This is one of Daniel’s little editorial homilies where he tries to stretch his moral legs and play the role of a thoughtful sage reflecting upon the “deep” waters of tradition. When he finally gets to the famous part in Genesis 4 that concerns the title, I thought Daniel would finally be able to do some goodwork considering semitic languages are his wheelhouse.
Instead I got:
This is a really shallow philological analysis and the lexical work that Daniel does for his readers is sub-par. We get nothing about the semantic domain of “ שׁוֹמֵר ” and nary a word about cognates, and we don’t even get a quick summation of the apparatus notes concerning this passage from the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia nor even a scant mention of some kind of lexical reference work, even an older one like the Brown Driver and Briggs.Daniel C. Peterson wrote:We can perhaps shed some light on this by examining what the word keeper means, in the phrase my brother’s keeper. The King James rendering of the Hebrew word שׁוֹמֵר (šōmêr) as “keeper” has, it seems, been retained by most English translations across the board. And what, exactly, does this imply? In English, a “keeper” is a person who takes care of animals or who is in charge of a building or of inanimate objects. Thus, we speak of zookeepers, beekeepers, the keeper of a lighthouse, or the keeper of antiquities in a major museum or of paintings and sculptures in an art gallery. We also use the term custodian in many such cases, so it is significant to note that Jerome’s ancient Latin Vulgate [7] rendition of šōmêr is custos, from which the English word custodian derives. The Greek Septuagint8 uses φύλαξ (phúlax or phylax) to translate šōmêr. The English equivalent of phúlax is guard or sentry. (Compare our word prophylactic, which refers to something that protects, guards, against disease or some other condition.) At Genesis 4:9, the Common English Bible [9] and the Complete Jewish Bible [10] have “Am I my brother’s guardian?” while the 1979 Nouvelle Edition de Genève [11] has “suis-je le gardien de mon frère?”
We do get mention of the Vulgate and Septuagint, but the endnotes take you websites and not references to critical editions of text; wouldn’t variants in each of those ancient translations gives us insight into how “ שׁוֹמֵר ” was understood by the ancient translators? And where is Targum Onkelos? Why doesn’t Aramaic merit inclusion but 4th century Latin does?
In fact, in this entire piece centered around a famous passage in the Torah there is nary a mention of Jewish scholarship, except for one David Stern. Stern “translated” something called the ‘Complete Jewish Bible’ which is popular among Messianic Christians. I should hasten to add that Stern is trained as an economist and not as a biblical scholar or ancient historian, and lacks the usual pedigree needed to undertake a professional and scholarly translation of ancient documents. It shouldn’t surprise readers to learn that Stern is a controversial figure whose work is largely ignored outside the narrow confines of Messianic Christianity.
David Stern’s relationship to Judaism and Jewish scholarship is comparable to Ed Decker’s relationship to Mormonism. Why did Daniel utilize such a source over the plethora of actual Jewish sources? Nothing from JPS on his shelves? I mean, doesn’t it register for him that calling something a “Complete Jewish Bible” you are insinuating that traditional Jews have an incomplete Bible? Is that a good look, considering modern relations between Mormons and Jews and the whole “let’s baptize holocaust victims” debacle?
