“Your an idiot!”

The grammar police among us will be quick to point out that in an effort to insult another, this person has actually shown their own level of intelligence by using the wrong your. It should be “you’re an idiot…idiot.”

But let’s imagine that you had to quote this person who tweeted, “your an idiot”. How would you do that? Do you fix it for them? Do you just leave it as is? If you fix it then you aren’t being faithful to the original. If you leave it unchanged then you now look like the goober who cannot get the right “your”.

Insert our little Latin friend known as the [sic]. It means “so” or “thus”. And it’s a way of saying, “I know this guy spelled that wrong, I’m not the blockhead, he is.” This is the customary way of showing your reader that you have done your job as a transcriber and faithfully reported everything exactly as it appeared in the original.

What happens, then, whenever you come to a place like Hebrews 10:5 where the author has not transcribed Psalm 40 exactly as it is written? And that’s not the only place the author does this. A.T. Hanson thought he was incredibly sloppy in his citations, noting that the author “did not seriously consider the original text and setting of his citations, altered the text to suit his convenience, and made no attempt to establish the original authorship”. Maybe that’s why he didn’t put his name on it.

One example of this is the author’s use of the word “body” in Hebrews 10:5 instead of the original “ears” in Psalm 40. There are actually four places in this quotation where the author diverts from the original. So is he just sloppy?

Some interpreters attempt to rescue the author of Hebrews. Many take the position that in Hebrews an errant manuscript is being used for citations. Others believe that the text the author of Hebrews was using had simply attempted to culturally appropriate the idiom of Psalm 40, so that “ears” became “body”. While there is some plausibility to these suggestions, I’m especially bothered by the idea that an inspired writer would be using an errant text.

What if he isn’t sloppy but intentional? Though I’m not fully convinced by all of her argument, I think Karen Jobes makes an important contribution to the discussion, especially when she says:

I suggest that the author of Hebrews was expressing his argument in Heb 10 in his best rhetorical style and that what has been misunderstood by modern standards as ‘misquoting’ the OT added the very quality that made his argument very attractive to the ear of his Hellenistic audience. (From Rhetorical Achievement in the Hebrews 10 ‘Misquote’ of Psalm 40)

I think her contribution is valuable here because it holds the author of Hebrews to his own cultural standards and not to those of the 21st century. It bothers us to think that a New Testament author would not 100% verbatim quote an OT passage. I shudder a little even suggesting that such a thing is possible. And it creates a bit of fear here because I’m a firm inerrantist. I don’t think we can play hard and fast with the truth. But this is what actually propels me to this position. We need to read the biblical texts as they are and not force our standards upon them.

This is why I say your sic might be making your Bible Study sick. By imposing our standards on the biblical authors we aren’t allowing them to speak for themselves. The author of Hebrews—through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit—is telling us something here by the specific way he is quoting Psalm 40. I would argue that he is faithful to the original but only if you use a Christ-centered hermeneutic.

David certainly could have delighted to God’s will and could have been given “an open ear” or literally” ears you have dug for me”. But we all know from the biblical story that David’s obedience wasn’t perfect. He could have rightly desired obedience but his actual actions didn’t fully match up. But Christ is the greater David. And his obedience would require not only his ears being dug out but his entire body to be offered up to atone for our sins. It wasn’t just a desire to do the will of God which was required but the actual full-life obedience to the point of death. And this was the sacrifice more precious than that of the blood of goats and bulls.

Let the text speak for itself. Even when it doesn’t exactly match it’s OT counterpart. We value the text when we hold it to its own standard and not those which we’ve come up with and dubbed the only faithful 21st century exegesis.

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