Daniel 10:6 (Old Greek) — Turned away my sides?
In the Old Greek version of Daniel 10:6, there’s a completely bizarre phrase, which literally translates as:
‘It was like the vision turned away to my side’.
It’s not clear what this means, but the Hebrew version says:
‘The vision came upon my sorrows’
This means the vision overwhelmed him.
A scribal copyist error explains part of the difference, and it’s a very simple one. The Old Greek uses the word ἀπεστράφη (apestraphē) meaning turned away, but if you just change the first letter to and an ἐ, you end up with ἐπεστράφη (epestraphē), which means ‘turned upon’.
That would match the Hebrew where it says the vision came upon him, as turning upon someone is a way to say that someone was overwhelmed by something.
If we fix this silly scribal error, it ends up saying this:
‘It was like the vision turned upon my side’.
Or:
‘It was like the vision overwhelmed my side’.
Now what about the ‘my side’ part? This is entirely different from the Hebrew which speaks of his sorrows, not his side! What explains this?
Well, there’s no obvious similarity to any words that could have been confused, so scribal errors seem unlikely.
One possible explanation is that ‘my side’ refers to the hips and legs, as the Hebrew word for side/rib is related to the word for limping! Given DaniEl’s physical reaction of falling down on the floor from being overwhelmed, it’s possible that the Old Greek translation is of an older version of the Hebrew text that mentions his side, meaning his going weak in the legs.
This may be a clue showing that the Hebrew text was later updated here instead to say his sorrows were overwhelmed by the vision rather than his side being overwhelmed. Perhaps talking of people’s sides was no longer a common expression to mean going weak at the legs, so it was updated.
Fixing this, we now end up with:
‘It was like the vision overwhelmed me and my hips’.
Which means:
‘It was like the vision overwhelmed me and I went weak in the legs’.