Tool Alpha
The Contradiction Desk
Claimed Bible contradictions, stated the way they circulate, each with one diagnosis and the evidence for it: the Hebrew, the Greek, the manuscripts.
Ears, or a body?
Psalm 40:6 says God dug open the psalmist's ears. Hebrews 10:5 quotes it as a body prepared. Hebrews is quoting the old Greek translation of the psalm, not the Hebrew.
Hebrews 10:5, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: did Hebrews misquote the psalm? The newspaper quoted the mayor saying the city needs hands, and the radio quoted him saying it needs workers. Did one of them get him wrong?
Psalm 40:6 says mine ears hast thou opened. Hebrews 10:5 quotes the psalm as a body hast thou prepared me and builds an argument about Christ's bodily offering on it. The New Testament changed the Old Testament's words to fit Jesus.
The ESV Study Bible says the Hebrew literally reads ears you have dug for me, and that the Septuagint translators, and the writer of Hebrews after them, understood the metaphor as the making of a body. The CSB's own note on the psalm gives the literal Hebrew as you hollow out ears for me. The site's translation entry gives the Septuagint wording, soma de katertiso moi, and says Hebrews quotes that Greek directly. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible also says the citation is from the Greek version. The difference arose in translation, in the Septuagint, and Hebrews inherited it. It is not in the Hebrew text of the psalm.
Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears hast thou opened: burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required.
No source read for this build states this one, so it is given as it circulates: the author of Hebrews misquoted the psalm, replacing ears with body to make it predict the incarnation. At full strength: an argument that depends on a word the original does not contain is not an argument from Scripture but from a translation of it.
MacArthur says the change is not significant: the Greek translators took the Hebrew as a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, and ears were chosen because they stand for obedience. The ESV Study Bible says New Testament quotations often reword or adapt the Old Testament, always compatibly with its meaning, and on the psalm itself that Hebrews uses these verses because its readers were tempted to go back to the sacrifices.
The diagnosis explains where body came from. It does not settle whether arguing from the Greek rendering is legitimate, which is the skeptic's real question. The harmonizers' answer, that part stands for whole, is a claim about the Greek translators' intent, and the sources here assert it rather than show it. Whether the Septuagint translators had a different Hebrew text in front of them is not addressed in the sources read here, so the entry claims nothing either way.
Not a claim that Hebrews invented the wording. The Greek wording was there before Hebrews used it.
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- ESV Study Bible, notes on Psalm 40:6-8 and Hebrews 10:5-7
- CSB Study Bible, textual note and note on Psalm 40:6
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, note on Hebrews 10:4-5
- The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), note on Hebrews 10:5
- Why Do Bible Translations Differ? (jayms.com tool data), entry psalm-40-6
- King James Version, Psalm 40:6 and Hebrews 10:5
