His mouth was like the sea?
The Old Greek manuscript of Daniel 10:6 literally says, regarding the man in linen:
‘His mouth was like the sea’.
That’s very confusing and makes no sense. What’s the explanation? It seems to be a scribal error combined with an interpretive translation.
First, let’s look at ‘mouth’.
The Hebrew text says body, not mouth. The Greek text probably said body too, originally, but there was scribal error. You see, the Greek for body is ΣΩ͂ΜΑ (soma), and mouth is ΣΤΌΜΑ (stoma). So at some point over the centuries, there was a simple accident and a copyist changed body to mouth.
The fact that such an error is so rare and so obvious just shows, ironically, how reliable these manuscripts are.
Second, let’s consider ‘like the sea’.
The Hebrew says ‘like tarshish’. Now, there’s a gemstone called tarshish, usually translated as beryl. That gemstone comes in a blue variety called aquamarine.
Perhaps the Greek translator decided to just say ‘like the sea’, meaning blue, for the benefit of readers who wouldn’t get the cultural reference to the blue color of tarshish gemstone.
So we use insertions to correct ‘His mouth was like the sea’ to read:
‘His [body] was [blue] like the sea’.