That Damned Oath!
The Torah was originally transmitted without the little dots and dashes that now accompany the printed text. Those dots and dashes were created by the Masoretes, a group of medieval text scholars renowned for their attention to the smallest details. They tell us exactly how to pronounce each word—and in many cases they also decide the meaning of a word (since sometime the same consonants can be read in more than one way).
But the Masoretic text (MT) preserves only one tradition of reading the Torah’s words. There are others. Numerous fragments of our biblical books were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and these ancient manuscripts sometimes preserve a different tradition of reading. By the same token, scholars have known for a long time that the Old Greek or Septuagint translation of the Torah differs here and there from the Hebrew of the MT. The reason is that this Greek translation was made from a Hebrew text that was slightly different from the MT. Most of the differences are pretty minor, but here and there even a minor difference can turn out to be important.
In this week’s Torah reading, Isaac is now dwelling in Beer Sheba, and the Philistine king, Abimelech, comes with his aides to meet him. Isaac and Abimelech have had rather frosty relations, so as soon as he sees them, Isaac calls out to the king and his courtiers: “What are you coming to see me for? You’re my enemies, you drove me away from you!” But the Philistines have come to reassure Isaac; they suggest making a sworn peace treaty with him to smooth things over. Isaac agrees, and they conclude this agreement with a feast; the next day the Philistines peacefully depart. “That same day, Isaac’s servants came to him and reported about a well that they had dug; they said to him, ‘We found water!’” (Gen 26:32).
The version underlying the Septuagint translation differs from the MT here in only one letter. While the MT reads “they said to him [the Hebrew reads lo, with the letters lamed and vav], ‘We found water!’” the Septuagint’s underlying text reads lamed alef instead of lamed vav. The resultant texts sound exactly the same, lo’, but the Septuagint’s means just the opposite: “They said [without the “to him”] we didn’t find water.”
Which is right? Sometimes the broader context will make the meaning clear, but here it’s hard to tell. The verse just before the lines mentioned above says that the Isaac’s servants had dug a well in Beer Sheba (Gen 26:25), but it doesn’t spell out whether the result of their digging was positive or negative. Perhaps now, with Isaac having sworn this peace treaty with the Philistines, his servants told him some more good news, “We found water!” A second possibility is mentioned by the midrash (Bereshit Rabba 64:9): Isaac’s servants were referring to a well mentioned still earlier, in Gen 26:19; they had found water there, in the well that they dug.
But another ancient source, the book of Jubilees (ca. 200 BCE), put a quite different spin on the whole incident. In general, Jubilees is extraordinarily xenophobic and chauvinistic—dealings with non-Jews were to be avoided at all costs. Now, it’s not clear if Jubilees’ author consciously chose to use the version of the Torah that read “we didn’t find water”; it’s possible that this was the only version of the text that he knew. In any case, the “we didn’t find water” reading fit his own ideology perfectly: Of course Isaac’s servants didn’t find water, he said. That’s what happens when you swear an oath with non-Jews.
In fact, Jubilees goes on to say that Isaac then cursed the Philistines, in effect undoing the peace treaty he had just sworn. What is more, according to Jubilees, Isaac called the place the Well of the Oath (Beer Sheva) not in honor of the peace treaty he had just sworn, but as a reminder never to make the same mistake again!
In the light of all this, one can appreciate how important a single letter of the Torah can be. In this case, it made all the difference between a mean-spirited, xenophobic message and one that celebrated quite the opposite. Sometimes a peace treaty is just what you need.
Shabbat shalom!
