Masoretic & LXX differences in the Song of Moses

Eric Jobe, graduate student of Early Rabbinic Judaism at the University of Chicago (and author of the now defunct Qatl Qitl Qutl blog) writes on one of the canons sung for Lent:

In the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, sung during the first week of Great Lent, the irmos of the first Ode is taken from the Septuagint (LXX) version of Exodus 15:2, the Song of Moses, "A helper and protector, He has become my salvation..."

I noticed last night while singing this ode, that, in Hebrew "A helper and protector" would form a wonderfully assonant (repetition of sounds) word-pair: ʿōzer wa-nōṣer. I made note of it with the intention of looking up the Hebrew when I returned home. To my surprise, the Hebrew (Masoretic. Unfortunately the Dead Sea manuscript begins at verse 5) does not read "a helper and a protector" but ʿōzī wa-zimrat-yah "My strength and song of Yah." Glancing over at the LXX, I notice that it does indeed contain "a helper and protector," βοηθὸς καὶ σκεπαστὴς. All of the other versions, the Latin Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and Targum Onqelos, follow the Hebrew.

So then, just how did this LXX reading come about? The first term is the easiest: the Hebrew ʿōzī "my strength" can easily become ʿōzer "a helper" if the tail of the letter yod at the end of ʿōzī is elongated, which was common in ancient manuscripts. The next term is a bit tricky and requires a bit of comparative Semitic work. The term in Hebrew is zimrat-yah "song of Yah." Zimrat, the construct of zimrah, is derived from the root zmr meaning "to sing" or "play music." However, this Hebrew root may be derived from two different proto-Semitic roots, *zmr or ḏmr (ḏ = th as in "this"). A glance at a Hebrew lexicon will reveal that there are in fact three different definitions of zmr. One is derived from the proto-Semitic *zmr, meaning "to sing," and another is derived from the proto-Semitic *ḏmr meaning "to protect." Aha! Now, we take the divine name yah tacked on to the end of the construct, and make it a part of the word, and we get a possible noun zmrtyh or zmrth which the translator could have taken to mean "protection."

This most likely came about because the translator expected two words that were roughly synonymous rather than semantically distinct. "A helper and protector" is more in keeping with typical Hebrew parallel repetition in poetry rather than two semantically distinct terms "my strength/a helper and song."

There is no judgment here about which one is "right" or "wrong." Both are theologically correct and meaningful. This note is only intended to illustrate just one more of the manifold ways that the LXX ends up with a different reading than the Hebrew, and how we end up singing what we do in church.

(reposted with permission)