OG Daniel 12:12: Reach or Gather?
The Old Greek has a curious literal difference here to the Hebrew.
Like the Hebrew, it says that the one who waits (actually, it says ‘remains’) will be happy, but then it diverges:
- The Hebrew says that he will reach the 1,335 days.
- The Old Greek uses the word ΣΥΝΑΞΕΙ which means ‘he will gather together at’ the 1,335 days.
If the Old Greek was correct, it may refer to gathering together in worship or as a community, as it’s from the same root as ‘synagogue’. So perhaps it’s trying to say that the person who sticks close to the community for the duration of the 1,335 days will be happy for doing so.
Alternatively, being gathered together is a common expression meaning dying. It’s also common in end-time prophecies.
So why is the Old Greek different? Is it an insightful revelation, or something less exciting?
Well, there’s no obvious way the Hebrew could have been misread… It is, however, very possible that the Greek text was corrupted in later copying.
You see, if the translator had chosen ΗΞΕΙ (‘he will arrive’) as the equivalent of the Hebrew ‘reach’, it’s easy to corrupt it to say what we now read in the Old Greek:
If, upon later copying, the first letter got corrupted to an Α, that would give us ΑΞΕΙ (‘he will bring’). This is very possible because the two letters of Η and Α often got mixed up, and the sounds became similar too!
Well, now what do you have? You have ‘he will bring at the 1,335 days’.
That makes no sense!
Well, a later copyist would have seen this and realized that yes, something has gone wrong here! If he then ‘corrected’ the grammar to add the ΣΥΝ- prefix (meaning ‘with’), it would become ΣΥΝΑΞΕΙ. With that ‘fix’ the text now reads, ‘he will gather together at 1,335 days.’
That looks fine to our copyist, as gathering together is a common expression found in the Bible.
‘Job done!’ our ancient copyist thinks. He congratulates himself on making such a great correction, and he moves on to the next verse.
To recap:
- ΗΞΕΙ (‘he will arrive’) gets corrupted to…
- ΑΞΕΙ (‘he will bring’) which gets ‘corrected’ to…
- ΣΥΝΑΞΕΙ (‘he will gather together at’)
In our translation, we fix this silly error and link to this note. We also put it in more familiar wording:
‘The one who makes it to 1,335 days will be happy!’