CHAPTER 46
he says that the Egyptians make out of this grain a medicine which they call athera.
CHAPTER 46 verses 26-7 LXX read: 'all the souls of the house of Jacob who went into Egypt were seventy-five.' Jerome tries to deal with two separate, related difficulties. First, LXX and the Hebrew disagree on the numbers who went into Egypt: LXX have seventy-five, while the Hebrew has seventy. Second, the Hebrew text has its own difficulty, since this verse says that sixty-six sons of Jacob went down; Joseph was already there, and had two sons (verse 27); thus the total was sixty-nine, although verse 27 lists seventy. Who was the missing person?
Jerome begins with the sixty-six who went down with Jacob, and notes that there is no disagreement about that number. It can be calculated by referring back to earlier information in Genesis.
LXX, however, say that Joseph had nine sons in Egypt. About two of these, there can be no disagreement: the Hebrew of 41: 502 is plain, as Jerome has already noted on those verses. But LXX, in their rendering of 46: 20 which Jerome quotes here, have added to the list 'by anticipation'
(see above, notes on 14: 7) Joseph's grandsons, the sons of Manasseh and Ephraim: see further x Chr.
Five of these are listed here; with Ephraim and Manasseh the number increases to seven, and we have eight if we include Joseph himself. It is not clear how LXX account for the number nine.!
By contrast, the Hebrew is clear, apart from the question asked earlier: who is the seventieth person? Jerome names Jacob himself: this is the opinion of Jub. 44: 12-13; Gen. Rab. 94: 9 ('there are some who say...'); Leqah Tov; Sekhel Tov; and MHG on this
1 While the state of LXX's text is not our primary concern, on this numerical problem see the remarks of Marguerite Harl, Bible d'Alexandrie, i. 296. She records that at Exod. 1: 5, LXX, a Qumran Bible MS, and MT give the numbers as seventy, the figure found also at Deut. 10: 22 MT and LXX, apart from Codex Alexandrinus, which has seventy-five. She notes the possibility that the MT of Gen. 46: 26-7 may have been 'corrected' to agree with Deut. 10: 22, noting that the number seventy would correspond also to the number of the Gentile nations (Deut. 32: 8-9) divided according to the number of the 'sons of Israel'.
Commentary verse.? But there were other opinions: the seventieth person was thought to be Jochebed, the mother of Moses (to name but a few sources: b. BB 123; Gen. Rab. 94: 9; Num. Rab. 3: 8; 13: 20; Tanh.
Bemidbar 16, 19; PRK 2: 10; and PJ on this verse); or God Himself (Gen. Rab. 94: 9; PRE 39: 1); or Serah, daughter of Asher (Gen.
Rab. 94: 9; Midrash Sam. 32; Eccles. Rab. 9: 18; Tanb. Wayyera'
123 Aggadath Bere'shith 22: 3); or a son of Dan (Midrash Sam. 32).
Josephus, Ant. 2. 176-83, so calculated the numbers that there was no missing person.
Jerome reiterates the principle of anticipation which LXX have used. They witness to the number seventy as having gone into Egypt at Deut. ro: 22. They have added the five sons of Manasseh and Ephraim to the list in these verses of Genesis. But explaining LXX is one task: defending the New Testament another, since Stephen in his speech (Acts 7:
14) quotes the LXX numbers as stated in Genesis. Jerome makes the following points: first, that the Gentiles would have known the Greek Bible, and it would have been inopportune for Luke to differ from it; second, that Luke himself was then an unknown author, whereas LXX had the status of Holy
Scripture. He seems to leave open here the question of whether Luke knew Hebrew, although Jerome himself may have believed that he did: see De Scrip. Ecc. 7. Jerome's solution of this problem, however, was disputed by Augustine, QG 152, who not only urged that LXX were correct and their numbers full of mystical significance, but also was frankly sceptical of 'Hebrew truth', which he regarded as offering no resolution of the problem and as raising its own particular difficulties. verse 28 The Hebrew has: 'And he sent Judah before him to Joseph, to direct (/hdrét) him to Goshen; so they came to the land of Goshen.' LXX translated: 'to Joseph, to meet him at the city of Heroes, into the land of Ramesses'. Apparently they translated
I-hGrot first as 'to meet', and then the sound of the word may have suggested also Heroopolis.? Josephus, Ant. 2. 184, followed LXX in this reading. The land of Goshen is taken as the land of Ramesses, no doubt because Gen. 47: 11 (Hebrew and LXX) tells
2 See also Rahmer, Die hebriischen Traditionen, 51-2.
3 Jerome does not comment on the meaning of this word, which elicited many different interpretations: see Grossfeld, Targum Ongelos to Genesis, 151-3; Salvesen, Symmachus, 56-7. His Vg rendering interprets the word twice, 'to inform him and to meet him', reflecting ancient debates: Aquila rendered it as 'to show',
Symmachus 'to enlighten'. that Joseph settled his family there.* Jerome's quotation of 47: 11 corresponds neither with Hebrew nor LXX. The former reads:
'And he gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land of Ramesses', which LXX faithfully rendered into Greek.
For the identity of Goshen with the Thebaid, and Ramesses with Arsinoé, see especially PJ, Ngl, and FTV: they took the place to be
Pelusium. Arsinoé was capital of the nome of Heroopolis, on the Pelusium side of the Nile.
CHAPTER 47 verse 31 The problem is caused by the Hebrew word mth: it may be vocalized as matteh, 'staff, rod', or as mittah, 'bed, couch'. The former was read by LXX and Pesh, and was copied by Heb. rz: 21.
This in its turn caused a problem. Whose staff was meant: Israel's own, or Joseph's? Augustine posed the question in these terms (OG
162), and seems to have accepted Jerome's Hebrew solution. But he would not agree that the LXX version has little or no meaning, and accordingly echoes earlier commentators who argued that it was
Joseph's staff to which Israel had bowed, and that he had thus worshipped Joseph, who wasa type of Christ (see comments on 41:
45), through the latter's staff or sceptre. Such was Origen's interpretation (Hom. in Gen. 15. 4), and it found an echo in the work of Eusebius of Emesa (Devreesse, p. 79), who, however, declares that other exegetes regarded the staff as Jacob's own: when Joseph swore the oath, his father bowed his head over his staff, and worshipped Joseph through it. Jerome may be concerned to refute
Eusebius here, and in any case cuts through all the confusion engendered by the Greek translations. For 'bed' is the vocalization of MT, and is the reading of Aquila, Symmachus, and 'the Hebrew'.
The Targums agree with this; both PJ and the Ngl (cf. Sifre Deut.
31) make the point that Jacob was worshipping. But his homage 4 See also Harl, Bible d'Alexandrie, i. 297.
1 See Kamesar, Jerome, 155-7; he notes that Jerome arrives at an interpretation similar to that of Gennadius and Diodore (Petit, ii. 262-5), but by a different route (p. 156). Theodoret, OG 1og9, had also regarded the staff as Joseph's and had seen Jacob's action as fulfilling the dream prophecy of Joseph recorded in Gen. 37:
Commentary ; was directed towards the Shekhina, which was there revealed to him.
See above, comments on 41: 50-2 and 46: 26-7. verse LXX read: 'your father is troubled ...'; Jerome follows the Hebrew, and the renderings of Aquila and Symmachus. See above, comments on 47: 31, for the different translations 'staff' and 'bed' of the one Hebrew word mth. Pesh here follows LXX, reading
'couch'. verses 5-6 See above, comments on 41: 50-2; 46: 26-7; 48: I, Leqah Tov, and Sekhel Tov on these verses, for the number of Joseph's sons. Jacob's insistence that Joseph's sons Ephraim and Manasseh will be equal with Jacob's own sons as tribes of Israel is handled by Jerome in a manner very close to that of the Targums: thus, where the Hebrew has Jacob say of Ephraim and Manasseh
'they shall be mine', PJ states that 'they shall be reckoned like Reuben and Simeon', (cf.
'they shall be counted', reputabuntur); and in TN Jacob twice insists that they shall be 'for my name', that is, most certainly mine. Particularly important is the fragmentary text GM, which agrees with Jerome further in making any future children of Joseph members of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. In Klein's translation, it reads: '[
] shall be called by my name; Ephraim and Manasseh like Reuben [and Simeon shall receive] a portion and an inheritance with us, in the division of the land. And [your] progeny: And the seed of your progeny, which you begot after them, shall be [attributed] to you; they shall be named after their brothers, in their inheritance.' See also PR 3;
Josephus, Ant. 2. 195; Augustine, OG 145. verse 22 Hebrew Shechem (3¢kem) became Sikima in this verse of LXX as if it were a noun in the accusative case; similarly, it is
Sicimam in VL. The place features in John 4: 5 as Sychar, as he notes also in In Osee 2. 6: 8-9, Ep. 108. 13. It was the chief city of the Samaritans, whose temple had once stood on Mount Gerizim adjacent to the town. In Roman times it was called Neapolis (see also Lib. Loc. 965-6), and was the home of Justin Martyr.
Jerome notes '*kem as meaning 'shoulder', qualified by ahad, 'one': this is the literal sense of the Hebrew, as Aquila has it. He