The king mowed the grass?
So many translations! I’m confused!
I missed an important point in my recent post on Gog and Gaga, but the article was already almost too long to hold a reader’s attention. So, I am concluding that post now with some additional information that is biblical but guess what? It is not found in our bibles unless you happen to have a 2300yr old version of our Holy Bible.
Which bible translation do you read? Depending upon where you look, you can easily find as many as 1500 different translations and versions of the bible. Will the real bible please stand up! Is this really necessary? People were better informed in the ancient past with a single version of the bible!
To be clear, no other manuscript has undergone such intense scrutiny over the last 3000yrs than the Old Testament writings. The original bible was written in Hebrew, of course, and over the centuries has amazingly remained very close to the original Hebrew after a turbulent history. I think most of us assume the English King James Version or Spanish Reina Valera 1960 Version to be the most original, but this is only if we discuss recent historical versions. In my research, I would make painful efforts to decipher the original Hebrew texts, only to later discover that most of the Hebrew was lost around the 3rd century BC. In fact, Yehshua and the disciples did not read a Hebrew bible at all, but rather, the Greek Septuagint was the official version of the Torah after the Greek conquest of the middle east by 331 BC.
After conquering the Persians, Alexander the Great traveled to Jerusalem and was met with awe and respect. The Jews believed he had been sent by God just as Daniel had prophesied nearly 3 centuries earlier. Alexander was not so much impressed with Jerusalem or Judea, but was intrigued by this Hebrew God that told of Greece’s rise to power centuries earlier. Alexander’s curiosity about the Hebrew God drove the first translation of the bible from the Hebrew language into Greek at his order. In Alexandria, Egypt, named after the conquering ruler, the first translation of the Hebrew bible would set the stage for the Gentile world to receive the word of the Most High God. This new bible would be called the “Septuagint”, receiving its name for the 70 Jewish priests that would be the scribes for this new translation. There were actually 72, but the name Septuagint would be representative of the number of the 70+ priests that rewrote the Hebrew bible into Greek.
The amazing part of this story is that each priestly translating scribe would do the work of translating in private, away from the other scribes. When each of the 72 translators had accomplished their work, the 72 translations were compared for any discrepancies. History records that the hand of the Holy Spirit was guiding the scribes and there were apparently NO differences between any of the 72 translations! All 72 copies were identical after this painstaking work of the rabbinical scribes. As a result, most of the Hebrew versions would be lost with the exception of two “Targums” called the Jonathan and the Onkelos Targums. Centuries later upon their discovery, these targums would verify the accuracy of the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Torah.
After the Crucifixion, Christianity exploded among the Gentiles nations. In fact, every Muslim nation today was once a Christian nation. The invention of Islam shifted control of the fallen Roman Empire to the papacy of Rome, but even more clever, also shifted control of Jerusalem away from the Jews and into Vatican control. (More on this another time! This is no conspiracy theory, just history that isn’t taught!) A missing piece of history that also is not taught in seminaries, is another conspiracy story against the rapidly expanding population of Gentile Christians, by the very same individuals that brought about the Crucifixion.
After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD, the nation of Israel was in ruin and shambles. Jews were persecuted more harshly than Christians under the Caesars. Before the Roman siege of Jerusalem, a Pharisee teacher named rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai convinced then Caesar Vespasian to allow him to relocate his Jerusalem teaching academy to a small village near Joppa (modern Tel Aviv). Vespasian agreed and Zakai was smuggled out of Jerusalem before the siege that left no stone upon another, as prophesied by Yehshua, and left the city in ruin. In the small and obscure coastal town of Jamnia (Tel Yavne near Tel Aviv), Rabbi Ben Zakai restarted his school. It was there that the still today disputed Council of Jamnia took place in 90AD where it was decided that the Jewish bible needed to be retranslated from Greek back into Hebrew, as a way of keeping it out of the hands of Gentiles. The Pharisees were very opposed to any use of their bible by Gentiles, especially Christians.
This framework that began at the Council of Jamnia in 90AD, laid the foundation for the famous Masoretic scribes that carefully reconstructed the 331BC Greek Septuagint back into Hebrew, laying the groundwork for the final Hebrew codified bible between the 5th and 10th centuries AD. Modern scholars in modern seminaries today will refer back to the Masoretic texts when researching to pinpoint accuracy in subsequent translations such as the King James or Reina Valera 1960. Our King James version was translated from a Hebrew Masoretic version of the bible into English, which went to print in the famous 1611 King James English version.
To the credit of everyone involved from the Pharisees, to the Masoretes, the Latin Vulgate, King James, etc, very few discrepancies can be found when compared to the oldest version we have available of the bible which was not written in Hebrew, but Greek; the Septuagint. Notwithstanding, however, there are a few differences, and one of them is pretty huge!
In the small Judean village of Tekoa, near Bethlehem, lived a humble shepherd and fruit harvester named Amos. Considered one of the first prophets of the bible, Amos lived at a time slightly prior to Isaiah. Most of his prophesies targeted the Northern Kingdom under Jeroboam II, warning of God’s coming judgement. This made Amos very unpopular in Israel and he was eventually killed by a Bethel priest named Amaziah.
In our King James version, Amos chapter 7 begins with this extremely peculiar verse;
Thus hath the Lord God shewed unto me; and, behold, he formed grasshoppers in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter growth; and, lo, it was the latter growth after the king's mowings.
If you think that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, you would be 100% correct! The only thing more confusing than this verse are the scholarly commentaries on it as they try desperately to make sense of it. But go to Brenton’s English translation of the Greek Septuagint, and voila!
Thus has the Lord God shewed me; and, behold, a swarm of locusts coming from the east; and, behold, one caterpillar, king Gog.
My goodness, this is quite the game changer as it drags this Gog into the light long before Ezekiel’s prophesies of the Gog and Magog war. If you read through verse 9 of chapter 7, you begin to realize that Gog’s confrontation with God has happened before. People who have tried to reason with this verse conclude that Gog is a demon king, as swarms of locusts are often written synonymously with demons. But is Gog himself a demon? As I pointed out in the last blog post, I believe that Gog is a fallen angel even if he was not very important among their hierarchal ranks. And as I read this, “swarms of locusts and one caterpillar”, I find it very interesting that the caterpillar is distinguished separately from the locusts. Obviously, what we know about caterpillars is their metamorphosis into butterflies. However, I believe this is one butterfly who left his first estate (Jude 1:6) having followed the fallen angels, but was not chained as Jude mentions since he was a mere messenger to the others. Being one that was condemned but not chained as the others mentioned in Jude, his new habitation was reversed from butterfly to caterpillar. And while indeed a king of demons, is not a demon himself. Gog is a victim of poor choices, given charge of a swarm of demons in the absence of his convicted felon friends.
This reminds me of the television series “Designated Survivor”, when suddenly after a brutal attack on Washington DC, the lowest ranking presidential cabinet member is given charge of the Whitehouse by default because there was no one else left.
There are other very slight differences between the Septuagint and King James, most are very insignificant. Please do not let this cause you to lose confidence in your bible, but also exercise caution in whatever translation you choose to read. I believe there are many conspiracies in modern translations that began around 1960. It was in the 1960’s that we began this turning away from God as a Christian nation. In 1963 the bible was outlawed in schools and public places. I personally use a 1947 version of the King James, and the internet for various research and verification.
One more very important point I would like to make about the Greek Septuagint that was used by the Disciples, is that they had several books included in their version that are missing from ours. This is one of the ongoing disputes between Catholics and Protestants, but on this one, I have to give the Catholics a little very small credit, with the exception of the Book of Enoch which no modern bible includes. The Book of Enoch was part of the Greek Septuagint used by the Disciples, and we should be reading some of it today, since it is where we can find the first mention of the “Son of Man” prophesied by Enoch.
Keep in mind, I could always be wrong about Gog, and he very well could be a demon rather than fallen angel. Whatever he is, God will deal with him harshly very soon!
I’ll close with a word from Paul in his second letter to Timothy:
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness…
2 Timothy 3:16