OG Daniel 11:37 – The desire of a woman/women?
The Old Greek uses the singular ‘desire of woman’ instead of the Hebrew’s ‘the desire of women’.
Why the discrepancy?
And what does it mean, anyway?
Some scholars have wondered if this was a specific reference to a female diety (or dieties), since it follows on from the previous statement that the king won’t care about his ancestor’s gods (which is true, since Antiochus IV promoted worship of himself and Zeus over everything else).
However, if it really is referring to one or more female gods, it’s not clear which… There were many!
Also, if you’re wondering, it seems unlikely that the reference means that king lacked the literal, physical desire for women or a woman, as Antiochus IV was married (bizarrely) to his sister, and had two children with her.
However, the grammar is ambiguous! It could alternatively mean that the king didn’t care about the woman’s desire (or women’s desires), ergo, the desire that a woman or women might have. What could that be?
Well, the Greek and Hebrew words for ‘woman’ double as the word for ‘wife’, so it’s possible that this passage is actually talking about the desire of the king’s wife.
Now this may be a possible explanation!
His wife, Laodice IV, was famously on her third marriage, and each marriage was to one of her full brothers… She had a son from a previous marriage who was set to succeed the throne, but instead, her new husband, Antiochus IV, had the boy murdered to ensure that his own son would succeed.
If the verse is referring to this event, it would fit well with the next clause, where it says he’ll be lifted up ‘in every way’.
If this is correct (and we’re not saying it is), then it would mean the Hebrew text was later changed, turning woman/wife into women/wives. This could not be a simple copyist error, because the two words are quite different (in a quirk of the Hebrew language, they come from different roots), so it would have to be a deliberate ‘correction’ made by someone who didn’t know what they were doing.
Since this is an interesting explanation that you won’t see anywhere else, we translate the verse to include it. We say:
‘He won’t care about his ancestor’s gods, nor for his wife’s desire. No, because he’ll be lifted up in every way…’