And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,Most Bibles will have a footnote indicating that this quotation comes from Micah 5:2. However, if you actually look up Micah 5:2, it doesn't quite match that:
are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for from you shall come a ruler
who will shepherd my people Israel.
But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,As you can see, the phrasing is somewhat different, but the basic meaning is the same in the first part of the quote. However there is a significant difference in meaning in the final clause--the Shepherd-of-Israel thing doesn't match up to the from-ancient-days thing at all. If you spend much time looking up New Testament quotes of Old Testament Scriptures, you will see that this sort of thing is fairly common. Some critics have looked at differences like these and claimed that they are evidence of errors in the New Testament. While the differences are undeniably there, I would argue that they are not errors, but rather represent a number of cultural differences between the time when the New Testament was written and now.
who are too little to be among the clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
one who is to be ruler in Israel,
whose coming forth is from of old,
from ancient days.
First, the Bible was not divided up into the chapters and verses we are familiar with until the 16th century. This division of the text was not something infallibly inspired by God. It was simply a convention that was agreed upon by biblical scholars to make it easier to find things. "John 3:16" is a lot more concise and accurate than "You know, that place where it says God gave his only Son..." These divisions are pretty arbitrary. Chapters often end in the middle of a paragraph. Verses sometimes even end in the middle of a sentence (see Ephesians 2:8-9). Since the Bible had not yet been broken up into chapters and verses, it's not surprising that Old Testament quotes in the New Testament do not always match up neatly to the beginning and ending of the modern chapter and verses. It seems likely that the scholars whom Herod consulted simply stopped quoting Micah 5:2 after the first three lines of the quotation.
The last line of the quotation, "who will shepherd my people Israel," seems to be a mash up of this kind, but it is not clear (at least to me) which verse in the Old Testament this line is drawn from. The ESV text note suggests that it is taken from Ezekiel 34:23:
And I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.This verse is a Messianic prophecy which refers to the coming Messiah as a shepherd, and Jesus certainly fulfilled it. However, the rest of the verse seems quite different from Matthew's quotation of Micah. "Shepherd of Israel" is actually a fairly common phrase in the Old Testament. It is used sometimes to refer to Israel's king, sometimes to refer to the Messiah (the king who was to come and restore the kingdom), and sometimes to refer to God. To make things more confusing, verses which, in their immediate historical context, refer to the king of Israel are often taken to have an additional metaphorical meaning which refers to the coming Messiah. I think the closest match is 1 Chronicles 11:2, a verse about King David.The fact that Bethlehem, the city identified as the birthplace of the Messiah, is also the City of David seems to support this connection, but I could easily be wrong--the people who translated the ESV certainly know more about it than I do.
Second, there was a different attitude toward quotations in the first century A.D. than there is today. To people now, quotations are all about accuracy. A quote is considered invalid unless it is word-for-word identical to the original and is coupled with a reference so that you can go read the original yourself to verify that the quote is correct. In the first century, a quotation was about conveying the meaning of the original statement, not the exact phrasing. Because of this, first century quotes are often more like modern paraphrases than like modern quotes. It was acceptable change the way something was worded in order to make the original intent more clear to the intended audience. It was even acceptable mash together two quotes from different authors and only attribute the one of them. In Mark 1:2-3, for example, part of Malachi 3:1 is mashed together with Isaiah 40:3, and the entire quotation is attributed to the prophet Isaiah.
Third, Old Testament quotations in the New Testament are taken from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament completed in the second century B.C. The translation is named for the Seventy Scholars who translated it (from the Latin septuaginta, meaning seventy). Because of the differences between languages, translating from one language to another inherently loses some of the meaning present in the original language. To illustrate this, I went to Google Translate and translated the following sentence from English to Chinese and then back to English.
Original Sentence:
The Bible is a book written by over a 20 authors over a period of 1600 years.Chinese Sentence:
圣经是过了一段1600年的超过20作者写一本书。Re-translated Sentence:
The Bible is over a period of 1600 to more than 20 authors to write a book.Other than the "20" and the "1600," I can't tell you diddly about what the Chinese sentence says; however, the re-translated English is pretty different than the original sentence. The verse in Micah is a direct translation from the Hebrew to English. The verse in Matthew is a translation from Greek to English of a translation from Hebrew to Greek.Given the double translation, it is not surprising that differences in wording creep into the translation.
It is important to note that human translators are better at translating than Google Translate--they know both languages and can tell when something doesn't work right in the target language. They can then apply intelligence to change the translation so that it makes sense. This application of intelligence improves the quality of the translation, but it also introduces the bias of the translator to the translation process.
In general, the translation philosophy of modern translators is that the translated text should represent the original text as accurately as possible with as little of the translators' bias introduced as possible. There are differences in translation philosophy between the translators of various translations, but most of these differences are opinions about what method of translation yields the most accurate finished product. In the New American Standard Bible (NASB), the translators believed that the most accurate translation would be produced by a word-for-word translation and that changes should only be introduced to make the translated sentences adhere to the rules of English grammar. By contrast, the translators of the (original) New International Version (NIV) believed that the most accurate translation would be produced by translating phrases or sentences from the original languages into English because there are often figures of speech in one language that do not translate directly into another For example, the phrase "he has a chip on his shoulder" means that he assumes others are out to get him and reacts defensively (see here for the phrase's origin). If translated directly to another language, it would (probably) just mean that he has a piece of wood on his shoulder. If this were a Hebrew idiom rather than an English one, the NASB might translate this as "he has a piece of wood on his shoulder" (and add a text note saying that this is a phrase in Hebrew means "he is belligerent"). The NIV might translate the same phrase as "he is belligerent" (and add a text note saying the original phrase translates literally as "he has a piece of wood on his shoulder"). Which way is better? It depends on your preference and your purpose. For hardcore Bible study, the NASB is probably better because it gives a more direct sense of the original language. For just reading the book, the NIV is probably better because the sentences flow more nicely and one doesn't have to work as hard to understand it.
The basic translation philosophy of the Septuagint was very different. They were, of course aware that it is easy for information to be lost in translation and they wanted to convey as much of the meaning of the original into Greek as possible. However, they did not see a distinction between their theological interpretation of the Scriptures and the actual words of the Scriptures. Because of this, the Seventy Scholars were concerned with translating the interpreted meaning of the text than with eliminating their own bias as modern translators are. This is philosophically very similar to the ancient attitude toward quotations which we discussed above: the point is to get the original meaning across, not to quibble about exact wording of the original. As a result, the Septuagint often reflects the Messianic bent Jewish theology in the second century B.C. This does not mean they were not interested in translating accurately, just that if a verse might be taken in one of two ways, one Messianic and the other not, the Messianic option will usually be taken. This translation philosophy sounds strange to modern ears, but we must remember that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament treat the Septuagint as though it were the authoritative Word of God.
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