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S OM E RE M ARKS ON T HE S ONG OF M OS E SI N D E U T E R O N O M Y X X X I I

BY

W. F. ALBRIGHT

Baltimore (Md., U.S.A.)

The Song of Moses is one of the most impressive religious poems

in the entire Old Testament, but it differs so strikingly from otherpoems in genre

x) that it has been exceedingly hard to date. The views

of serious scholars have in the past ranged over nearly a millennium,

but there is lately a strong tendency to date the Song earlier. So, for

instance, in the first edition of my book, From the Stone Age to Chris

tianity (1940) I dated it about the seventh century B.C. (p. 227). In

the latest edition, on the other hand, published seventeen years

later (1957), I dated it "apparently" in the tenth century (p. 296).

Meanwhile Otto EISSFELDT has gone much farther. In the second

edition of his famous Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1956) he refers

the Song to the middle of the eleventh century B.C. (pp. 271 f.).

This very early date is defended at length in a monograph on Deut.

xxxii and Psalm lxxviii, published two years later, where he proposes

as termini post and ante quern 1070 and 1020 B.C.2) My own first reac

tion was a somewhat dazed admiration for Eissfeldt's daring, but

after rereading the chapter over and over again at intervals I have

come around to his eleventh-century datingthough a little later

with quite different interpretations of some key passages. In this

short essay I shall limit myself to observations on a few passages.

Here again the Dead Sea Scrolls have come to our rescue, with

Mgr. Patrick W. SKEHAN'S publication of a large fragment of a sticho-

metric text of the Song, in typical book-hand from about the Christian

x) S. R. DRIVER'S comments (An Introduction to the Literature of the Old

Testament, 6th ed., 1897, p. 96) vividly illustrate the distance traversed by literarycriticism during the past half-century. He comments on the "maturity" of thought

and style comparing Deut xxxii with Hos ii Jer ii Ezek xx Psalm evi as a

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340 W. F. ALBRIGHT

era or a little earlier.x) Verse 43 is preserved in six cola, as against

th e four of MT and the eight of LXX. The question is : Have we

secondary expansion or contraction of the original text? SKEHAN,following an earlier reconstruction, made before anyone dreamed of

the Qumran discovery, proposed a four-colon modification of the

M T obtained with the aid of LXX2) CROSS, in a very careful analysis

of the recensional variants, agrees substantially with SKEHAN3) .

EISSFELDT proposes a six-colon reconstruction. Interesting suggestions

were also made by H. L. GINSBERG4) , . H. TUR-SINAI

5) and others,

before the Qumran text appeared, and similar efforts have been

made by various scholars subsequently.

6

) In 1955 I proposed aneight-colon reconstruction

7), which I should now modify in detail but

which still seems to me more likely than the curtailments offered

by other scholars8) :

Harnn smayim 'imm we-histahw-l 9) bene ^Elhm

Harnn gymy

et-camm we-hi^q(J)-l kol mal^ak *El

K dam banw yiqqom we-nqm ysb le-sdraw10

) we-kipper *admat""ammon)

^ BASOR, 136, 12-15.2) Ibid., p. 15.3) The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modem Biblical Studies (New York, 1958),

pp. 135 ff. For another loss in vss. 14 f. see SKEHAN, JBL, 78, p. 22.4) TarbiZ, 24 (1954/55), pp. 1-3.

5) Tarbiz, 24, p. 232.6) See EISSFELDT'S convenient survey, op. cit., p. 14, n. 1.7) BASOR, 140, pp. 32 f., . 27.

8) Th e metr ical st ruc tur e appears as a rule to consist of bicola with 3 + 3 beats,

but in the extant text 3 + 2 structure is often found, and our know ledge of

He b r e w metr ics rem ain s in its infancy. My tra nsc rip tio n of H eb re w is as simpleas practica ble. Since there was as yet no t spirantiz ation ofBGDKPT I have not

indicated it except in the case ofp-f, whe re consistency wo uld have flouted all

pronunciations employed today.9) SKEHAN and CROSS (doubtfully) suggest we-hab c% for the uni que Gr eek

, but this seems rather arbitrary.1 0

) It seems likely that the colon -l-mesanne^wyesallm, which appears both in

Q a nd G, b ut wh ich is missing in MT , comes from verse 41, as th ou gh t by

SKEHAN and CROSS. However, the person is different in vss. 41 and 43, there are

other partial repetitions in the chapter, and we may have a tricolon here (as cer

tainly in verse 39b). Since it does not fit the eighth colon at all, I omit it and

suppose that the original seventh colon has been lost. It should be observed that

the sixth colon is not close enough to the parallel text in 41 to warrant cutting

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SOME REMARKS ON THE SONG OF MOSES 341

This may be rendered:

Rejoice with Him, O heavens,

and bow before him, O sons of God!Rejoice with His people, O nations,

and work hard(?)x) for it, O angels of God!

Truly He will avenge the blood of His sons,

and He will visit retribution on His foes;

and He will cleanse the land of His people!

This restoration is based primarily on G, which is put back into

Hebrew in accord with the Qumran fragment, whenever possible.

The first colon has been lost in MT by obvious vertical dittography,

but G and Q both have it. The second colon has become partially

conflated with the fourth; /o/may have come into the Vorlage of G

from the fourth colon, which is preserved only in G. For beneyElhm

cf. Deut. xxxii 8 in Q. The third colon follows MT (with an inserted

V) and G; it has been lost in Q just as the first colon was lost in MT.

The fourth colon follows the Greek literally, but since it seems to

make good sense, it may be approximately correct. The fifth colon

follows G and Q; cabdn> in MT was presumably substituted for

banw because of its occurrence in verse 36. The sixth colon appears

in all three recensions, but there has been dittography in G. The

seventh colon seems to have vanished from all our recensions, leaving

the eighth colon a torso which may be variously interpreted. Of

course, I should not insist on the correctness of my point of view,

but it does accord with the increasing evidence from the Qumran

Scrolls that our Hebrew originals, once edited in antiquity, suffered

far more from omissions by copyists than from additions. In other

words, glosses and conflate readings can seldom be detected on the

basis of recensional differences alone, though we are often justified

in assuming from the state of a text that they may have been incor

porated into it by the original editor.

The textual condition of MT elsewhere in the Song of Moses is

much better than might be inferred from the above discussion, but

there are numerous examples of similar phenomena elsewhere in it.

Verse 17 for example is awkward and strange as it stands in MT;

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342 W. F. ALBRIGHT

wholly unattested vcrbScR (se

crum).

) H. WINCKLER seems to have

been on the right track in vocalizing seHrm^ "demons", which

he thought stood in parallelism to sdm.2

) However, the latter is anAccadian loanword through Aramaic,

3) and in this passage it is

more likely to have been itself a corruption of an original secrm

(preserved in consonantal form by a scribal error, for which there are

several possible explanations). Read perhaps as follows:

Yi^beh lisHrm ly-yElah hresm mq-qrob

^Elhm lo* jed^um (we-)l* jedcm ^abthm

4)

The first colon agrees with LXX, and so do the third and fourth

cola, aside from the transposition of the third colon. The second

colon requires only the insertion of a word lost by simple haplography

to yield perfect sense, though with different vocalization; the less

said of hadsim miq-qrb b^ the better, especially since b' is

transparent dittography. Render the verse:

They sacrifice to demons, not divine,

who are too deaf to approach5),

Gods whom they know not,(and) whom their fathers did not know.

The two most important passages from the standpoint of religious

history are verses 39 and 8 f. The former requires no emendation ;

it may be rendered:

Behold now, I am I

and there is no other God than I;

I kill and restore to life,

after I have smitten I heal,

and none can save from my hand!

x) Arab. fa

cara, "to know", does not help much, since no cognates are known.

2) Geschichte Israels, II (1900), p. 133.

3) This has always been my own assumption, but it cannot be proved that the

wo rd is no t early in Nort hwes t Semitic. In 1942 (BASOR, 87, pp. 29-32) LEVI

DELLA VIDA pointed out that the divine name Sdrp* (Greek Satrapes) in

Phoenic ian , Pa lmyrene and Greek inscr iptions from Syria, also occurs in

Neo -Pun ic ; it is, therefore, perhaps very much older than the Persian peri od(it has no connexion whatever with Persian satraps!). It could be interpreted as

"Healing Genius," from an earlier *sdu rpPu, in which case the wel l-known

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SOME REMARKS ON THE SONG OF MOSES 343

The first colon has been completely misunderstood by most transla

tors. There is no mysterious divine name "He," but only a copulative

pronoun of a type familiar in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic; theunusual order, *an *anh* instead of *anhu*>anis exactly paralleled

by the fifth colon, we-*en miy-jad masslinstead o we-en masslmiy-jad.

Such free word-order may often be found in Ugaritic, where the

preservation of case endings made the rigid word-order characteristic

of later Hebrew unnecessary.

The other important theological passage is verse 8 f., where the

new Qumran fragments published by Mgr. SKEHAN confirm a very

important reading of LXX, bene *Elhm (so; see JBL, 78, p. 22)instead of the bene Yisr*el of MT. The scribal error could not be more

natural, in view of the fact that both expressions were so common.

Here I must differ from EISSFELDT, who thinks that the appellationcElyon refers to the later-forgotten head of the pantheon, to whom

Yahweh was subject like the other bene *EL On the contrary, we have

here merely another example of parallelism carried over groups of

verses (cf. verses 21 and 30 f. for cases). Render:

When the Most High distributed lots,

when He separated the children of man,

He set the borders of the peoples,

like the number of sons of God;

But Yahweh's portion is His people,

Jacob is his allotted domain!

In other words,cElyon = Yahweh kept Israel for His own special

domain. This does not, of course, mean that in some earlier polytheistic form of this ethnogonic myth two gods were not involved.

It may be pointed out that the bene *Elhm ( = Ugaritic bn *El) were

in pre-Mosaic times also the bnu *Athirat (Asherah being the consort

of El), whose number is given in the Canaanite Baal Epic as seventy.

In the Table of Nations (Gen. x) we have approximately seventy

peoples listed, and in the Haggada we read that seventy angels were

appointed by God to rule the seventy nations. x) This is, therefore,

*) See especially the material collected by Louis GINZBERG in his Legends of

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344 W. F. ALBRIGHT

a very old motif, which may perfectly well go back into Canaanite

times; it has often been suggested that the Table of Nations is modeled

after a Phoenician prototype.

x

)It is, on the other hand, doubtful whether we should attribute

much special significance to the interesting passage in verse 21,

where we may render:

They set up a no-god as my rival, 2)

they made me angry by their follies;

So I will set up a no-people as their rival,

I will make them angry with a foolish nation.

The foolish nation (gqy nbl) appears in verse 6 as an appellation

of Israel itself (cam nbl we-l* hkm), so it seems clear that the

expression l*-cam refers precisely to Israel, against whose follies

God is warning its people. There is no need to turn to the Philistines

or to any other non-Israelite nation in this particular context, though

EISSFELDT must be right in considering the former as the enemy par

excellence in this poem. Characteristic of the frequent repetitions in

the poem is verse 16, where we find the same two verbs in parallelism:

They make Him jealous of strange < gods > ,3)

They make Him angry with < foreign(?) > abominations.4)

The style of the Song of Moses is intermediate between archaic

repetitive parallelism, such as we find in the Songs of Miriam 5) and

Deborah (as well as in the catalogue of very ancient hymns preserved

in Psalm lxviii, and the tenth-century style of the lyric Lament of

David in 2 Sam. i, etc. (as well as in such Psalms as xviii = 2 Sam. xxii6)

x) The mos t obv iou s poin t of contact is the der ivat ion of Canaan from Ha m

rather than Shem, in agreement wit h Phoenici an ideas but against the linguis tic

situation. Yet it cannot be denied that Gen. is, as it stands, a product of Israel;

I should now date the "Sefer hat-Toledot" to the late tenth century B.C.2) I owe this convincing rendering of qine^n to Mr. Shalom PAUL of the

Jewish Theologic al Seminary of America, wh o compares Ecc l. iv 4, where qitfh

is translated "ri val ry " by a nu mbe r of recent comme nta tor s; he also compares

Baba Batra (Talm . Bab.), 21, "the rivalry (qin^at) of scribes increases wi sdom. '

We should presumably replace the hifcil vocalization of the two verbs in 21b with

picel; no change in cons onan ts is requ ired . The re is certainly no need to identify

the foolish nation with any people other than Israel itself; for a list of past sugges

tions see EISSFELDT, op. cit., pp. 16 f.3

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SOME REMARKS ON THE SONG OF MOSES 345

and lxxviiix), which are not much later). In these later poems repeti

tion of words seems to have disappeared, except in refrains; its place

is taken by paronomasia. (It is, of course, too soon to propose cogenthypotheses about the origin of the non-repetitive style, except to say

that it belongs with a narrative rather than a lyric category.) In our

poem we find only a few examples of repetition according to familiar

Canaanite patterns, but we do find much repetition of words and

phrases in adjacent bicola. Besides the examples already quoted in

verses 17, 21, 43, note especially verse 30 f.:

*ekh yirdf *ehd *elef u-senyim jnisu rebbh

*im-l* k sr am mekrm we-Yahwh . . . hisgirmk-l* ke-srm

2) srn < ha-l* >

3) *qyebenpellm

The foe is described as crediting the God of Israel with deliberate

punishment of His own people, an astonished assertion which the

poet emphatically accepts:

"How can one man chase a thousand,

and two put a myriad to flight,

Unless their "rock" had sold them

and Yahweh had handed them over. . ?"

Truly our "Rock" is not like (their) rocks

< are not > our foes the judges?

In these lines we have a very archaic use of sr in the sense of

"god" 4) as well as an elaborate series of repetitions, with the word

taking three different endings. We also have an example of trans

position through confusion of two similar words, with which we may

compare an apparently unrecognized transposition in verse 19,

which should read:

of early orthography in the psalm, but it is unnecessary to suppose that the psalm

was at all obscure to the unknown scribe who copied it in a somewhat later pre-

exilic spelling.x) I accept EISSFELDT'S argument for a Davidic date of Psalm lxxviii (op.

cit., pp. 26-43), which is historically important, because of the otherwise unique

references to early Israelite history and geography.2) This vocalization is demanded by the context.3) By inse rting ha-l'we obtain better assonance, better metreand better sense.4) It must be remembered that sr in the sense "god" is derived from the word

*%uru (for still older *%uhru, "back , ridg e") = Aramaic tura and Ugaritic guru

(lik ^ "b thi t " A b % P t t h b GOETZE) " t i "

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346 W. F. ALBRIGHT, SONG OF MOSES

way-jar* Yahwh waj-jikcds mm-na*as

1) banw -bnotw

Yahweh saw and He became angry

at the insults of His sons and daughters.Cases ofarchaic morphology and vocabulary are common in the

Song ofMoses ; there are many which have not been mentioned here.

It is hard not to see a number ofinstances ofarchaic consonantal

spelling without the matres lectionis at the end ofwords, which gene

rally suggest a written original not later than the tenth century B.C.2)

EISSFELDT'S early date for Deut. xxxii thus appears to be justified.

He is also clearly right in recognizing the Philistine period as the

background ofthe poem, though I should go farther and point tothe intransigent monotheism of the author, which is made all the more

vivid by his archaic imagery. Such virile monotheism belongs to a time

when Yahwism was fighting for its life again st both external and internal

foesin brief, to the period when Samuel rallied Israel against its

hereditary enemy as well as against the paganism rampant m its midst.

We cannot directly compare the literary genre ofDeut. xxxii with

the Blessing ofMoses in Deut. xxxiu, since the latter belongs to a

category oftribal blessings which goes back long before the Song ofDeborah and is therefore replete with extreme archaisms While we

can probably date Deut xxxiu before the Philistine conquest of

Israel in the third quarter of the eleventh century, it may be consider

ably later than the Song of Deborah 3) The Blessing of Jacob probably

dates after the Philistine conquest but before Saul's reign 4) and the

solitary incipit ofthis category which we find m Psalm lxvm may

belong to the reign ofSaul.5)

x) With the same sense as ne^asah [CfJBL, 78, 22 ]2) Cf A L B R I G H T , JBL 63, 208 ff, CROSS and F R E E D M A N , Early Hebrew Ortho-

graphy (New Haven, 1952) and JNES X I V(1955), 237 ff3) Note the striking absence in both Judg and Deut xxxiu of the plays on

the names of tribes which characterize Gen xhx and the slightly later Lament

of Davi d Th e bitter criticism ofLevi in Gen xhxseems to point to the period

of lowest Levitic fortunes in the second half of the eleventh century, and is in

striking contrast to the earlier praise ofLevi in Deut xxxiu On the great archaism

of the latter see CROSS and FREEDMAN, JBL 67 (1948), 191 210, I heartily concur

with their orthographic argument forthe dating ofthe Blessing ofMoses in the

eleventh century4) Verse 8b does not fit and is presumably a later insertion As yet no up-to-da te

treatment of the Blessing of Jacob has appeared, though there are numerous

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^ s

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