Psalm 40:6 ~

⁶ In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted,
    but you have given me an open ear.^[a]
Burnt offering and sin offering
    you have not required.
⁷ Then I said, “Behold, I have come;
    in the scroll of the book it is written of me:
⁸ I delight to do your will, O my God;
    your law is within my heart.”

Hebrews 10:5

⁵ Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
    but a body have you prepared for me;
⁶ in burnt offerings and sin offerings
    you have taken no pleasure.
⁷ Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,
    as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’”

⁸ When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), ⁹ then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second. ¹⁰ And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

The honest pastor, when preaching on Hebrews 10:5-10, Vv. 5-7 of which is quoted from Psalm 40:6+, will refer to the latter text to alert his congregation to the discrepancy that exists in the translation from the original Hebrew, as passed on in the Masoretic text, into the Greek of the Septuagint (LXX). Unfortunately, the pastor may then feel that it is incumbent upon him to justify this discrepancy because the writer of Hebrews quotes the LXX translation. Evangelical Christians accept the entirety of Scripture as found in the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired and inerrant Word of God and as such the only source of absolute truth and the only guide for faith and practice. Therefore, this passage in the New Testament Book of Hebrews is without error. The question is, though, which text is to be considered inerrant? This is probably the self-imposed dilemma the preacher is attempting to resolve by resorting to explanations such as the one found in the New Geneva Study Bible that “the ear is to the body as the part is to the whole” (my paraphrase) or to commentators who reason that the Hebrew verb insinuates that the ear of a slave has been pierced as a sign of lifelong service to his master. This latter interpretation is ruled out by most Hebraists, that the Hebrew triliteral does not carry that connotation.

There is no merit in arguing for the inspiration and inerrancy of the Septuagint. It is a translation rendered by Jewish scholars in the 3^rd century B.C. “which contains Greek idioms that express events differently from the way they were expressed in the Hebrew Old Testament.” [https://www.thoughtco.com/the-story-of-the-septuagint-bible-119834] Nor is there utility in arguing, that because three of the most reliable LXX codices (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus [https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/9289/how-is-the-septuagint-interpretation-of-psalms-406-reconciled-with-the-hebrew-t]) read ‘body’ rather than ‘ear,’ the LXX is a reliable representation of the original Hebrew text. After all, it would be anachronistic to argue that the writer of the Book of Hebrews quoted from one of these codices – the earliest, extant copies of the LXX, which are from around the 4^th century A.D. – since the writer of Hebrews would have quoted from a version of the LXX that would have been in circulation well in advance of these three codices. It also stands to reason that the editors of these three codices would have had knowledge of God the Son coming to earth in bodily form.

On the other hand – and this is my conclusion – there may well have been editing of the LXX sometime between the death of Yeshua ha Moshiach and the time of the writing of Hebrews, most likely a span of 30 years or so. That is, the editors would have rewritten verse 6 to incorporate a stronger Messianic tone to the Psalm after the fact. To take the position that the original 3rd century B.C. translation would have made such a leap would require one to accept the notion of progressive revelation through translation, that the Holy Spirit revealed this to be the proper meaning of the Hebrew text. To do so also requires one to call into question the text as rendered by the Masoretes, of whom it is well-established that they, as they meticulously recopied the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, never made changes to the actual text; rather, their comments were cited in a ‘critical apparatus.’ Therefore, the Hebrew text of Psalm 40 (39) has remained intact since first penned. To accept the LXX’s version over that of the Hebrew Bible is, ipso facto, to deny the inerrancy of the Hebrew text in favor of the LXX text. But the Greek Septuagint does not supersede the original Hebrew. The Old Testament autograph as transmitted via the Masoretic Text is inspired, not the LXX!

Of course, there are linguistic points to consider. A major justification for the LXX’s translation has been the use of the Hebrew triliteral radical meaning ‘to dig’ (crh/(כרה; in the context of David’s Psalm, the metaphorical sense of ‘to open’ is logical. A secondary meaning is ‘to trade’ or ‘barter.’ Only a tertiary meaning is ‘to give a feast,’ i.e., to fete, not to prepare a feast, but to throw a feast (that had already been prepared). (These meanings are as noted in the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT) It is supposedly this tertiary meaning as ‘prepared’ that allegedly influenced the translators of the LXX. According to HALOT, the triliteral radical under consideration is used 12 times as ‘to dig,’ with one of these times being in Psalm 40:7, while only three times as ‘to give a feast’/’to invite to a meal.’ This begs the question, why choose a much less frequently used meaning that does not fit the context when the more frequently used meaning is basically demanded by context?! According to the Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon (AHCL), the expression אזנים כרית לי “mine ears hast thou d[ug], i.e., [means] opened, given me a listening ear.”

As for the idea of a ‘pierced ear’ symbolizing a “body prepared,” the above Hebrew radical offers no gloss intimating ‘to pierce.’ Strong’s Concordance and the AHCL note an approximate homonym cra/כרא meaning ‘to be pained, grieved’ – only metaphorically does it carry the possibility of being translated as ‘pierced’ – and is found only in Daniel 7:15 in an Aramaic/Chaldean form. Therefore, it would be gross linguistic malfeasance for language scholars to contend that such a gloss as ‘pierced ear’ can be read into the text.

It should be noted as well that the writer of the Book to the Hebrews, in his interpretation of LXX’s translation, focuses on those sections of the passage that are common to both the Hebrew and the Greek (a close approximation): It is not sacrifices and offerings that please YHWH, rather the willing obedience of His Son to replace the old sacrificial system with the perfect, once-for-all sacrifice of the Son. This thrust the writer has made clear on numerous occasions up to this point, so that he treats the questionable line almost as an aside – ‘oh yes and by the way, it is His body that Yeshua offered.’

As a post-Resurrection edit to the LXX, the new verse 5 “a body You have prepared for me,” while true, does not automatically make it inspired. Indeed, I would suggest that replacing the Hebrew text “You have opened my ears” with such an interpretive translation diminishes the prophetic power of this Messianic Psalm of David. By this I mean:

Psalm 40:5 “You have opened my ears” is directly connected to verse 8 “I [have/will] come.” As we have observed above, verse 6 (Hebrew text) indicates [the Messiah’s] willingness to obey the Father. I would offer that there is another facet to consider – a communication between Father and Son, in which the Father is alerting the Son that the sequence of events was to begin, to not only fulfill His predestined role as the Sacrificial Lamb, but also His return at the end of time; thus, the Hebrew perfect verb form באת’ (ba-thEE), can be translated as past, present, or future, depending on context. In other words, the Son tells the Father, “I [have] come to do Your will;” and, “I [will] come [again and] … those desiring my harm will be put to shame.” (v 15).

In conclusion, it would behoove the exegesis and proclamation of Psalm 40 as the main text and, if necessary, to only allude to the Hebrews passage, in particular, verse 5, in passing. To do so would serve to illustrate the Messianic nature of the Psalm as understood by the writer of the Book to the Hebrews while explaining that the different translation in the LXX does not infer progressive revelational inspiration via translation, but rather a probable post-Resurrection edit to it.