel, Rois, Chroniques, Esdras, Néhémie, Esther. Rapport final du Comité pour l’analyse textuelle de l’Ancien Testament hébreu institué par l’Alliance Biblique Universelle, établi en coopération avec Alexander R. Hulst, Norbert Lohfink, William D. McHardy, H. Peter Rüger, coéditeur, James A. Sanders, coéditeur (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982).
14
Jenni, in his magisterial research on the prepositions, classifies Proverbs 30:19 as a locative use of beth. Nonetheless, he finds only one other occurrence similar to Proverbs 30:19 and it is not a precise parallel. See E. Jenni, Die hebräischen Präpositionen, Band 1: Die Präposition Beth (Stuttgart: Kolhammer, 1992), 52–69, 171–174, 195–197, # 2315.
15
Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 57.
16
Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 66–82.
17
So BDB, KB3, DCH, Ges18. BDB = Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1907); KB3 = L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Lexikon zum Alten Testament, 6 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1967–1997); DCH = Clines, David J. A., ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, 9 vols. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993–2016); Ges18 = R. Meyer, H. Donner, and J. Renz, Wilhelm Gesenius Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18^th Edition (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013).
18
For an exhaustive examination of all evidence, see Christophe Rico and Peter J. Gentry, The Mother of the Infant King, Isaiah 7:14 ʿalmâ and Parthenos in the World of the Bible: A Linguistic Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020), 209–212.
19
F. Zorell, ed., Lexicon Hebraicum Veteris Testamenti (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989).
20
Murray R. Adamthwaite, “Isaiah 7:16 – Key to the Immanuel Prophecy,” The Reformed Theological Review 59.2 (2000), 65–83.
21
W. M. Clark, “A Legal Background to the Yahwist’s Use of ‘Good and Evil’ in Genesis 2–3,” Journal of Biblical Literature 88 (1969): 266–278. See also H. Blocher, In the Beginning (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984), 126–133.
22
Nogah Hareuveni, Nature in Our Biblical Heritage (Kiryat Ono, Israel: Neot Kedumim, 1980), 11–22.
23
In the New Testament, when Jesus reached the age of accountability, he informed his parents, Joseph and Mary, “Do you not know that I must be concerned with the affairs of my Father?” (Luke 2:49). Three panels or sections in Isaiah 7–12 focus on the coming king. If Isaiah 7:14 is a prediction of the distant future and the birth of a future king, then the age of accountability is fitting and relevant in this prophecy.
24
See Peter J. Gentry, “The Literary Macrostructures of the Book of Isaiah and Authorial Intent,” in Bind up the Testimony: Explorations in the Genesis of the Book of Isaiah, edited by Daniel I. Block and Richard L. Schultz (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2015), 227–254.
25
See Christophe Rico, La mère de l’Enfant-Roi Isaïe 7,14, 136–156.

The Fall and the American Founding

While not explicitly Christian, the U.S. Constitution was forged by those who shared the Bible’s view of human nature.

Tracy McKenzie

Christians interested in America’s founding have typically been preoccupied with one question above all others: Was the United States founded as a Christian country? Concerning the Constitution specifically, we’ve wanted to know whether the Framers of that document were men of genuine Christian faith who were determined to establish an explicitly Christian government. But let me suggest that we’d gain more insight by turning our attention from the Framers’ theology to their anthropology—from what they thought about God to what they thought about us. Doing so is not only key to comprehending the Framers’ handiwork in 1787 but can also help us in understanding American politics two and a half centuries later.

Almost without exception, the fifty-five men who took part in the Constitutional Convention held their religious views close to the vest. They produced a document that never refers to God, does not cite the Bible, and is silent concerning the religious questions that so divide Americans today. Throughout the four-month-long convention they abstained from making explicitly religious arguments, and they showed the same reticence during the state-level ratification debates that followed. In contrast, they were constantly proclaiming their views on human nature, and the reason that they did so was plain: they were convinced that no framework of government could long succeed that did not take human nature rightly into account. As George Washington observed to John Jay on the eve of the Constitutional Convention, “We must take human nature as we find it.”

The Founders were convinced that no framework of government could long succeed that did not take human nature rightly into account.

So let’s ask three simple but crucial questions: (1) What was the Framers’ view of human nature? (2) How did their view inform the Constitution? and (3) To what degree was their view compatible with the Bible? Note that this final question doesn’t ask whether the Framers’ understanding of human nature stemmed from their personal religious faith, whether they were self-consciously applying Christian insights as they crafted the Constitution, or whether the document they produced is evidence that they aspired to forge a Christian nation. As much as we might wish otherwise, we lack the evidence to answer any of those questions definitively. Instead, we’ll pose a question that is just as important and far easier to answer.

The Framers’ view of human nature

Like so much of their understanding of the world, the Framers’ assessment of human nature was complicated. On the one hand, they were consciously embarking on an experiment in self-government, and that presupposed a degree of optimism concerning the capacity of humans to govern themselves. They sought to enhance that capacity by promoting the inculcation of virtue, a character trait which they defined as the willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the good of the community.

On the other hand, the Framers discerned a basic selfishness in the human heart that consistently trumped virtue. In short, human nature mixed elements of “rectitude” and “venality,” as Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist no. 76. The former justified a measure of “confidence,” James Madison noted in Federalist no. 55. The latter necessitated a healthy dose of “distrust.”

Barry Faulkner’s mural depicting the writing and adoption of the Constitution hangs in the National Archives. Source

The Framers devoted more attention to the latter. While they had no doubt that humans are capable of morally admirable acts of courage or compassion or sacrifice or generosity, they were equally certain that the “stern virtue” that places the common good above self-interest “is the growth of few soils,” as Hamilton observed in Federalist 73. George Washington, who chaired the Constitutional Convention, maintained that “the motives which predominate most in human affairs [are] self-love and self-interest.” Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson observed, “It is the nature of man to pursue his own interest, in preference to the public good.” New Jersey delegate William Livingston agreed that “it is extremely difficult, for the best of men, to divest themselves of self-interest.” James Madison, often remembered as “the Father of the Constitution” for the seminal role that he played, lamented that “self-love” is “sown in the nature of man.” Or as Madison put it privately in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, “Wherever there is an interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.”

The title to the “Jefferson Bible.” Illustration by Josh Koch.
The Jefferson Bible and the Faith of an American Founder
Thomas Jefferson’s cut-and-paste version of the Gospels reveals important facets of the famous founder’s faith and the Bible’s role in American history.
Thomas S. Kidd

The Framers’ view and the U.S. Constitution

And so, even as they praised virtue and exhorted their fellow Americans to practice virtue, the men who gathered in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1787 did not craft the Constitution with a virtuous citizenry in mind. Following Washington’s advice to “take human nature as we find it,” they sought instead to structure the government in such a way as to compensate for “the defect of better motives,” as Madison explained in Federalist 51. To be blunt, they assumed that both government officials and common citizens would be prone to selfishness, and they designed the Constitutional system accordingly.

It was a monumental challenge. Human selfishness meant that the propensity to abuse power would always be present—in any form of government. This meant that power would always be a threat to liberty, whether that power was wielded by a king, a dictator, or a democratic majority. The Framers’ daunting task, then, was to find a way to give the government sufficient power to promote the general welfare without creating at the same time a Frankenstein’s monster that could devour citizens’ liberty. As Madison famously observed in Federalist 51, their goal was to “enable the government to control the governed” and at the same time “oblige it to control itself.”

To enable it to “control the governed,” the Framers granted the federal government a host of prerogatives that had been denied the government under the Articles of Confederation—most notably the power to tax and regulate commerce—while also distancing the Senate, the president, and the federal judiciary from undue popular pressure. (As originally conceived, members of the House of Representatives would be the only popularly elected federal officeholders.)

To oblige the government “to control itself,” the Framers devised the separation of powers and “checks and balances” that most of us were introduced to in junior high but have rarely thought deeply about since: the tripartite structure of the government, the division of the legislative branch into two houses, the executive’s power to veto acts of the legislature, the legislature’s role in approving executive treaties, and so forth. Nearly two and a half centuries later, these provisions fairly shout to us the Framers’ understanding of human nature, especially their keen awareness of the tendency of human beings to abuse power. It’s no exaggeration to say that the Framers’ awareness of human selfishness permeates the document that they created.

The Framers’ view and the Bible

This brings us to our third question: was the Framers’ view of human nature compatible with the Bible’s understanding of it? The answer, without a doubt, is an emphatic “Yes!” Historically, Christians have grounded their understanding of human nature on two doctrinal pillars: the concepts of imago Dei and original sin. The doctrine of imago Dei teaches that we bear the image of God and thus occupy a unique place in God’s created order.

Dr. McKenzie’s book explores the Founders’ view of human nature in greater detail.

The Framers never spoke explicitly of imago Dei, but they took for granted two of the key attributes that theologians associate with the divine imprint on human beings, namely the faculty of reason and a capacity for moral discernment. Had they doubted that humans possessed such traits, their commitment to a form of government grounded in the consent of the governed would have made no sense.

A second relevant doctrine, the doctrine of original sin, instructs us that our rejection of God’s rule has defaced the divine image we each bear, marring though not obliterating it entirely. Since “the Fall,” each of us enters the world as a natural rebel against our rightful ruler. Our hearts are characterized by “recalcitrance” and “concupiscence,” as Augustine put it in The City of God, driven above all to rule ourselves and please ourselves.

Whether the Framers believed in this doctrine in its fullest theological sense is questionable. They rarely spoke of “sin” at all, much less “original sin,” and yet their view of human selfishness at the very least overlapped with that doctrine extensively. When the Framers insisted that none of us is naturally inclined to virtue—that the act of denying ourselves to promote the good of others is contrary to our nature—Christians around the country could have cheerfully responded, “Amen!”

The importance for democracy

In sum, although the Framers didn’t use religious language in articulating their understanding of human nature, nor did they appeal explicitly to Scripture or Church teaching to justify their assessment, on the whole, their view—whatever its origins or foundation—was broadly compatible with orthodox Christian understandings of the earthly implications of imago Dei and original sin.

I would add that, for Christians who want to think Christianly about the underpinnings of the Framers’ constitutional vision, the Bible’s teaching on the imago Dei and original sin are invaluable. The two concepts in tandem capture the tension at the heart of the Framers’ philosophy of government. If the traits associated with imago Dei make self-government possible, the corroding effects of original sin make self-government problematic. It was a brilliant accomplishment to fashion a form of government that would make allowance for both.

Sadly, Americans today generally don’t understand this underlying foundation of the Constitution.

Sadly, Americans today generally don’t understand this underlying foundation of the Constitution, nor do we, on the whole, subscribe to the understanding of human nature that guided the Framers. Especially is this true regarding the concept of original sin. Numerous opinion polls reveal that a large majority of Americans—typically two-thirds to three-fourths of respondents—believe that most humans are naturally good. This is not a new development. Whatever was being taught from America’s pulpits in the early decades after independence, in the realm of political rhetoric, at least, the presupposition of essential human goodness had replaced the Framers’ beliefs within two generations.

A shift in beliefs

By the 1830s, politicians were routinely proclaiming what I call “the democratic gospel,” namely, the good news that humans are not naturally selfish, but rather virtuous by nature. Here it’s instructive to compare the farewell addresses of the country’s first and seventh presidents. In 1796, George Washington used his final message to the nation to warn Americans of “that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart.” Four decades later, Andrew Jackson praised his countrymen for their “high tone of moral character,” rhapsodized that they were “uncorrupted and incorruptible,” and reassured them that “the cause of freedom will continue to triumph” as long as they remain “true to themselves.”

If Jackson’s rhetoric sounds familiar, it’s because his presidency marked the inception of the political world we now inhabit and take for granted. In democracy as Americans have lived it for nearly two centuries, vote-seekers routinely pay tribute to the wisdom of the people and impute an intrinsic moral authority to their preferences. If this strikes us as utterly unexceptional, as little more than white noise, that’s partly because it’s so ubiquitous, and partly because it gives voice to what the culture now accepts as a truism.

One of the great benefits of history is that, when we pay attention to the past, it enables us to see aspects of our present that have become invisible to us.

One of the great benefits of history is that, when we pay attention to the past, it enables us to see aspects of our present that have become invisible to us. Even a brief review of the Framers’ understanding of human nature underscores the chasm that separates their view from the dominant view among contemporary Americans.

The Framers did not craft our Constitution for a people who were “uncorrupted and incorruptible,” but for citizens who would always be prone to “self-love and self-interest.” In Christian terminology, they fashioned a form of government for a “fallen” people. In forgetting that fact—and in rejecting belief in original sin itself—Americans today miss one of the Framers’ greatest insights, and arguably the message from our past that we most need to hear: Given humankind’s fallen state—what the Framers would have called our lack of virtue—a free and just society is as fragile and unnatural as it is precious.

Paul and the Septuagint Canon

What do the apostle’s quotations of the Septuagint tell us about his view of the Old Testament canon?

Edmon L. Gallagher

The apostle Paul quoted Scripture more than a hundred times in his thirteen canonical letters, but he never identified the version of Scripture that he used. Why bother?—you may think—everyone knows he used the Septuagint (LXX). He was obviously not quoting Scripture in the original language, because he was writing in Greek, not Hebrew, so he had to quote a translation. The LXX was the obvious choice.

There are problems with the simple statement that Paul quoted the LXX, however, and this essay focuses on one: did Paul know he was quoting the LXX?

The expanding definition of ‘Septuagint’

Whether Paul knew that he was quoting the Septuagint depends on what we mean by that term, Septuagint. Certainly, Paul knew that he was quoting Scripture in Greek and, if that’s all we mean by the term Septuagint, then Paul certainly did know. But “Septuagint” is also an ancient term associated with a particular origin story, and so we might ask whether Paul was familiar with the story and what he thought about it.

Illustration by Peter Gurry. Images from iStock
The Most Important Bible Translation You’ve Never Heard of
Used by the Apostles and the early church, the Greek translations of the Old Testament may be the most important ever made.
William A. Ross

Here is the story: King Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the early third century BC commissioned seventy—or, actually, seventy-two—Jewish scholars (six from each of the twelve tribes) to translate Jewish Scripture into Greek. The translation came to be called “the translation of the Seventy,” or “the translation of the Hebdomēkonta” (in Greek, ἑβδομήκοντα), or, in Latin, “the translation of the Septuaginta.” That explains the common abbreviation LXX, a Roman numeral.

Ancient sources for the term

We can be more specific: our ancient Jewish sources for the story all specify that the portion of Jewish Scripture translated for Ptolemy was the Pentateuch. These Jewish sources include:

The Letter of Aristeas second century BC
Aristobulus (frg. 3, preserved in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 13.12), second century BC
Philo (Life of Moses 2.25–44), first century AD
Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 12.11–118)
Talmud, specifically b. Megillah 9a §11. The traditions of the Talmud are hard to date, but this type of tradition called a baraita has been dated as early as the first century AD.

Not all of these sources mention the number of translators; Philo does not. But each of them mentions Ptolemy and that the translation project involved the Torah alone. Modern scholars rightly discount this entire story as a later propagandistic fabrication designed to magnify the authority of the early Greek translation of the Torah, but that is not our concern here; we are interested in how ancient people thought about the LXX.

‘Septuagint’ before Christianity

Other portions of Jewish Scripture were also translated into Greek, but they were not incorporated into the story of the translation for Ptolemy. We do not have, for instance, a story about the translation of Isaiah or Samuel or Proverbs or the Psalter, but we do know that these works were translated into Greek at some point in the third through first centuries BC because we have the Greek texts and many of the books of Jewish Scripture were quoted by Greek authors.

The New Testament quotes most of these books, so the translations must have been largely complete by the lifetime of Jesus. Most scholars would say that many of the books were translated already in the second century BC, in part because the translator of the apocryphal book of Sirach in the late second century BC mentions in a general way the Greek forms of the law, the prophets, and other books. (This is in the prologue to Greek Sirach.)

These other works (Greek Isaiah, Greek Proverbs, etc.) were not considered a part of the LXX—at least, not by the ancient Jewish sources that mention the LXX. For instance, Philo did not consider Greek Isaiah to be a part of the translation for Ptolemy. He knew about the existence of the Greek translation of Isaiah, and he even quoted it on occasion. One example is at On Dreams 2.172, where he introduced a quotation of Isaiah 5:7 with the words, “I have the witness of one of the ancient prophets who under inspiration said…” But when Philo told the story of the translation for Ptolemy, he left Isaiah out of the account and made the story all about the books of Moses. Notice that the title of the work in which Philo told the story is Life of Moses.

What was true for Philo was true for Josephus, who also used the Greek translation of most books of Jewish Scripture but considered the LXX to be the Greek Pentateuch and nothing else. To repeat: all of our ancient Jewish sources limited the scope of the LXX to the Torah.

‘Septuagint’ in early Christianity

So, how did the “Septuagint” or LXX come to refer to more than just the Torah in Greek? It was Christians who expanded the scope of the translation to include all of Jewish Scripture in Greek. According to the first Christian to mention the translation—Justin Martyr in the mid-second century AD—the translators assembled by Ptolemy produced a Greek version of all of Jewish prophecies, not just the Torah. Justin told the story of translation in his First Apology (ch. 31).

Dr. Gallagher’s book explores the Septuagint’s reception in greater detail.

This expansion of the scope of translation aided Justin’s apologetics by allowing him to argue against the validity of Greek renderings that he found problematic. For instance, with regard to the “virgin birth” (Isaiah 7:14), Justin was aware of some Greek translations that failed to render the verse with the crucial word “virgin” (parthenos, παρθένος) but instead had “young woman” (neanis, νεᾶνις), against the testimony of “the translation of the Seventy” (Dialogue with Trypho 70–73). Justin argued that the newer version must be wrong because it departed from the authoritative translation produced by the Seventy sages for King Ptolemy.

Once the step had been taken, later Christians rarely found it problematic to attribute the translation of all the books of Jewish Scripture to Ptolemy’s court. Again, this aspect of Christian thought about the LXX served as a foundational element in defenses of the text of the traditional Greek Bible as opposed to newer Greek versions associated with the Jewish translators named Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion.

How could a Christian believer know that the traditional translation of Jeremiah (or whatever book) was preferable to the version of Jeremiah in one of these later translations? Because the Seventy sages at Ptolemy’s court produced the traditional translation. And why do we trust the Seventy sages? Already Irenaeus of Lyon in the late second century developed several arguments favoring the authority of the Seventy (see Against Heresies 3.21.1–3), of which one of the most important was that the Seventy were inspired by God.

The Inspiration of the Septuagint

Irenaeus did not completely invent the idea that the Seventy translators were inspired, but he did contribute to the evolving story. More than a century earlier, Philo had already insisted that the translators for Ptolemy did the impossible: they produced a perfect translation that matched the Hebrew both word-for-word and thought-for-thought. They were able to achieve such an amazing translation because God inspired them (Life of Moses 2.38). According to Philo, one who read the Greek Pentateuch alongside the Hebrew Torah (something Philo could not do) would see that they were identical (2.40). Before Philo, the Letter of Aristeas (§307) merely hinted at the involvement of God in the process of translation.

Irenaeus inherited from Philo the notion that the translators were inspired, and he attested a story that provided more color to this claim. According to Irenaeus, King Ptolemy decided to test the integrity of the translators by separating them into separate rooms, ordering each of the 72 translators to produce a Greek rendering of Scripture. When the 72 separate translations of Jewish Scripture were compared, it was discovered that all 72 translators had chosen the exact same wording all the way through—a sure sign of not only their accuracy but of their inspiration. This embellished origin story (of which there is a hint in Philo, Life of Moses 2.37) became the standard account of the translation among Christians, who were confident both that the translators were inspired and that they produced the traditional Greek version of all of Jewish Scripture.

Not everyone was convinced. Jerome, for one, at the turn of the fifth century, challenged the traditional story of LXX origins. While he was producing his own Latin translations of the books of the Hebrew Bible that would become the core of the Latin Vulgate, he pointed out flaws in Christian thinking about the LXX. The Jewish sources—Jerome named The Letter of Aristeas and Josephus—limited the translation to the Pentateuch (Commentary on Ezekiel 5:12) and said nothing about the translators working in separate rooms (Preface to the Pentateuch). But Jerome was fighting a losing battle; the translation, in the minds of most Christians, continued to include all of Jewish Scripture. This leads us back to the Apostle Paul.

Paul’s Septuagint

The fact that Paul used the Septuagint is well-known, not only among New Testament scholars, but also among more educated general Bible readers (the type who read articles from the Text & Canon Institute). But this well-known fact about Paul raises several questions in terms of the identity of the Septuagint, questions of both text and canon. To briefly gesture toward the problem of text: not all of the apostle’s quotations align well with the traditional text of the LXX. Paul apparently sometimes used Greek revisions (something like the Theodotion text), sometimes quoted from memory, and sometimes paraphrased, sometimes adjusted the quotation to fit the point he wanted to make. The simple statement that “Paul quoted the LXX” disguises the complexity of his Scriptural texts.

Painting of St. Paul, ca. 1627–1729 by Jan Lievens. Image source

Even when he was quoting the LXX, did he know that he was quoting the LXX? Paul never mentioned the translation, nor the story of the translation, so we cannot really know if the apostle had ever heard about the translators gathered by Ptolemy. Maybe Paul simply used the Greek text available to him without knowing or caring about its precise origins.

If Paul did know about the translation for Ptolemy, what would he have thought about it? What books were included? As we have seen, all of our Jewish sources limit the scope of the translation for Ptolemy to the Pentateuch, even though some of these same sources also knew and used Greek translations of other books of Jewish Scripture. For Philo and Josephus, the Greek Isaiah did not count as LXX. Did it count as LXX for Paul?

As far as we know, the first person who treated a book outside the Torah as the LXX was Justin Martyr—a century after Paul. It is possible that the expansion of the scope of the LXX beyond the Torah as attested first by Justin had already happened in the days of Paul, but I cannot think of any evidence to suggest that it had. If Paul learned about the story of the translation—say, at the “feet of Gamaliel” (cf. Acts 22:3)—it would probably have been a story about the Pentateuch, not about other books of Scripture, books that were available in Greek but considered a part of a different translation project not made for Ptolemy.

The first person who treated a book outside the Torah as the LXX was Justin Martyr.

Paul and the Septuagint’s inspiration

Philo thought that the translators at Ptolemy’s court were inspired, that the translation itself was inspired in Greek. Later Christians, starting with Irenaeus, express the same belief. Did Paul share this conviction? If the apostle did consider the LXX inspired, presumably that belief would have applied only to the Greek Pentateuch—as it did for Philo. We should remember that Philo said that perfect translation is impossible without divine inspiration, and that such a thing had happened for the Greek Pentateuch. Philo said nothing about God’s involvement with the translation of Isaiah or Proverbs or Samuel (etc.), so evidently he would not have considered the translations of these books to be perfect.

We cannot say whether Paul shared Philo’s ideas on the inspiration of the LXX, but at least we can say that someone contemporary with Paul did express those ideas. The notion that all of Jewish Scripture was inspired in Greek, expressed first by Irenaeus, long post-dates Paul’s death, so there is less reason to think that Paul may have held it. But Philo’s views were not the only views on the LXX “in the air” in the first century; Josephus said nothing about the inspiration of the translators of the Greek Pentateuch.

Paul and the Septuagint canon

If this is what Paul might have thought about the LXX as a translation, what about the hitherto unmentioned “elephants in the room,” namely, the apocrypha, or the deuterocanonical books? It is often claimed by scholars that these books came to be accepted as Scripture among Christians because the LXX included them. Is it possible that the LXX already included these books in the first century? Since Paul quoted the LXX, did he also regard the apocrypha as not only a part of the LXX but a part of his Bible?

The biblical scholar R. Timothy McLay pursues this line of argument.

The fact that the OG/LXX text was cited in the NT, in contrast to the Hebrew Scriptures, demonstrates that the Greek Jewish Scriptures as witnessed to by the LXX were deemed to be Scripture for the Early Church…. The external evidence of our Greek codices, which contain the apocryphal/deutero-canonical writings, is a simple testimony to the authority of the Greek Scriptures exercised in the life of the Early Church.¹

I think McLay’s argument boils down to this: if the New Testament authors quoted the LXX, then they accepted as Scripture the collection of books in the LXX manuscripts of the fourth century. Do the quotations of the LXX in Paul’s letters mean that the apostle accepted the canonicity of the apocrypha?

The short answer is “no”—or, with a little more nuance, the available evidence suggests otherwise. The apocryphal books (e.g., Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, etc.) were available in Greek by the first century, and Paul had probably read some of these books. But what evidence suggests that anyone in the first century considered these books a part of the LXX, the translation made for Ptolemy? I know I am repeating myself, but … all of our sources before Justin Martyr considered the LXX to be the Greek Pentateuch.

Paintings of Jerome and Augustine. Illustration by Peter Gurry and Josh Koch.
Why Are Protestant and Catholic Bibles Different?
Knowledge of the Bible’s history clears away the caricatures and misinformation swirling around this common question.
John D. Meade

The apocrypha are included within the LXX today—whether we are talking about the Greek Orthodox biblical canon (which is not definitively settled) or the standard hand-edition of the Septuaginta that sits on the shelves of most biblical scholars. But what is true today was not necessarily true in the first century. It was Justin who first labeled as LXX a book outside the Pentateuch. Did Justin think that the Seventy translators also produced the Greek versions of the apocryphal books? He did not say. It was Epiphanius in the fourth century who first said something about the Seventy translators working on books outside the Jewish Bible (On Weights and Measures 5).

Yes, the full biblical manuscripts from the fourth century include some of the apocryphal books, but is the reason for this inclusion that the creators of these manuscripts thought that these books were translated by the Seventy? As far as I can tell, these early full-Bible manuscripts mention the Seventy only once, in the colophon to Genesis in Codex Vaticanus (Γένεσις κατὰ τοὺς ἑβδομήκοντα = “Genesis according to the Seventy”). Even if all of the books in the Old Testament portion of Vaticanus were considered LXX (which I doubt), we lack the evidence to back-date such a view three centuries. The use of the LXX by the New Testament authors has no bearing on what the apostles thought of the apocrypha.

The use of the LXX by the New Testament authors has no bearing on what the apostles thought of the apocrypha.

Conclusion

Did Paul know he was quoting the LXX? It’s impossible to say. He may have realized that (some of) his quotations of the Pentateuch would have been considered by some of his contemporaries (e.g., Philo, but not Josephus) as quotations of an inspired translation made for King Ptolemy. There is hardly any reason to think that Paul would have associated this view with the Greek Isaiah, and even less for the Greek Tobit. To the extent that the LXX was a concrete object in the first-century world of Paul, it was the Greek Pentateuch. The other books, including the apocrypha, were incorporated into the LXX only a century or more after the apostle’s death.

Notes

1
R. Timothy McLay, The Use of the Septuagint in New Testament Research (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 144.

The Bestselling Reference Bible That Remade American Evangelicalism

By combining familiar and original material, the Scofield Reference Bible ushered in a theological sea change.

Daniel G. Hummel

It is a useful fact for trivia night that Oxford University Press, one of the world’s most prestigious academic publishers, has a bestselling book of all time that it doesn’t often celebrate. That bestseller is the Scofield Reference Bible, edited by C. I. Scofield, first published in 1909, updated in 1917, and revised in 1967. In its first few decades, the SRB sold more than two million copies and, by one estimate, has sold more than ten million copies in its lifetime. It still sells in various formats in dozens of languages.

These sales have influenced an entire religious subculture in the English-speaking world. Journalist Amy Frykholm’s recollection is shared by millions of Americans: “In my mind’s eye I see my grandmother’s Scofield Reference Bible, a text from which she read every day of her life, a text that told her of the coming of the rapture” (4). Indeed, the SRB’s widespread adoption by lay evangelicals since 1909 has made it something of a driver of U.S. evangelical and fundamentalist culture writ large.

The SRB popularized the teaching of an any-moment “rapture” event (even as Scofield’s notes only employed the term once without defining it) and unobtrusively introduced readers to key teachings of dispensationalism, the theological tradition known for advancing biblical literalism, a strong Church-Israel distinction, and a sequence of distinct dispensations of God’s relationship with humanity that will end with a pretribulational rapture and a premillennial return of Jesus.

How original was Scofield?

Recent accounts of the SRB acknowledge the Bible’s importance in the history of evangelicalism. To reference the most recent, historian Donald Akenson concludes that it “became deeply embedded in American culture” (435). Other scholars agree, which is why the SRB has such a prominent place in the history of annotated Bibles.¹

But a deeper question allows us to explore afresh some fundamental aspects of the SRB, including its origin, importance, and legacy: exactly how original (or not) was it? Historians, not to mention theologians and other informed observers inside and outside of the dispensationalist tradition, do not agree. Within religious circles, where historic creeds are important reference points, “originality” is a loaded term. And in non-religious scholarly circles, continuity is hotly debated. Assessing the SRB’s originality and continuity can supply a new appreciation for how it changed the world and why it has remained relevant more than a century after its publication.

The story of the SRB’s originality (or not) should be assessed at three levels:

How much did it reflect American Protestant assumptions in the early twentieth century?
How much did it reflect the teachings of what I call the Moody Movement, or the proto-dispensationalist movement, of which Scofield was a leader?
How much of it was idiosyncratic to Scofield himself?

A photo of C. I. Scofield — C. I. Scofield (1843–1921)

Most studies of the SRB begin with the man who produced it, Cyrus Scofield. Much has been made of Scofield, whose biographical details have been debated. Especially for his opponents, they have also been used as fodder to dismiss his writings.

My contention is that the figure of Scofield matters less than asking how much of what ultimately made its way into the SRB was original (and in what way) and how much was continuous with previous teachings in the American Protestant circles Scofield inhabited. The explanation for the SRB’s stunning sales and cultural success lies, in part, in the fact that answers to all of three of these questions are multifaceted and complex.

The early twentieth-century context

Historian Brendan Pietsch is correct when he writes that one key aspect to the success of the SRB was that “in its basic theology it reflected the beliefs and impulses of nonspecific American Protestantism, particularly among the laity” (178). In other words, it succeeded because it fit right in. On everything from the importance of conversion and evangelization to the Christian life to the essential reliability of the Biblical text, Scofield sounded like a “nonspecific” early-twentieth century Protestant. Moreover, he did so while presenting his findings as modern, “based on ‘a new and vast exegetical and expository literature,’” as he wrote in his Bible’s preface.

In other words, the SRB was successful precisely because on many topics it did not question received views and presented those received views as justifiable in a modern intellectual climate. This includes views that are rejected today but were commonplace in the early twentieth century, including the “gap theory” interpretation of Genesis 1 and the racist assumption of a “curse of Ham” (see Scofield’s note for Gen. 9:1).

Scofield divided Genesis 1:1–3 into three sections, allowing for a presentation of the “gap” theory of an undisclosed but vast amount of time between each verse. As note two explains, “The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages.” Google Books

Neither of these views fell outside the American Protestant mainstream of the time and Scofield was merely one proponent of both. Had they been more fringe, or had Scofield presented novel views on historic teachings in too particular a manner, the SRB’s appeal would have shrunk and its status would have become isolated as a “Scofieldian” production rather than a broadly evangelical one.

We can see this in action by comparing Scofield’s work to a contemporaneous Bible which represented some of the same unique theological teachings that influenced him. Scofield’s work was indebted, in part, to the teachings of John Nelson Darby, the influential leader of the Exclusive Brethren movement and the prodigious writer and articulator of such doctrines as the any-moment rapture. While the two men never met, we know that Scofield was familiar with Darby’s writing and the Exclusive Brethren movement. Scofield cites Brethren in the SRB acknowledgements and Brethren helped to fund and bring it to publication. Yet, as historian Crawford Gribben has recently argued, Scofield did not regard himself as beholden to Darby’s ideas. The notes presented Darby’s teachings in a “radically revised, simplified, and contracted form”² intended to apply to American evangelical rather than British Exclusive Brethren concerns.

The title to the “Jefferson Bible.” Illustration by Josh Koch.
The Jefferson Bible and the Faith of an American Founder
Thomas Jefferson’s cut-and-paste version of the Gospels reveals important facets of the famous founder’s faith and the Bible’s role in American history.
Thomas S. Kidd

But Scofield was not the only biblical annotator working to adapt Darby’s teachings. Another person influenced by Darby was Fredrick W. Grant, perhaps the most prominent U.S.-based Exclusive Brethren at the turn of the century. Grant had produced his own seven-volume Numerical Bible from 1888–1905 that we can see as a similar project to Scofield’s. Grant’s work included expository notes, but the nature of these notes was different from Scofield’s. Grant combined intricate numerology and typology, a novel way to number verses, and Exclusive Brethren teachings about ecclesiology and pneumatology more aligned with Darby that made his Numerical Bible a robust offering, but one destined for a niche market. Grant’s work is notable today mostly because, according to one of the first chroniclers of the SRB, Scofield kept Grant’s work by his side constantly as a reference.

The role of the ‘Moody Movement’

Unlike Grant’s Bible, the SRB was not so novel as to become niche. What it did do was offer a distinctively conservative presentation of Biblical teachings that aligned with Exclusive Brethren emphases and the growing premillennial convictions of conservative evangelicalism in the United States. And it did all this in an emerging fundamentalist-modernist polarization of American Protestantism. This conservative evangelicalism was, as historian Michael Hamilton has defined it, essentially the outgrowth of Dwight Moody’s era-defining revivals, missions work, and institution-building.

The “Moody Movement” incubated the first Bible institutes, the first wave of nondenominational global missions agencies, and was powered by the robust Bible and prophecy conference circuits such as the famed Niagara Bible Conference (1875–1897). Scofield himself was at one time the pastor of Moody’s own church in Massachusetts, helped found the Central American Mission, and founded the Philadelphia School of the Bible (now Cairn University).

D. L. Moody speaking to a group at Northfield Camp in Massachusetts. Wikimedia Commons

The Moody Movement was more distinctive than “nonspecific American Protestantism” on a number of fronts, each of which made it into Scofield’s notes. The Moody Movement was generally premillennialist in eschatology (breaking with the dominant postmillennial Protestant consensus a generation before), was committed to Keswick or “Higher Life” teachings (breaking with both confessionally Reformed sanctification and Wesleyan perfectionism), rejected Darwinian evolution (Scofield’s note for Gen. 1:26 declared, “Man was created, not evolved”) and young earth creationism (Scofield preferred to interpret the “days” of Gen. 1 as “a [longer] period of time marked off by a beginning and an ending”).

Moody and Scofield represented a thoroughly interdenominational movement, focused on parachurch activity.

Moreover, Moody and Scofield represented a thoroughly interdenominational movement, focused on parachurch activity, with a default to congregationalism in church polity and structure allowing for the mixing of such disparate denominational members in the movement as Exclusive Brethren, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Stone-Campbellites, and some early Pentecostals.

These movement-level distinctives are what helped demarcate the SRB reading public and friendly churches from American Protestantism as a whole. Landing when it did in 1909 and, especially, with the revised 1917 edition, this meant that the SRB’s legacy would both be limited (to the more conservative wing of the emerging fundamentalist-modernist polarization), but would also permeate that fundamentalist wing and disproportionately shape the baseline interpretations of verses and passages for those within the fundamentalist fold.

Scofield’s committee of “consulting editors” was another testament to this specific strand of Protestantism to which he belonged. It was made up of Moody Movement leaders representing key institutions (Moody Bible Institute, Toronto Bible Training School—now Tyndale University) and luminaries (Arthur T. Pierson, Arno C. Gaebelein—the latter of which assisted Scofield on writing most of the prophecy-related notes), among others.

The front plate of the *Scofield Reference Bible*’s 1917 edition provides a detailed description of the resources Scofield is adding to the Biblical text as well as a list of the consulting editors, significant as much for what the list signals as for exactly how instrumental these individuals were to the substance of the SRB. Google Books

The extent to which these consulting editors—excepting Gaebelein—directly aided Scofield in the substantial creation of the SRB is limited. More important to Scofield was establishing that he was indebted to, as his preface made clear, “the valuable suggestions and co-operation” of such an esteemed group of Moody Movement leaders whose names essentially vouched for the high quality of the final product.

Alongside the SRB’s interpretive commitments, the book helped to popularize new Bible reading techniques and technologies that had been gaining legitimacy in the preceding decades. Beyond extensive help notes at the bottom of the page intended for lay readers, Scofield introduced newly titled section headings that could play a significant interpretive role, as in the aforementioned case of the “gap” theory of Genesis 1:1–3 or the various headings declaring a new dispensation (see, for example, headings preceding Gen. 8:20–22 or Exod. 19:8).

Moreover, he offered an elaborate chain system of verses that ran down a central column of each page that created thousands of analog “hyperlinks” across the entire Biblical text, producing new associations, systematizations, and meanings for key terms including Israel, salvation, and antichrist. Scofield’s chain system, as Donald Akenson documents, emerged alongside similar systems such as that developed by Frank C. Thompson (in his Thompson Chain Reference Bible, first published in 1908).

Alongside the hundreds of notes, Scofield developed an extensive system of subject references. These created a vast internal architecture of biblical meaning and resemble something like an analog “hyperlink” system for establishing systematic meanings of words and passages. This instruction page was inserted more than a dozen times in the Bible, preceding each grouping of books (Pentateuch, Historical Books, Poetical Books, etc.). Google Books

Both Scofield and Thompson were indebted to the Biblical indexes and concordances developed in the previous thirty years by Augustus Strong and Robert Young which gained immediate widespread adoption by lay Christians. Scofield embedded each of these technologies in his own reference Bible to create, as he wrote in the 1917 introduction, a one-stop Biblical interpretive resource for “the plain people of God in their homes.”

Scofield’s unique contribution

Finally, there is Scofield himself. Born in 1843 in Michigan, he was living with relatives in Tennessee when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Scofield enlisted for a one-year term in the Confederate Army where he served at Antietam in September 1862. But, when he was conscripted, he prosecuted his own discharge on terms of bad health and being underage when he had enlisted. He spent the rest of the war in St. Louis and married into a wealthy Catholic family in 1866. His story is a rough one from this point: he was appointed a U.S. attorney, dismissed for corruption, became an alcoholic, and fled his home, separating permanently from his wife and two daughters.

In the midst he converted to Christianity and became a disciple of one of St. Louis’s most prominent pastors, James Brookes, who also happened to be one of the most significant adopters and promoters of Exclusive Brethren teachings in the U.S. Scofield was a quick learner and became a successful popularizer and co-organizer with Brooks, Moody, and many other prominent evangelicals of the era. Scofield had a gifted mind, learned and synthesized vast amounts of information, and worked tirelessly, amid significant health challenges, to complete his work.

He was also a socially conservative Christian who regarded theological and social truth as intertwined. Scofield spent much of his pastoring career in Dallas, Texas and by all accounts accepted the Jim Crow system of racial segregation then in force. Scofield preferred clear, distinct, and hierarchal categories and relations between concepts—between law and grace, periods of time, between goodness and sin, and between groups of people.

He was skeptical of social reform movements of all kinds and pessimistic about the prospect of international peace, socialism, ecumenism, or capitalism as solutions to sin and injustice. We might see socialism and capitalism on separate ends of an economic spectrum, but for Scofield both pointed toward a concerning consolidation of power and authority in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

We might see socialism and capitalism on separate ends of an economic spectrum, but for Scofield both pointed toward a concerning consolidation of power.

Consolidation was both politically and prophetically significant—it presaged more difficulty for Christians and the fulfillment of worsening conditions on earth before the return of Jesus. Scofield’s views permeated his notes in ways obvious and implicit, whether it was an imposition of law-grace distinctions across all parts of the Bible, or his endorsement of the curse of Ham mentioned above.

Scofield came into funding and opportunity for the SRB through his involvement with Exclusive Brethren businessmen and prophecy conference circuits in the 1890s and early 1900s. By 1902 he had secured some support from benefactors to quit his pastoral duties and dedicate all of his time to the production of his Bible. He spent the years 1905–1908 largely in Europe where he met Henry Frowde, the famous publisher of Oxford University Press who was also at work developing a new North American branch for the press. Scofield and Frowde came to an agreement in April of 1909 that landed the SRB in hands of readers on both sides of the Atlantic (though with a much larger built-in audience in the United States).

Taking all three dimensions together, the SRB could not be what it became without a mix of continuity and originality relative to American Protestantism in 1909: the Moody movement as the dominant buying market for the Bible and the specific efforts of Scofield himself (and those he surrounded himself with).

Akenson declares that the SRB was “a successful rewriting of the scriptures… a new Bible,” (427) which seems too strong a claim given the significant lines of continuity Scofield advanced from both Exclusive Brethren and American Protestant circles. Historians R. Todd Mangum and Marc Sweetnam, on the other hand, conclude that Scofield’s theology “is characterized by (1) social conservatism; (2) irenic evangelicalism, and (3) distinctive dispensationalism” (133). This gets closer to the analysis presented here, though it was not just the theological but social, cultural, and publishing context that shaped these commitments.

Perhaps the most iconic product of early dispensationalism was its detailed charts, many of which illustrated prophetic timelines. The most recognizable were those by American Baptist pastor Clarence Larkin (1850–1924). Image source

Assessing the legacy

We can assess the legacy of the SRB in the subsequent century using the same levels of analysis as we have used so far. For Scofield himself, the SRB made him a singular name in the Moody Movement and, though he died in 1921 before the fundamentalist movement had fully cohered, he was a household name there, as well. In the circles of fundamentalism where it took hold, the book had a unique shaping power on lay and pulpit Biblical interpretations—theologically, culturally, and devotionally. As the historian Paul Boyer observed, Scofield was “a towering figure” and his Bible “more than any other single work solidified the premillennial movement” (97).

Yet on the flip side, Scofield himself became a lightning rod in other sectors of fundamentalism. Perhaps most significantly, the coiner of the term “dispensationalism” was a disaffected fan of Scofield named Philip Mauro, who came to reject proto-dispensationalist theology in part because of reading the SRB. While Scofield’s notes on eschatology did not align with Mauro’s views, other facets of the SRB were even more alarming to him. Picking up the Bible for the first time, Mauro could not make it past the notes for Genesis 1 which allowed for a nonliteral reading of “days” of creation. In an out-of-print book from 1919 titled A Kingdom Which Cannot Be Shaken he wrote, “I found to my surprise and disappointment that these notes made room for, and indeed rather favored, the absurd notion that the ‘days’ of Genesis 1 were long periods—ages—of time” (10–11).

A passionate advocate of a six-day reading of the creation account, Mauro could not brook difference on this issue. His depiction of Scofield and his notes as “modern” and “clever” were not meant as compliments. As later twentieth century doggerel from dispensationalist opponents attests, Scofield remained polarizing. A satire based on the famous hymn “On Christ the Solid Rock” runs like this: “My hope is built on nothing less / Than Scofield’s notes and Moody Press / I dare not trust this Thompson’s chain / But wholly lean on Scofield’s fame.”

“My hope is built on nothing less
Than Scofield’s notes and Moody Press.”

The fundamentalist reaction to Scofield bleeds into movement-level analysis of the SRB’s legacy. In theological terms, the SRB cemented the ascendance, for most of the century after its publication, of futurist, pre-tribulational premillennialism as the dominant eschatological position among a large swath of fundamentalism and post-World War II evangelicalism (and relevant still today). Scofield had been part of a resurgent premillennial movement in the late 19th century that then splintered over debates on the nature and timing of end-times events, leading, among other things, to the ending of the famous Niagara Bible Conference in 1897.

The *New Scofield Reference Bible*, published in 1967, was the culmination of more than a decade of scholarly collaboration. The editorial committee made thousands of changes to the 1917 edition, including revisions away from key Scofieldian emphases such as typologies. The committee also added notes that included tacitly endorsing Zionism (see note for Gen. 12:3) that reflected changing world events since 1917.

The SRB appeared at an opportune time to assure that Scofield’s views prevailed and became more permanently embedded in the Moody Movement and, later, in large parts of the Billy Graham-oriented evangelicalism. For his part, Scofield articulated his own end-times position into his notes and did not acknowledge other views. The scholarship of later evangelical premillennialists such as George Ladd, Carl Henry, and James Montgomery Boice—among many others later in the 20th century—had to contend with the SRB’s massive reach and success in shaping the premillennial movement.

Finally, how significant was the SRB’s broader national reach in the United States and beyond? We can say without a doubt it has contributed to dispensationalism being, as one historian described it, “perhaps the most resilient popular theological movement in American history” (246). The SRB’s continuing popularity is a testament to its impermeability to being dismissed, especially in communities where it has already gained authority.

Yet a truly national and international legacy is harder to discern. Its influence on global missions and successive generations of Christianity in the Global South is evident, but not yet assessed systematically by scholars. In terms of the United States, Akenson concludes his study of the SRB by describing it as “the ur-text, the script and scripture, of twentieth-century American white Christian nationalism” (436). This would be remarkable if true.

Scofield and today’s ‘Christian Nationalism’

Yet as alluring as it might be to draw a straight line from Scofield to Trump, such claims to the SRB’s significance should be resisted. We can too easily commit the violation that anthropologist Susan Harding warned about the “internally ‘orientalized’” (390) othering of American fundamentalism, assuming static and largely unchanging influences in the twentieth century that do not account for, in the case of the SRB and Christian nationalism, an intervening century of dynamic development, reforms, splits, and reassessments of theology including the SRB.

The SRB resides theologically and ideologically distant from much of what is commonly referred to as “Christian nationalism” today. It would certainly have been news to Scofield, as well as to contributing editors James Gray (president of Moody Bible Institute) and Arno C. Gaebelein, all of whom received critiques from other Protestants for not being nationalistic enough during World War I (1914–1918). Those charges, lobbed by modernist critics of premillennialism such as Shirley Jackson Case, who equated premillennialism with political quietism, the Moody Movement’s relationship to American power and war was complex in the 1910s.

It was not until the 1940s—World War II and the start of the Cold War—that evangelicalism developed a more thorough nationalism, and still decades later that the more familiar politicized dispensationalism of Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye shaped evangelical activism at the grassroots. By the 1980s we are a long way from the SRB’s original context and, indeed, a long way from its direct (though certainly there was indirect) influence on these developments.

Today’s leading advocates of Christian nationalism tend to represent the theological tradition, not of Scofield and the SRB, but of his critics (confessionally Reformed and Pentecostal postmillennialists).

Today’s leading advocates of Christian nationalism represent the theological tradition, not of Scofield and the SRB, but of his critics.

Conclusion

In the end, the Scofield Reference Bible remains significant as ushering in a theological sea change among lay evangelicals in the early twentieth century—and not because everything Scofield introduced was new. The layering of familiar and original, the addition of distinctive teachings alongside lines of continuity, created a text that indeed has shaped far more of American Protestantism than Scofield could have imagined.

An earlier version of this article said Scofield’s notes did not use the term “rapture,” but it was used once at Rev. 19:9 (without definition).

Notes

1
Other recent accounts that agree with Akenson: R. Todd Mangum and Mark Sweetnam declare that the SRB “permeates evangelical culture and thought” (The Scofield Bible: Its History and Impact on the Evangelical Church (Colorado Springs, CO: Paternoster, 2012), 3–4), while Brendan Pietsch’s study of early twentieth century dispensationalism hazards the judgment that the SRB is “perhaps the most influential annotated Bible in the twentieth century” (Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 174). A recent biography of John Nelson Darby by Crawford Gribben states that it “circulated in the tens of millions to define the movement of ‘fundamentalism’” (J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), 6).
2
Gribben, J. N. Darby, 116.

How Digital Apps Are Changing How We Read the Bible

Digital Bibles shape what we see—and don’t see—in the text and require us to be mindful of their power and peril.

John Dyer

Perspicuity is a fancy, hard-to-pronounce word that means just the opposite. In contrast to the complex, difficult-to-follow writing of academics, perspicuity means clear, direct, and understandable. The gist of the word is captured by the popular phrase “clear is kind” which applies equally to writing and personal relationships. Don’t beat around the bush. Just say what you mean. That is kindness.

The Reformers applied the concept of perspicuity to the Bible, saying that the most important ideas in scripture can be understood by any reader. That doesn’t mean that every part of the Bible is easy to understand (even Peter admits some things are “hard to understand” in 2 Pet. 3:16). It means that the essential things we must know—who God is, and what he is doing for us—can be picked up by individual readers. The Roman Catholic tradition, in contrast, argues that the scriptures need an official authoritative interpreter. The Roman Catholic Church calls its teaching authority the magisterium, explaining that it was passed from Jesus to Peter and the leaders of the Roman church.

A simple contrast between Protestant perspicuity and the Catholic magisterium on a non-essential issue would be a verse like Mark 6:4, “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are His sisters not here with us?” Protestants would say that the most straightforward reading of this is that Mary and Joseph had children after Jesus who became his siblings. However, the magisterial teaching of the Roman Catholic church is that Mary remained a virgin after Jesus’ birth and therefore never had additional children. This leads them to conclude that “the brothers” (ἀδελφοί, adelphoi) mentioned here are cousins or some other non-blood relative.

Dr. Dyer’s book explores the use of digital Bibles on Bible reading habits.

The digital Bible

So what does perspicuity have to do with digital Bible apps like Logos Bible Software, YouVersion, and biblehub.com?

In the book People of the Screen, I explore digital Bibles in depth, looking at how app creators view their craft and mission and collecting data on how everyday Christians use Bible apps in their lives. Before focusing in on perspicuity, here are a few things I found.

First, it turns out that, unlike the move from scrolls to the codex and the codex to the printing press, Bible apps aren’t replacing printed Bibles. Instead, my survey data indicates that most people use a mix of print and digital media depending on what they are trying to accomplish and what is available to them. For example, they like to use print for devotional and long form reading, their phones for shorter daily readings and quick lookups, and desktops for deeper study. The American Bible Society’s 2023 report confirms this overall trend with 69% of Bible readers using print in a given month and 50% using an digital Bible app (p. 149).

Bible apps aren’t replacing printed Bibles. Instead, most people use a mix of print and digital media.

In addition, digital media is enabling a return to the way people engaged with the Bible before the printing press, when people heard the Bible. From the time of Moses to the time of Luther, few believers had their own copy of the Bible and their only access to the Word was what they heard in church. Bible apps have made audio versions much more accessible, and many Christians report an uptick in listening to scripture as a mode of engagement.

If you’re a regular reader of textandcanon.org, when you think of Bible software, you might be picturing tools that empower in-depth study of the original languages and offer commentaries and other resources such as Logos Bible Software and Accordance. These apps were originally only available on desktop apps, but there are now many excellent study-oriented Bible apps available for phones and tablet. It turns out that the presence of these study apps might be reforming how average Christians understand the Bible and its understandability.

Illustration by Peter Gurry.
How Bible Software Solves Differences in Versification for You
Software developers have to account for different versification in how Bible data is both stored and presented.
Rick Brannan

Digital hermeneutics

As part of my study, I interviewed almost two hundred Bible readers and gave them an interpretive exercise to see how print and phone screen reading might differ.

At several churches, I split the audience in half, asking one group to read on their phones and the other group to read their printed Bible. I asked both groups to read the book of Jude and then tell me (1) what the point of the book was, and (2) how it made them feel. Interestingly, two opposite trends emerged. The print readers said they felt Jude was about God’s judgment while the phone readers tended to emphasize God’s faithfulness. But then, on the second question, their answers seemed to split. The print readers, who felt the book was about God’s judgment, said they were encouraged by the reading. The phone readers on the other hand who said Jude was about God’s faithfulness, said after reading it that they felt discouraged and confused.

So what can account for that difference? Why is a judgmental God encouraging and a faithful God discouraging? As I looked through the interview data on how people spoke about their Bible reading habits and the digital age, some themes emerged that might explain this.

The free YouVersion App boasts 3,000 Bible versions in 2,000 languages.

First, while there are a few outliers that are print-only or digital-only, as I mentioned above almost everyone sees the value in using both mediums for different activities (print for devotions, phones for audio, desktop for study, etc.). Second, most people tend to associate certain characteristics with the medium itself beyond what the text is saying.

Over and over again, my interviewees would speak of a printed Bible as something they could trust, something that represented a faith they could literally pass on to the next generation. Someone might hold up a well-worn printed Bible and say, “This, this is what I believe.” On the other hand, when people spoke about Bible apps, they expressed appreciation for search functionality, audio Bibles, original languages, study notes, and so on. But they also tended to mention things like the distraction of notifications, the anxieties they feel when they read the news, and the pressure of social media.

Over and over again, my interviewees would speak of a printed Bible as something they could trust.

This recalls the Marshall McLuhan’s famous saying, “the medium is the message.” By this McLuhan meant several things, one of which was that a medium can influence how we perceive a message, much like tone of voice and body language when speaking in person. In this case, the medium of print itself sends a message of confidence, while screens seems to send a message of anxiety. It’s likely that we associate print with trust, but phones with all the complex emotions we experience on social media. It’s interesting to note that the text of scripture hasn’t changed at all, but when the medium changes, people perceive it differently.

These kinds of observations are also seen in “materiality of religion” studies which focus on how material objects have a representative power within a community. For example, some traditions carry a printed Bible through the congregation as part of the liturgy and others give a Bible to someone at key moments in their life. In these cases, the printed bible is functioning in an iconic way that a digital Bible cannot.

Secondary perspicuity

The people I interviewed also indicated, albeit indirectly, that the presence of digital Bible apps had altered their understanding of perspicuity. While most people associated print with more certainty and trust, they also spoke about how Bible apps gave them a unique confidence.

Some spoke of the familiar small group scenario where a member says, “I think it says somewhere in the Bible that …” but no one is sure. Bible apps, they went on to say, ensured that such a verse could always be found and verified or shown to just be a popular phrase but not something in the Bible.

Others discussed the role of Bible apps with study helps, saying that even the most difficult passage could be understood if one had the right app with the right resources installed. Long before Bible apps existed, Protestants and Catholics alike created printed Bibles with study notes and interpretive guides (e.g., the Geneva Bible in 1560 and the Douay-Rheims in 1582).

But unlike the static study notes around the printed text, Bible apps allow for an exploratory feeling. Several participants spoke of an endless experience of tapping words and going “deeper and deeper” to find the “original meaning” of the text. Some readers even said that after long periods of using apps, they found themselves wanting to tap on the words of their print Bibles when they didn’t understand something.

I call this phenomenon “secondary perspicuity” because the reader is still convinced that the meaning of the passage can be known—just as long as one has the right content downloaded. The digitally enabled Bible reader doesn’t need an authoritative Church to tell them what a passage means, but their understanding of the knowability of the text has shifted to include the necessity of outside helps and resources. This continues to evolve today with several new AI-generated Bible summary and interpretation tools, each of which reinforce the idea that the right tools can get us to the right answers, perhaps even apart from the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

The point here is not that Bible apps are bad or that we need to go back to print (or back to exclusively encountering scripture through public readings). It’s to recognize the very subtle ways that mediums we use shape and form our encounters with content. Neither print nor screen are neutral. Both form us and our communities, shaping what we see and don’t see in the text and about God. As we seek to encounter the one true God, let us continually be thankful for the good gifts of technology, but also mindful of its power and peril.

How Was the Divine Name Translated in the Reformation? Part 4

Translators have wrestled with the divine name for centuries. Some have used it only to reverse course later.

Andrew Case

The previous articles in this series considered God’s desire for us to use his name, how the pronunciation was lost, and how the New Testament writers handled the matter. It remains, finally, to consider how it has been handled by translators since the Reformation. In that time there have been various departures from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, which rendered the divine name as Dominus (“Lord/Master”), while others have maintained the tradition, which goes back to the Septuagint.

The Reformers’ view

Luther and Calvin were not in agreement on this. Luther followed the tradition of the Septuagint and used the German title “Herr” (Lord) in all caps, while Calvin’s choice was to use “Jehovah” for his French translation of the Psalms. Calvin explained his decision as follows:

It would be tedious to recount the various opinions as to the name “Jehovah.” It is certainly a foul superstition of the Jews that they dare not speak, or write it, but substitute the name “adonai;” nor do I any more approve of their teaching, who say that it is ineffable, because it is not written according to grammatical rule … Nor do I agree with the grammarians, who will not have it pronounced, because its inflection is irregular; because its etymology, of which all confess that God is the author, is more to me than an hundred rules.¹

The Wycliffe version of the Bible in English used “the Lord,” as did Tyndale’s unfinished translation of the Old Testament, but in a few places, like Exodus 6:3, he rendered “Iehouah.” This set a precedent for all early Protestant bibles, except Coverdale’s translation (1535). The King James Bible printed “Lord” in all caps when it represented YHWH, except in four places (Exod. 6:3, Ps. 83:18, Isa. 12:2; 26:4) where the translators felt the need to render it as a proper name, and in these places the name “Iehouah” appeared in the first printing (spelled as “Jehova” in later editions).

Casiodoro de Reina, the first translator of the most famous Spanish version of the Bible (the Reina-Valera), took particular interest in avoiding the substitution of a title for the divine name. In the prologue to the 1569 publication of his work, he wrote the following:

We have retained the name (Iehovah), not without serious reasons. First of all, because wherever it will be found in our version, it is in the Hebrew text, and it seemed to us that we could not leave it, nor change it for another without infidelity and singular sacrilege against the law of God, in which it is commanded “Do not take away from it, or add to it” (Deut. 4:4 and Prov. 30:5) … It also seemed to us that this mutation cannot be made without contravening God’s advice, and in a certain way wanting to amend it, as if He had done wrong all the times that his Spirit in Scripture declared this name, and it was to be another. And it is true, that not without particular and very serious advice, God revealed it to the world, and wanted his servants to know and invoke him; it would be a reckless thing to abandon it, and reckless superstition to neglect it, on the pretext of reverence.

Someone could argue to us here that neither Christ nor the Apostles in their writings made amends for this error, etc. To this we answer, that they were never in charge of making versions, or correcting the facts, but attentive to a greater and more central matter, which was the announcement of the advent of the Messiah, and of his glorious Kingdom. They used the common version, which was then in use, which seems to have been that of the Seventy [the Septuagint], because they had plenty of it for their main purpose.

Casiodoro De Reina’s 1569 Spanish translation used “Iehoua” throughout as seen here in Exodus 3.

Modern translations

By the nineteenth century, German scholars began to point out that the name “Jehovah” was a mistaken pronunciation, but many scholarly works in England continued to use “Jehovah.” In spite of these trends, English Christians did not see the necessity to produce an altered version of the Bible.

By the nineteenth century, German scholars began to point out that the name “Jehovah” was a mistaken pronunciation.

It wasn’t until the 1880s that “Yahweh” became a more frequently used pronunciation among scholars and students. Then, in 1901, American scholars prepared their own edition of the Revised Version (a revision of the KJV) for publication in the USA, known as the American Standard Version (ASV). In this version they decided to use “Jehovah” consistently. Even though they were aware that Jehovah was not an accurate pronunciation, they decided it would be received better because it was still more well-known than Yahweh. They explained in their preface:

The American Revisers, after a careful consideration were brought to the unanimous conviction that a Jewish superstition, which regarded the Divine Name as too sacred to be uttered, ought no longer to dominate in the English or any other version of the Old Testament, as it fortunately does not in the numerous versions made by modern missionaries.²

Benjamin B. Warfield, who was influential at the time of the publication, expressed strong approval of this decision. But the public had a harder time accepting the change. As the Princeton Seminary Bulletin later remarked, “However correct this practice might be in scholarly theory—for the word in Hebrew is indeed a proper name, not a title—it was disastrous from the point of view of the liturgical, homiletical, and devotional use of the Bible, and was almost universally disliked.”³ Thus, when it came time to revise the ASV, the committee decided to revert to using “the Lord” instead of Jehovah. The resulting RSV was published in 1952.

This would not be the last time modern versions flipflopped on the divine name. The Catholic NJB version (1966) used “Yahweh,” but the revision switched to “the Lord” in 2019. The Holman Christian Standard Bible (2004) used “Yahweh” (albeit inconsistently), and then decided to reverse their decision only five years later with the Christian Standard Bible revision.

To date, only one mainstream English Bible is committed to translating God’s name as a name: the Legacy Standard Version (2021), which is a revision of the NASB. The revisers write: “The effect of revealing God’s name is His distinction from other gods and His expression of intimacy with the nation of Israel. Such a dynamic is a prevalent characteristic of the Scriptures.” That said, since 1960 there are other (not mainstream) bibles that have arisen specifically to restore the translation of God’s name (more about that here). It should also be mentioned that the World English Bible (public domain) uses “Yahweh” consistently.

Conclusion

History shows us how the winds of market forces, fickle human opinions, ignorance, and tradition can toss modern versions to and fro and blow them about, especially regarding the translation of God’s name.

Will translations like the LSB suddenly fall out of vogue and turn course as others have done? My hope is that the English Bible publishers rise to the task of taking a clear, systematic, robustly biblical stand on what they are going to do with the divine name and why. It is not an issue that can be resolved in a few paragraphs of a version’s preface or a few pages on a website. Rather, it calls for a decision based solidly on Scripture’s teaching that leaves no stone unturned, documented exhaustively, and open to the public.

Notes

1
John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony by John Calvin, trans. Charles W. Bingham (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1843), 127.
2
Preface to the ASV, 1901, accessed January 16, 2021, https://biblia.com/books/asv/offset/389.
3
Robert C. Dentan, “The Story of the New Revised Standard Version,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin vol 11, no. 3 (Nov 1990): 212.

Topics

Levels

Theology

The spectrum of views

Isaiah’s context

The Immanuel sign

Various explanations of Isaiah 7:14

Six questions for Isaiah 7:10–16

1. Who’s the audience?

2. What verbs belong in verse 14?

Related

3. Does ʿalmâ mean just ‘young girl’?

4. What do the verbs in verses 6 and 16 mean?

5. How should we translate the last sentence in 7:16?

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6. What does it mean to “eat curds and honey” in verses 15–16?

The larger literary structure

Conclusion

Notes

The Framers’ view of human nature

Related

The Framers’ view and the U.S. Constitution

The Framers’ view and the Bible

The importance for democracy

A shift in beliefs

The expanding definition of ‘Septuagint’

Related

Ancient sources for the term

‘Septuagint’ before Christianity

‘Septuagint’ in early Christianity

The Inspiration of the Septuagint

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Paul’s Septuagint

Paul and the Septuagint’s inspiration

Paul and the Septuagint canon

Related

Conclusion

Notes

How original was Scofield?

The early twentieth-century context

Related

The role of the ‘Moody Movement’

Scofield’s unique contribution

Assessing the legacy

Scofield and today’s ‘Christian Nationalism’

Conclusion

Notes

The digital Bible

Related

Digital hermeneutics

Secondary perspicuity

Conclusion

The Reformers’ view

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Modern translations

Conclusion

Notes

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