"The Lord rebuke you Satan"

by mdb 1 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  mdb

  Who says, “The Lord rebuke you Satan”?

  And the [angel of the] Lord [yhwh] said to Satan, “The Lord [yhwh] rebuke you, Satan! The Lord [yhwh] who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?”
  ~Zech 3:2

  [angel of the] : Addition made into the NWT. Any additions added in brackets [] (according to the Forward in the NWT) are to clarify a passage and not add to the meaning of a passage. Does the addition of the phrase [angel of the] change the doctrinal meaning of the verse? It certainly does in this case. Without it, we have the Lord [yhwh] saying to Satan, “the Lord [yhwh] rebuke you”. With the added phrase, we have the angel of the Lord saying, “the Lord [yhwh] rebuke you.” In the verse above, there are two (2) distinct persons of yhwh, but in the NWT, one person of yhwh is removed.

  One yhwh is the eternal Son of God, the pre-incarnate Christ. This would go against the Watchtower teaching that Jesus is "a" god rather than God. Therefore, the addition of the [angel of the] to support their doctrinal bias and remove the reference to a second person of yhwh.
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  Leolaia

  Bear in mind that the Society does cite textual support for their rendering....the Syriac Peshitta has "angel of the Lord" in this passage. It is however pretty poor support since the MT, 4QXII e, LXX, and the Vulgate all have YHWH or "the Lord" instead.

  I can see another motivation for having "angel of the Lord" in the NWT. This version is designed to insert "Jehovah" in the NT where quotations of the OT occur, and the Society regards Jude 9 as a citation of Zechariah 3:2, so they have inserted this name into the text of Jude 9. The problem is that Michael the archangel is the one who utters these words in Jude 9, so to harmonize with it, the Society has adopted the less-probable position that Zechariah 3:2 has "the angel of Jehovah" say these words. Of course, Jude 9 does not cite Zechariah, it actually quotes an apocryphal work.