This Is the Token

I suggested earlier that various texts use the word 'sign' or 'mark' (Hebrew 'ot or Greek semeion) to refer to priests (specifically, Genesis 1, Genesis 4, and Isaiah 8).  Now Genesis 9 give us an interesting test, where it identifies the 'token' (again, 'ot and semeion -- the English translation is different, but the Hebrew and Greek are the same term as the other texts) of the eternal covenant (brit 'olam), as a bow set in the clouds.  A rainbow.

Cloud imagery is common of texts set inside the temple: for starters, the Mount of Transfiguration, Daniel 7, and Lehi's dream.  This reflects the incense altar that was set in the hekal, the middle room of Solomon's Temple.  But are there any texts that corroborate the idea that a rainbow might refer to a priestly figure?

Turns out there's at least one.  Chapter 50 of Sirach, a book preserved in the LXX but not the MT, shows the coming forth of a priest named Simon son of Onias in a temple setting (scholars think on the Day of Atonement).  Verses 5-7 read like this: "...how he was glorified as he spun around the shrine, as he exited from the house of the veil.  Like a morning star in the midst of a cloud, like the full moon in the days of a feast, like the sun shining on the shrine of the most high, like the rainbow gleaming in clouds of glory..."

We have: the specified location in the temple; clouds; comparison of the priest with astral bodies, like 1 Nephi 1 (stars = angels = priests); and the identification of the priest with the rainbow.

So I think the message of Genesis 9 is not that as long as you see rainbows, God won't flood the earth, but when rainbows cease, we might be in trouble (this was the folklore I knew as a kid, and believe me, I looked for rainbows with great anxiety).  I think the message of Genesis 9 is that the sign, 'ot, of the eternal covenant, is that the Lord appears to his people in the temple.  In ordinances, he does this in the person of his authorized messenger, the Melchizedek priest.

Bookshelf: The Septuagint

The ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament is important.  Since it's likely to come up in class and will definitely come up in your study, I want to make sure you know a few things about it, and point you to where you can find an English version.

It's called the Septuagint (sep-TOO-uh-jint), from the Greek word for "seventy," and is therefore also identified by the Roman numeral for 70: LXX.  The number 70 is an old Hebrew stereotype meaning the whole world, or sometimes the world outside Israel (the idea being that there are seventy nations).  You can see this idea in both the Old Testament and the New.  The LXX is the earliest known translation of the Old Testament into another language -- some parts of it are pre-Jesus, even as early as 200 B.C.

The really interesting thing about this old Greek translation is that it's often very different from the Hebrew, in two ways: First, it contains books or parts of books that aren't preserved in Hebrew, but were considered by the ancient Jewish translators part of scripture (for instance, the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach or the extra chapters of Daniel and Jeremiah).

Second, the LXX contains some very different readings from the traditional Hebrew text of the Bible (the Masoretic text, or MT).  For instance, Deuteronomy 32:8 in the MT says that God divided the world up according to the sons of Israel, but in the LXX the same verse says that God divided the world according to the sons of God... these are radically different ideas.

To really come to grips with the differences between the LXX and the MT and why they matter, you'll need some Greek and Hebrew (there's my little pitch, again).  But for starters, you can find the New English Translation of the Septuagint in its entirety online, here (I know, the web-page looks a little hokey, but the LXX translation itself is good, and downloadable in .pdf).  You can also buy a physical copy of the book.