A Coat of Many Words, Part 3

The Robe and the Wisdom

Hello brothers and sisters,

We’ve come a long way for two Hebrew words.

In Part 1 we stood in a room full of translators, every one of them serious, every one of them reaching a different conclusion about what Joseph was wearing. In Part 2 we took the Septuagint’s answer and followed it everywhere it goes: dappled fawns, embroidered curtains, Jacob’s flocks, a rescued girl clothed by God Himself, and finally a New Testament where the color drains out of the word entirely and Peter uses it for trials and for grace in the same letter.

Now we finish. And we finish somewhere I did not expect when I started.

Because there is one more Greek word for that garment, and it sits in a different book, in a story so ugly most of us skip past it. And there is one more form of the word we have been tracing, and it appears exactly once in all of Scripture, aimed at an audience you would not guess.

Let’s dig in.

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The Other Word

Go back to the list from Part 1. The Hebrew phrase כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים occurs five times. Three of them are Joseph. The other two are Tamar.

2 Samuel 13:18 (NKJV): “Now she had on a robe of many colors, for the king’s virgin daughters wore such apparel.”

Same Hebrew phrase. Identical, right down to the plural.

And the Greek says something completely different.

2 Samuel 13:18 (LXX): χιτὼν καρπωτός

The noun is the same. χιτών, the tunic, as in Genesis. But the adjective has changed entirely.

καρπωτός (karpōtos). The lexicons derive it from καρπός in the sense of the wrist. A tunic with sleeves that reach the wrists.

Now, a small note that will interest anyone who has done a little Greek. There are two words in Greek spelled καρπός. One means fruit, and it is all over the New Testament, in the fruit of the Spirit and the tree that bears fruit in season. The other means wrist. They are unrelated. Our word comes from the second, and there is no fruit anywhere in it.

So here is the situation. One Hebrew phrase, five occurrences. In Genesis the Greek says ornate. In 2 Samuel the Greek says sleeved.

That is not a scribal accident. That is a different translator, working on a different book, at a different time, making a different judgment about the same two Hebrew words. And it means the split we spent Part 1 documenting between Greek translators is not just a matter of Aquila and Symmachus dissenting from the Septuagint a few centuries later.

The split runs through the Greek Bible itself.

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A Complication Worth Knowing

I have to tell you something here that makes this messier. Because I would rather hand you the mess than give you a tidy version that comes apart at the seams.

The Greek of 2 Samuel is not straightforwardly “the Septuagint” in the same way the Greek of Genesis is.

In 1963, a French scholar named Dominique Barthélemy published a study of a Greek scroll of the Minor Prophets found at Naḥal Ḥever, and in doing so he identified something that reshaped the field.

He showed that portions of the Greek Old Testament had been systematically revised, at some point in the first century before Christ or thereabouts, to bring them into closer conformity with a Hebrew text very like the one that became the Masoretic Text. Scholars call this the kaige revision.

And one of the stretches affected runs from 2 Samuel 11:2 through 1 Kings 2:11.

2 Samuel 13 sits squarely inside that.

Which means the χιτὼν καρπωτός in our Greek text of 2 Samuel may not be what the original Greek translator wrote. It may be a later reviser’s word, chosen to match a Hebrew text more precisely. The older Greek reading, if there was a different one, would have to be hunted through the Antiochene tradition and the Old Latin, and that requires critical editions I do not have.

So let me be clear about what I can and cannot say.

I can say: the Greek Bible as it has come down to us renders this one Hebrew phrase two different ways in two different books.

I cannot say: with certainty that those two renderings represent two independent third-and-second-century translators rather than one translator and one later reviser.

Does that weaken the point? I do not think so, and here is why:

Either way, we are watching Greek-speaking Jews who knew the language far better than we do look at פַּסִּים and reach for different words. Whether that happened in 250 B.C. or 50 B.C. or both, the testimony is the same: the phrase was hard then too. Nobody in antiquity was sitting on a settled definition and casually declining to share it.

And I will say this as well. If the kaige reviser is the one who chose καρπωτός, then he chose it while deliberately conforming his Greek to the Hebrew. Which would mean that a man staring hard at פַּסִּים, with the explicit goal of matching the Hebrew as tightly as he could, came away with sleeves.

That should tell us something.

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Tamar’s Robe

Now the story, which we do not talk about enough.

Amnon, David’s firstborn, becomes obsessed with his half-sister Tamar. He feigns illness, gets her sent to his room to cook for him, and rapes her.

Now, I don’t want to just roll through this. That’s a major statement that the text gives without commentary but I think we owe it to Tamar to slow down here.

Think about what this is really saying. Not only did Amnon develop a serious (and seriously unhealthy!) obsession with his half-sister, and not only did he force her to lie with him against her objections where she actually offered to marry him. She begs him to go to the king and ask for her hand.

But he refuses.

Let that sink in. He claims to be desperately in love with her, yet refuses to marry her.

And the kicker to all this is that following the advice of his friend and cousin Jonadab (son of Shimeah, David’s brother), he manipulates his way into getting her alone with him to facilitate this deed that Tamar begs him repeatedly not to commit.

And then, after his passion is spent, the text tells us, the hatred with which he hated her afterward was greater than the love with which he had loved her. He has her thrown out and the door bolted.

And it is precisely here, at her worst moment, that the narrator stops to tell us what she was wearing.

That is a strange place for a wardrobe note. But it’s not decoration. The narrator is telling you what has been destroyed.

2 Samuel 13:19 (NKJV): “Then Tamar put ashes on her head, and tore her robe of many colors that was on her, and laid her hand on her head and went away crying bitterly.”

She tore it herself.

Joseph’s coat was torn off him by other hands. Tamar tore her own, because that is what you do in that culture when someone has died, and what had died was her. The garment that marked her as a king’s virgin daughter was now a lie, and she would not wear a lie through the streets.

And then, as far as the narrative is concerned, David does nothing.

He’s angry. That’s all we’re told. Absalom takes his sister into his house and says nothing to Amnon, good or bad, for two years, and then has him killed at a sheepshearing.

The robe of the king’s daughters, torn by the daughter who wore it. That’s what the second half of our five occurrences is about.

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Two Tamars, One Recognition

Now I have to clear something up. I’ve seen people get this tangles and it’s important that we keep it straight.

There are two Tamars in this study, and they are not the same woman.

The Tamar with the ketonet passim is David’s daughter, in 2 Samuel 13. That is the one we have just been reading about.

The other Tamar is in Genesis 38, and she is Judah’s daughter-in-law. She has no famous garment. She has a veil, a signet, a cord, and a staff.

Different women, different centuries, no connection between them except a shared name, which was a common one.

But. This one is worth the detour.

Genesis 38 is the chapter that interrupts the Joseph story. Joseph is sold into Egypt at the end of chapter 37, and then, before we find out what happens to him, the narrative stops dead and tells us about Judah and his daughter-in-law. Readers have complained about this placement for centuries. It looks like an intrusion.

But it isn’t.

Look at how chapter 37 ends. The brothers dip the coat in goat’s blood and send it to Jacob:

Genesis 37:32 (LXX): τοῦτον εὕρομεν· ἐπίγνωθι εἰ χιτὼν τοῦ υἱοῦ σού ἐστιν ἢ οὔ

“We found this. Recognize whether it is your son’s tunic or not.”

Now look at how Judah’s story turns. Tamar is being dragged out to be burned, and she sends Judah the pledge items he left with her:

Genesis 38:25 (LXX): Ἐπίγνωθι, τίνος ὁ δακτύλιος καὶ ὁ ὁρμίσκος καὶ ἡ ῥάβδος αὕτη

“Recognize whose this signet and cord and staff are.”

The same imperative. ἐπίγνωθι. And in the Hebrew it is the same too, הַכֶּר־נָא, haker-na.

Judah says it to his father, holding a bloodied garment and a lie. Then a woman says it back to Judah, holding the proof of what he has done. Judah, who proposed selling his brother. Judah, who helped stage the evidence.

And the Talmud caught this long before any modern literary critic did. In tractate Sotah, Rabbi Hama bar Rabbi Hanina reads it exactly as measure for measure: with haker-na Judah deceived his father, and with haker-na he was himself confronted.

The Greek preserves the parallel perfectly. Same verb, same form, both chapters. It did not have to. A translator working chapter by chapter could easily have varied it. This one did not.

So what is Genesis 38 doing there? It is the hinge in Judah’s life. The man who engineered the lie in chapter 37 is broken open in chapter 38, and by chapter 44 he is the one offering himself as a slave in Benjamin’s place so his father will not have to lose another son.

The chapter that looks like an interruption is the chapter where the coat’s worst consequence starts getting undone.

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Three Tunics

Now let me put something in front of you and let you look at it.

There are three χιτῶνες in this study, and all three are stripped from their wearers.

Joseph’s is taken off him by his brothers, dipped in an animal’s blood, and carried to his father as evidence of a death that did not happen.

Tamar’s is torn by her own hands, as evidence of a death that did happen, though she went on breathing for years afterward in her brother’s house.

And there is a third.

John 19:23-24 (NKJV): “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took His garments and made four parts, to each soldier a part, and also the tunic. Now the tunic was without seam, woven from the top in one piece. They said therefore among themselves, ‘Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be,’ that the Scripture might be fulfilled which says: ‘They divided My garments among them, and for My clothing they cast lots.’”

The Greek noun is χιτών. The same word that clothed Joseph and Tamar.

But John tells us something about this one that is not true of either of the others. It was ἄραφος, seamless, woven from the top throughout.

And the soldiers, of all people, say the thing out loud: let us not tear it.

The one tunic in Scripture that does not get torn is the one belonging to the Man who was.

I want to be careful not to overwork that. John says why he includes the detail. It’s Psalm 22:18, and I couldn’t improve on his stated reason even if I wanted to. But John is a deliberate writer, and he chose to record that the soldiers made a point of not tearing a garment while they were in the middle of tearing a body.

That juxtaposition is his, not mine.

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The Coat That Lied

And here is where the whole series lands for me.

Go back to Jacob, holding the bloodied coat.

Genesis 37:33 (NKJV): “And he recognized it and said, ‘It is my son’s tunic. A wild beast has devoured him. Without doubt Joseph is torn to pieces.’”

He recognized it, and he drew the obvious conclusion, and he was wrong.

Because the blood on that coat was goat’s blood. Joseph was not dead. At the very hour Jacob tore his own clothes and refused to be comforted, his son was alive, walking a caravan road toward Egypt, toward a household, toward a prison, toward a throne, toward the granaries that would keep Jacob’s entire family breathing through seven years of famine.

The coat told the truth about the blood and lied about the son.

It said devoured. It said torn to pieces. It said the story is over. And every one of those statements was false, and the father who believed them spent twenty-two years grieving a living man.

Now look at the other Father, and the other Son, and the other garment.

The soldiers gambled at the foot of a cross, and the blood on that ground was not an animal’s. There was no substitution there, no goat killed in a field to stage a scene. The Son really was torn. The Father really did give Him up.

And the message that blood carries is the exact inverse of Joseph’s coat.

Joseph’s coat said “dead” about a man who was alive. The blood of Christ says “alive” over everyone who was dead.

Jacob was handed evidence of a death and told to recognize it. We are handed evidence of a death and told to recognize something else entirely: that it happened, that it was ours, and that the One it happened to did not stay torn.

ἐπίγνωθι. Recognize.

That imperative runs through this whole study. Recognize whether this is your son’s tunic. Recognize whose signet this is. And the same root shows up at the end of the New Testament story, on a road to Emmaus, where two disciples walk for miles with a stranger and finally, at a table, when He breaks the bread, their eyes are opened and they recognize Him.

Joseph’s brothers used that word to sell a lie. Tamar used it to expose one. And in the Gospel it becomes the word for what happens when a person finally sees who has been walking beside them all along.

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The Manifold Wisdom

One word left.

In Part 2 we traced ποικίλος until it stopped being about cloth at all: various diseases, various trials, manifold grace. But there is an intensified form, πολυποίκιλος, much-variegated, and it appears exactly once in the entire New Testament.

Ephesians 3:10 (NKJV): “to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places”

Ephesians 3:10 (Greek): ἵνα γνωρισθῇ νῦν ταῖς ἀρχαῖς καὶ ταῖς ἐξουσίαις ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις διὰ τῆς ἐκκλησίας ἡ πολυποίκιλος σοφία τοῦ θεοῦ

The NRSV renders it “the wisdom of God in its rich variety,” which I think gets closer to the Greek than “manifold” does.

Outside Scripture the word is rare and lovely. It turns up in a fragment of the comic poet Eubulus describing the many hues of a garland of flowers. It is a word for something with so many facets that you cannot take them in at once.

Paul takes that word and attaches it to the wisdom of God.

And then he says who the audience is. Not the church. Through the church, to τὰς ἀρχὰς καὶ τὰς ἐξουσίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις. The rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.

If you have been with me through the Divine Council series, that vocabulary should stop you where you stand. It is the same register Paul uses in Ephesians 6:12, when he tells us our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against ἀρχαί and ἐξουσίαι and κοσμοκράτορες. It is the language of the unseen government, the divine council and its rebellious members, the powers standing behind the thrones of Babylon and Tyre.

Read Ephesians 3:10 with that in view and the sentence turns inside out.

God is putting on a demonstration. The exhibit is the church, Jew and Gentile in one body, a thing that had never existed and that nobody saw coming. And the gallery He has assembled for the unveiling is the assembled powers of the unseen realm.

They are being shown something. And what they are being shown is called πολυποίκιλος.

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The Coat and the Wisdom

So here, finally, is why I wanted to write these three posts.

The word that clothed Joseph is the word Paul uses for the wisdom of God.

Not the same word exactly. Paul’s is intensified, πολυποίκιλος rather than ποικίλος, much-variegated rather than variegated. But it is the same root, the same idea pushed to its limit. Intricate. Many-sided. Worked with a care you cannot take in at a glance.

Now think about what happened to Joseph while he was wearing the ordinary version of that word.

He was hated. He was stripped. He was thrown into an empty pit. He was sold to passing merchants for twenty pieces of silver by his own brothers. He was lied about, imprisoned, and forgotten by a man who promised to remember him.

If you had asked Joseph in that pit whether he could see a pattern, he would have told you there was no pattern. Just a bottom, and walls, and no water.

And he would have been describing the most intricately worked rescue in the book of Genesis, from the inside, at the one moment when none of it was visible.

That is what πολυποίκιλος means. Not that God’s plans are complicated. Complicated is what we call things that are badly made. It means they have more sides than you can see from where you are standing, and the side facing you at any given moment is not the whole shape.

Joseph said it himself, decades later, with the power to do anything he liked to the men who took his coat: you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to save many people alive.

He did not say it was not evil. He said God was working something with more sides to it than his brothers’ malice. But their malice was one of the threads.

Jacob gave his son a ποικίλος garment, and it ruined him, and the ruin was the road to Egypt.

The Father gave His Son a seamless one, and the soldiers who tore everything else left it whole. The tearing they did instead is the reason any of us are here.

And the powers of the unseen realm, who watched the whole thing and thought they had won, are now being made to look at the church, and what they are being shown is the πολυποίκιλος wisdom of God.

They did not see it coming either.

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Weighed and Found Sufficient

We started three posts ago with a simple confession: nobody knows what Joseph was wearing.

I have not solved it. I am not going to. Eight readings went into Part 1 and eight came out.

But look at what came with the not-knowing.

Because the Masoretic Text refused to smooth a difficult phrase, we still have the difficulty, and the difficulty sent us looking. Because the Greek traditions committed where the Hebrew did not, we have ancient testimony about how the phrase actually sounded. Because one Greek translator chose ποικίλος, we can hear Jacob’s flocks in Joseph’s coat and Peter’s grace in Peter’s trials and the wisdom of God in a word that started out describing a dappled fawn.

None of that is available to someone holding only one tradition.

This is what I mean when I say both/and, and I want to be precise about it one last time. Despite how it has sometimes been twisted, I have never suggested that the two traditions can be averaged into a single answer. What I mean is each tradition is doing different work, faithfully, as they have for thousands of years. And the Lord preserved both because we need both.

The Hebrew kept the question open. The Greek recorded the answers. And somewhere between them sits a garment nobody has seen since the Bronze Age, still doing its work, still pulling careful readers back to the text three thousand years later.

Weighed against a definition, we came up short.

Weighed against what we found on the way, I would not trade it.

God bless.

And I’ll see you next week with something you won’t want to miss!

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