Was it "potter" or "treasury"?

[TimCallahan]

The gospel writers frequently used the Book of Zechariah, one of the 12 minor prophets, for source material. One curious verse from Zechariah was used as prophetic of the death of Judas Iscariot. After acting as the shepherd for the flock destined to be slain, the prophet asks for his wages, which amount to 30 shekels of silver. Then Zech. 11:13 says:

Then the LORD said to me, "Cast it to the _____ - the lordly price at which I was paid off by them. So I took the thirty shekels of silver and cast them to the _____ in the house of the LORD.

The word that fills the two blank spaces is, depending on which translation one uses, either "potter" or "treasury." The Hebrew word for "potter" is yatsar, the word for "treasury" is owtsar. It would appear that a scribal error has occurred. In Hebrew letters yatsar is written Yodh (Y) - tsadeh (TS) - resh (R). Owtsar is written aleph - vav - tsadeh - resh. Were it not for aleph, representing, when placed at the beginning of a word, that it begins with a vowel, at the beginning of owtsar, the scribal error could be simply seen as writing yodh in place of vav. Both letters are written as a single stroke, with the vav being a longer stroke. "Treasury" seems, after all, to be the logical place into which one would cast 30 shekels of silver.

On the other hand, if the original verse contained the word yatsar, I could see ascribe "correcting" it to owtsar. There is some confusion as to what it meant evident in the Gospel of Matthew. Judas, filled with remorse at having betrayed Jesus wants to return the 30 pieces of silver and eventually throws it down in the temple (Mt. 27:5 - 8, emphasis and bracketed material added):

And throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he [Judas] departed and went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, "It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money." So they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. Therefore that field has been called Field of Blood to this day.

Luke has Judas by the potter's field, Akeldama, himself. The field, from which potters dug red clay is aptly named Field of Blood, simply form the color of its clay.

I was trying to find a picture of the verse from Zechariah as it appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls to see if if there owtsar is written beginning with an aleph or if the addition of the aleph to the beginning of the word was introduced, along with vowel points, by the rabbinic scholars who created the Masoretic Text between 600 and 900. Does anyone have any ideas on this subject?

 

[Recovering Agnostic]

On the other hand, if the original verse contained the word yatsar, I could see ascribe "correcting" it to owtsar. There is some confusion as to what it meant evident in the Gospel of Matthew. Judas, filled with remorse at having betrayed Jesus wants to return the 30 pieces of silver and eventually throws it down in the temple (Mt. 27:5 - 8, emphasis and bracketed material added):

And throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he [Judas] departed and went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, "It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money." So they took counsel and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. Therefore that field has been called Field of Blood to this day.

Is it possible that this was a deliberate Hebrew pun? There's a surprising amount of wordplay in the Bible that gets lost in translation. One of the few that generally gets preserved is at the start of Jeremiah.

Not trying to promote the idea, just wondering.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

Hm, does simply "vav - tsadeh - resh" have any particular meaning in Hebrew?

 

[Myriad]

How did all the innocent hardworking potters feel about having their red clay supply contaminated with buried bodies?

In other words, "cast it to the potter" makes no sense in the context of the potter's field explanation, in which the silver goes ultimately not to any potters (and in fact, seems to take a resource away from the potters) but to the benefit of the indigents buried in the field.

There could, though, be some other sense in which silver could be cast to a potter. Perhaps a potter could grind it up and use it in a glaze, or use a pottery kiln to melt it down (into what?), or something. Some research into uses of silver in pottery and uses of pottery in temple proceedings might be in order -- and if that turns up dry, I guess I'd prefer the "treasury" translation, as being a better fit for both blanks.

I don't suppose they meant, cast it into Harry Potter's vault in Gringott's? Silver is standard currency in the wizarding world, if I recall correctly.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[TimCallahan]

Hm, does simply "vav - tsadeh - resh" have any particular meaning in Hebrew?

Apparently not. I went to a transliteration / translation site and got the message that such a word doesn't exist when I typed vav - tsadeh - resh.

 

[TimCallahan]

Is it possible that this was a deliberate Hebrew pun? There's a surprising amount of wordplay in the Bible that gets lost in translation. One of the few that generally gets preserved is at the start of Jeremiah.
Not trying to promote the idea, just wondering.

Could you elaborate on the punning at the beginning of Jeremiah?

As to word play, some have asserted that "Cast it to the potter," was similar to, "Throw it to the dogs." However, I don't know that there is anything that substantiates such an interpretation, except that, according to Strong's Concordance, the Hebrew word translated in this verse as "cast," shalak, means to "throw away." That still wouldn't explain the potter being in the "House of the LORD" (i.e. the house of YHWH) or why casting something "to the potter" would be equivalent to throwing it away. That discarding something into the temple might be a slap at the priestly authorities, saying the temple had become a place of refuse.

ETA: I just went to the Jewish Encyclopedia site on Zechariah. According to the encyclopedia, not only is the Book of Zechariah an artifice, combining two separate works (chapters 1 - 8 and chapters 9 - 14), but there may also be a division between chapters 9 - 11 and the rest of the second half. The quote in question may come from a pre-exilic prophet who was a contemporary of Amos. That prophet wrote ca. 760 - 750 BCE. Amos was at odds with the Temple establishment. If the author of Zech. 11:12, 13 shared Amos' hostility toward the religious establishment, then seeing the tTemple as corrupt and a place of refuse would fit the verses in question.

 

[TimCallahan]

The Dead Sea Scrolls could certainly solve the problem of whether the original word in Zech. 11:13 was yatsar - "potter" or owtsar - "treasury." At least it would show which word was written in the Hebrew text at about the time of Christ. Unfortunately, though the Book of Zechariah was represented in the Qumran texts, its remnants were fragmentary, and Zechariah 11 isn't represented among the fragments.

However, there is a clue as to why the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX) translated the word in question as "furnace," or, in its original Greek, choneuterion. In the LXX version, "the LORD" (i.e. YHWH) tells the prophet to cast the 30 shekels of silver into the furnace to test their worth. The Hebrew word tsaraph "smelter" can also mean "refiner." In the Hebrew alphabet tsaraph is written tsadeh - resh - fe or TS - R - PH. Thus, it could be a corruption of yatsar by dropping the yodh - a small letter consisting of a single, short stroke - and adding a fe.

I also looked up transcription errors and found that a number of different types:

Substitution: Substituting a similarly shaped letter for the original, such as a yodh (Y) for a vav (V or W).

Transposition: Reversing the order of two letters. This is surprisingly easy to do. In the OP I actually wrote "form" instead of "from," en error the spell-check didn't flag, because "form" is a real word.

Omission: Dropping a letter

Insertion: Adding a letter

A possible scenario that could have changed "treasury" - owtsar - or aleph - vav - tsadeh - resh, into "potter" - yatsar - or yodh - tsadeh - resh, could have resulted from one scribe's accidental omission of the aleph, followed by a later scribe deliberately changing the vav to a yodh to make the word make sense, since vav - tsadeh - resh doesn't spell anything. The initial omission could have been facilitated by the fact that words were originally run together in the Hebrew text. Thus, "She loves me; she loves me not" - devoid of punctuation or vowels, written all in caps and run together - would be written: SHLVSMSHLVSMNT. In the case of "the treasury" or, in Hebrew, ha owtsar, the text would read hey - aleph - vav - tsadeh - resh. After the omission, it would read hey - vav - tsadeh - resh.

 

[CriticalSock]

Just because I'm not contributing doesn't mean I'm not interested!

 

[Brown]

This is just to note that the tales in Matthew and Acts (supposedly written by Luke) differ a bit.

In Matthew, Judas threw the money in the temple and then went off and hanged himself. The temple priests used the money to buy a field.

In Acts, Judas himself bought the field and then killed himself by throwing himself to the ground. He must have thrown himself off something high, because he died when "his bowels gushed out."

 

[TimCallahan]

This is just to note that the tales in Matthew and Acts (supposedly written by Luke) differ a bit.

In Matthew, Judas threw the money in the temple and then went off and hanged himself. The temple priests used the money to buy a field.

In Acts, Judas himself bought the field and then killed himself by throwing himself to the ground. He must have thrown himself off something high, because he died when "his bowels gushed out."

Both Matthew and Luke / Acts have comparatively extensive stories about the betrayal by Judas. However, both, along with Mark, have Judas betray Jesus with a kiss. According to the Farrer / Goulder Hypothesis, a rival to the Four Source Theory as a solution to the relationship of the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew was based on Mark, but added narrative material as well as sayings. Luke, in this theory, is based on both Mark and Matthew, while altering material from the latter and adding new narratives. This hypothesis explains the fact that there is some shared narrative material, as well as sayings, between Matthew and Luke that is not found in Mark. Personally I would opt for a blend of the Four Source Theory and the Farrer / Goulder Hypothesis, with both Luke and Matthew (along with the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas) using "Q" as a source for the sayings of Jesus, whale assuming that narrative material shared between Matthew and Luke originated in Matthew.

All of the material on the betrayal by, and fate of, Judas derives from the Hebrew scriptures, not only using the 30 pieces of silver and the treasury / potter imagery from Zechariah, but as well from the narrative in 2 Samuel on Absolom,s revolt against his father, King David, and the ensuing betrayal and murder of Amasa by Joab.

In the narrative from 2 Samuel, after Absolom has driven David out of Jerusalem, his chief counselor, Ahithophel, uges him to pursue David and finish him off before he can gather any support. One of David's supporters, Hushai, pretending to support Absolom, says that Absolom should wait and gather more strength before risking a final battle with David. When Absolom favors Hushai's counsel, Ahithophel, seeing Absolom's cause is doomed, goes home, sets his house in order and hangs himself. When Absolom is killed by Joab and his men, against David's orders, David replaces him, as commander of his forces, with Amasa, who had been Absolom's commander. However, Amasa proves ineffectual at putting down yet another revolt against David. Joab, ever the pragmatist and seemingly devoid of an ethics, solves the Amasa problem by direct action (2 Sam. 20:9, 10a):

And Joab said to Amasa, "I it well with you, my brother?" And Joab took Amasa by the beard with his right hand to kiss him. But Amasa did not observe the sword which was in Joab's

hand; so Joab struck him with it in the body, and shed his bowels to the ground, without striking a second blow and he died.

So, in the Synoptic Gospels, Judas, like Joab, betrays with a kiss. Later, according to Matthew, he hangs himself, as did the traitor Ahithophel. Just as Ahithophel betrayed his sovereign, King David, so Judas betrayed Jesus the messianic new David. In all the scriptures, Old Testament and New, the only two people to hang themselves are Ahithophel and Judas. When Amasa dies he sheds his bowels to the ground, just as Judas does while looking down at the potter's field, In fact, as Randel Helms notes, the wording of the incident of Amasa's death in the Greek of the Septuagint (LXX) is strikingly similar to the wording in the Greek of Acts.

It's also notable that, in 1 Cor. 15:5, the risen Christ first appears to Cephas (Peter), then "the twelve." Paul, writing 1 Corinthians ca. CE 50, does not seem to be aware of any betrayal, and, in fact, none would be necessary, since Jesus was, according to the gospel narratives, a public figure. The betrayal by Judas would seem to have been a later invention by the gospel writers.​

 

[Brown]

It's also notable that, in 1 Cor. 15:5, the risen Christ first appears to Cephas (Peter), then "the twelve." Paul, writing 1 Corinthians ca. CE 50, does not seem to be aware of any betrayal, and, in fact, none would be necessary, since Jesus was, according to the gospel narratives, a public figure. The betrayal by Judas would seem to have been a later invention by the gospel writers.

I have no comment on our other thoughtful remarks, but I want to add a little bit to the point about betrayal.

It is true that Paul seemed to be unaware of the details of the betrayal or the fate of Judas. Some sort of betrayal is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 11:23: "For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread...."

But this is just part of a larger, and perhaps stranger, picture: Paul seemed to be unaware of a hell of a lot of the details reported in the Gospels. Paul didn't seem to be aware of many of Jesus's most famous sayings or actions, or the history of Jesus's life.

As for the mechanics of the betrayal, it has been argued that there is at least a wee bit of credibility there. It may have been true that Jesus had some local fame, but the arrest may have occurred in poor light and the arresting personnel might not have been "up on current events." Perhaps all they knew is that they were supposed to bring in the ringleader of this little seditious group, but they might not have known for sure which of this group the ringleader was. Judas identified the ringleader, and that is the guy they took.

It's a lot of speculation, of course; but it is somewhat more credible speculation than some speculative "explanations" that seek to reconcile the accounts of Judas's death in Matthew and Acts. Some of such attempts border upon comical.

 

[TimCallahan]

I have no comment on our other thoughtful remarks, but I want to add a little bit to the point about betrayal.

It is true that Paul seemed to be unaware of the details of the betrayal or the fate of Judas. Some sort of betrayal is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 11:23: "For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread...."
But this is just part of a larger, and perhaps stranger, picture: Paul seemed to be unaware of a hell of a lot of the details reported in the Gospels. Paul didn't seem to be aware of many of Jesus's most famous sayings or actions, or the history of Jesus's life.
As for the mechanics of the betrayal, it has been argued that there is at least a wee bit of credibility there. It may have been true that Jesus had some local fame, but the arrest may have occurred in poor light and the arresting personnel might not have been "up on current events." Perhaps all they knew is that they were supposed to bring in the ringleader of this little seditious group, but they might not have known for sure which of this group the ringleader was. Judas identified the ringleader, and that is the guy they took.

It's a lot of speculation, of course; but it is somewhat more credible speculation than some speculative "explanations" that seek to reconcile the accounts of Judas's death in Matthew and Acts. Some of such attempts border upon comical.

Concerning the first highlighted area: That's an excellent point. I'd forgotten about that verse. The Greek verb often translated as "betrayed" is paradidomi. It's made up of two parts. the "didomi" part is a verb meaning to deliver or hand over. The prepositional prefix para can mean anything from "next to" (as in paragraph - written words net to each other), "alongside of" (as in parallel), "beyond" or "over" (as in paranormal), to "against" (as in paradox, against belief). Depending on the context, paradidomi, meaning literally "to deliver over," can mean to deliver a package, to give a present, to arrest - in terms of "handing over" to the authorities and, of course, to betray. If we translate the verse from the original Greek to read, "On the night he was handed over," we render the context a bit more neutral with respect to betrayal. If we translate it as, "On the night he was arrested," there's no longer a betrayal. It's possible that the verb in question is regularly translated as "betrayed" by Christian translators who implicitly assumed agreement between the gospels and the letters of Paul.

Concerning the second hilited section: The opening chapters of Paul's epistle to the Galatians is quite enlightening in this regard. Consider the following verses (emphasis added):

Gal. 1:11, 12: For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not mans gospel. For I did not receive it from man nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

Gal 1:15 - 19: But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia; and again I returned to Damascus.

Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas, and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother.

So, Paul's knowledge of Jesus came almost exclusively from a vision (read hallucination), augmented by what he know from hearsay before, when he was persecuting the Christian sect, and a minuscule exposure to Peter (Cephas) and James. In fact, he glories in the the superiority of his vision by deliberately avoiding contact with those "contaminated" by the personal experience of having actually talked and listened to Jesus!

Concerning the third hilited section: Yeah, it's possible a real betrayal took place and the Judas had to single Jesus out. However, the mechanism of betrayal by a kiss, found in the Synoptic Gospels, is probably taken from 2 Samuel. It's noteworthy both that the Gospel of John includes the betrayal by Judas and that it dispenses with the kiss (Jn. 18:2 - 8). Than John includes the betrayal means that, quite possibly, by the time Mark was written, ca. CE 70, the legend of a betrayal was circulating and was part of the common oral tradition among the those of the Christian sect of Judaism. That John felt free to dispense with the kiss might well be because he saw it as based on Joab's betrayal of Amasa in 2 Samuel.