An Advent Mystery

Greek Koine and Biblical and Medieval Greek
1

Reading Luke for the first time, I was surprised to read the Greek for Luke 2:14.

Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις Θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας.

I read this as something like: “…and upon Earth peace among men of goodwill.” The εὐδοκίας reading is Wescott and Hort. Another variant in nearly as many manuscripts is εὐδοκία. The variant would be something like: “…and upon Earth peace among men [and] goodwill.”

This second is closer to the hymn. Most modern Bibles, however, go by the first text and have this translation, one that I wouldn’t have expected from the Greek: “…and on earth peace among those whom he favors! (NRSV)” The NRSV adds the footnote: “Other ancient authorities read peace, goodwill among people.”

This is substantially the same as the RSV, except that NRSV has removed “men” because it is a microaggression. It has also removed the poetry, which wasn’t hurting anybody, and the ESV and NIV are almost as bad with tin eared wordings here.

However, comparing the footnote to the main text (in all four versions mentioned), I would think that translators need to make up their mind on εὐδοκία. Is it goodwill or God’s favor?

The LSJ has εὐδοκία, ἡ, = εὐδόκησις, esp. of God, Lxx 1Ch.16.10, al., Ev.Luc.2.14, al.; good will, Ep.Phil.1.15; contentment, Phld.Piet.25. 2. object of desire, LxxPs.144.16,Si.18.31. 3. v.l. for εὐδοκιμίη in Hp.Praec.6.

I think that the comparison there between 1 Chronicles and Luke in the LSJ entry is mistaken. In 1 Chronicles it’s very clear whose εὐδοκία we are talking about: τὴν εὐδοκίαν αὐτοῦ.

Jerome’s rendering, by the way:

…et in terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis.

I’m posting this for Advent since I don’t expect anybody to be around on Christmas, and we probably deserve a better “Christmas Treat” than this.

2

Go back a couple of years and you’ll find The Reason for the Season, quoting Luke 2.1-21. In a post there I commented on this verse:

In 14 I found ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκία very jarring, just standing there on its own without any connective linking it to the preceding pair of phrases. Not at all a normal use of asyndeton. And once again, I see the UBS text gives εὐδοκίας, genitive (“and on earth peace among men of good will” or “among men well approved of [by God]”). This reading has much better manuscript support, I see. It also makes a better pairing: glory-heaven-god in the first, matched by earth-peace-men in the second. Personally I’d prefer it without the limiting ευδοκιας at all, but to go cutting out words without external authority would meet with universal condemnation (justifiably or not)!

3

Sometime around 1958 J. Fitzmyer was working on a text from Qumran and found[1] what he judged to be a semitic parallel to ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας. Since that time there have been hundreds of articles written both popular and academic. Google: “Luke 2:14” “semitic background” will unearth some samples.

Magan Broshi wrote an article published in The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Dead Seas scrolls and the Qumran … [2] where Broshi translates “Peace on earth among people of His good will.” Broshi comments: “Peace will be granted to those whom the Lord has elected, not to people with good intentions or good deeds to their credit.”

[1] Fitzymyer credits Claus-Hunno Hunzinger for calling attention to the pertinence of 1QH 4:32-23 to ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας. Fitzymyer 1958 http://cdn.theologicalstudies.net/19/19.2/19.2.4.pdf

[2] Predestination in the Bible and the Scrolls, Magan Broshi, The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Dead Seas scrolls and the Qumran editor James H. Charlesworth.

4

ΚΑΤΑ ΛΟΥΚΑΝ 2:14: δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη, ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκία.


Σοῦδα: τὸ ἀγαθὸν θέλημα τοῦ Θεοῦ
ΛΣΚ: ἔγκρισις, εὔνοια, χάρις
ABE: εὐαρέσκεια
EBE: ἀγάπη και σωτηρία
Carouso: εὐεργεσία, χαρά

τὸ ἑξῆς: δόξα θεῷ, ἐν ὑψίστοις. καὶ εἰρήνη, εὐδοκία, ἐν ἀνθρώποις, ἐπὶ γῆς.

κατά με, σημαίνει ὁ στίχος “τῷ μὲν Κυρίῶ ἐν οὐρανῷ, τιμή. ἡμῖν δ’ ἐν κόσμῶ, εἰρήνη, τούτ’ ἐστι χάρις.”

5

Thank you C.S.!

Here is the J. Jeremias article on the meaning of ευδοκιας: PDF. Unfortunately I can’t read the Latin. Maybe someone more learned can summarize the main points for me?

According to Fitzmyer, this article is the best explanation of why “ευδοκιας must refer to God and not to man.”

Perhaps a Hebrew parallel exists, but I’d first like to know what the Greek meant to Luke’s Greek-speaking readers.

EDIT:

I notice that the Fitzmyer article claims that the first two chapters of Luke were originally Hebrew.

Randall Buth once claimed the same thing to me on the other forum – in fact that he had written a paper proving that the Magnificat was originally composed in Hebrew. It turned out that his argument hinged on some Greek verb tenses. But I was interested enough to look up the individual lines of the Magnificat in the Septuagint. Just about every phrase is a fairly direct borrowing. It seems clear to me that at least the Magnificat was constructed in Greek from the Septuagint, not from any Hebrew original.

6

Joel,

I have a habit of mistrusting reference works that rely on other reference works rather than primary sources. So whenever possible I track down the primary source. This isn’t always easy. With the Qumran manuscripts it can be somewhat difficult to get access to reliable data. It has been a long time since 1952 Claus-Hunno Hunzinger article and 1958 Fizmyer’s article.

Decades of research in the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms) 1QHa has resulted in a restructuring of the text. The first thing I did was opened up Martin Abegg’s tagged version of the DSS Sectarian Texts and searched for Fitzmyer’s reading: בני רצונו

1QH 4:32-33(?) Fitzmyer 1958
בני רצונו
sons of his good pleasure

I couldn’t find it. A global search of the Sectarian Texts for the pattern בני רצונו and it wasn’t there. Then I searched on *רצונ ( good pleasure) which produced hundreds of hits. One just few lines down in 1QH 4:35.

I then found:

The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, edited by Florentino García Martínez
& Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar brill 1999 online here:
http://www.nazarenemedia.net/uploads/8/1/0/5/8105580/martnez_florentino_garca_-_the_dead_sea_scrolls_study_edition_brill_1999.pdf

After spending too much time searching and comparing Fitzmyer, Abegg and Martínez–Tigchelaar, I boiled down a summary of what I found.

Hodayot 1QHa

1QH 4:32-33(?) Fitzmyer 1958
בני רצונו
sons of his good pleasure

1QHa 4:35 Abegg
1QHa 4:23 Martínez & Tigchelaar
‏דברי רצונך
things [words] of your will

1QHa 19:12
בני רצונכה
the sons of your approval

my conjecture is that דברי is a different reading of בני but I could be wrong.

1QHa 19:9 is close to Fitzmyer 1958. There is another reading in Aramaic which I didn’t bother with. It looks like the argument in Fitzmyer 1958 still hangs together but the data has shifted. Since the argument doesn’t stand or fall on his reading from 1QH 4:32-33, the change in that reading isn’t that important.

After doing this work I did notice that the latest edition of the NT lexicon (BDAG 2000) is still citing Fitzmyer 1958 under εὐδοκία.

7

I don’t suppose that you would have access to the English translation of the J. Jeremias article that Fitzmyer mentions in the footnote? It’s not available online as far as I can tell. Although I’m still hoping that mwh or bedwere will give us a quick outline of the Latin version.

8

Can’t help with Jeremias. That was 1925?

Discourse analysis of Hebrew Narrative is a worthwhile side trip if your going to understand narrative in the Gospels. Note the places in Luke’s narrative where the subject precedes the verb. Doesn’t happen often. Joseph never appears before the verb. Mary only once.

Luke 2:19 ἡ δὲ Μαριὰμ πάντα συνετήρει τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα συμβάλλουσα ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτῆς.

The shepherds and the ἄγγελος κυρίου are both clause initial.

8 Καὶ ποιμένες ἦσαν ἐν τῇ χώρᾳ τῇ αὐτῇ ἀγραυλοῦντες καὶ φυλάσσοντες φυλακὰς τῆς νυκτὸς ἐπὶ τὴν ποίμνην αὐτῶν. 9 καὶ ἄγγελος κυρίου ἐπέστη αὐτοῖς καὶ δόξα κυρίου περιέλαμψεν αὐτούς, καὶ ἐφοβήθησαν φόβον μέγαν.

The audience receiving the shepherds report.

18 καὶ πάντες οἱ ἀκούσαντες ἐθαύμασαν περὶ τῶν λαληθέντων ὑπὸ τῶν ποιμένων πρὸς αὐτούς·

There isn’t one and only one explanation for the subject of the verb preceding the verb. Levinsohn (Discourse Features 2000, p11) notes that position in front of the verb is used for constituents that relate the following narrative segment to the context. Either the preceding text of the narrative or the external context, i.e. the assumed cultural scenario. A noun in the pre-verbal position may signal a new development in the story line represented by the introduction of a new agent which may mark a new episode.

Καὶ ποιμένες ἦσαν ἐν τῇ χώρᾳ τῇ αὐτῇ … καὶ ἄγγελος κυρίου ἐπέστη αὐτοῖς

The sentence that introduces the ποιμένες marks a new scene, episode. It reports the activity of the ποιμένες as background information, a setting. The ποιμένες are not at this point agents in the narrative but they will become agents later. The sentence that begins with ἄγγελος κυρίου introduces a significant new agent-participant .

This sort of analysis is not something that can be reduced to a set of rules. Certain patterns have been observed but patterns are not rules. Randall Buth and others have noted a tendency for Luke’s narrative to fall into patterns found in Hebrew narrative. Particularly the use and placement of verbs that mark narrative segments, for example καὶ ἐγένετο used about fifty times in Genesis LXX.

9

Joel, your linked pdf is not Jeremias but Vogt—n.3 in Fitzmyer’s piece, not n.2. Jeremias wrote in German, not Latin, and before the Qumran texts came to light, while Vogt wrote hot on the heels of their discovery and partial publication. There must have been considerable progress since then.

But to oblige you I’ve read through Vogt’s Latin piece and can confirm the accuracy of Fitzmyer’s summary of it. (Vogt rejects the text approved by Markos, along with Markos’ peculiar understanding of it.)

Incidentally, when I offered “among men well approved of [by God]” as an alternative to the familiar “among men of good will,” I was going only by what seemed to me to be the likeliest meaning of the Greek, regardless of Hebrew or Aramaic and NT scholarship.

Perhaps a Hebrew parallel exists, but I’d first like to know what the Greek meant to Luke’s Greek-speaking readers.

Most likely, I think, either “among men of good will" or “among men well approved of [by God]”, as suggested in my original post. It’s hard to render the ευδοκ- concept in English, but “thinking favorably” is fundamental to it. Cf. e.g. “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased”—εν ᾧ ευδόκησα. There’s quite a bit of NT evidence (including ευδοκια itself), and even more outside it.

I don’t imagine Luke knew Hebrew, and certainly most of his readership didn’t. When Fitzmyer speaks of “the pertinence of a Qumran expression to the understanding of the Lucan Christmas greeting,” he doesn’t mean Luke’s readers’ understanding of it (to which Qumran expressions are quite impertinent) but merely modern scholars’ understanding of the origin of it.

10

RE: Jeremias

Jeremias wasn’t the first. Already, Henry Alford argued for this reading of εὐδοκίας. A. Plummer (Luke ICC 1898,1921) has an extensive treatment of it. The discovery of the the Hodayot texts reinforced a position already accepted as the late I. Howard Marshall noted in his commentary on Luke (NIGTC 1979).

Professor I. Howard Marshall (Born 12 January 1934, Carlisle; died 12 December 2015, Aberdeen)

11

Thank you mwh. I’m sorry for the mistake – I should have increased my text size – I mistook the 2 in the footnote for a 3.

The Jeremias article wasn’t available on Hathi Trust, but I was able to obtain it gratis, as academic publishers don’t seem to be able to program decent credit processing systems. Here it is:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B23NN-fS5SQEMDNtQ25Nbk9yZ0E/view?usp=sharing

I had assumed that, as this predates the Qumran discovery, Jeremias would be a case for the meaning based entirely on the Greek. But looking it over, it appears to be making the case based upon Hebrew parallels. It is German, so I can’t read it thoroughly until I have time, probably later this week.

My current thoughts are:

  1. I don’t think that Luke was much influenced by Hebrew, although he did know the Septuagint very well. The proposed connection to Qumran is tenuous at every level. I think that we should look to the Greek.

  2. Peace among “favored men” might work as a literal translation, but “favored by God” is interpretation. I notice that the author/translator of Lxx 1Ch.16.10 seems to think that he needs to make explicit that God is the one doing the favoring. It’s an obvious interpretation, but “favored men” alone would strike me as as out of place here in Greek as it would be in English. The translation “men of goodwill” seems to be so much more natural to me.

  3. While I know that election theology is big among many of the people translating this as “favored by God,” it doesn’t fit Luke’s general attitude as well. I’m not the first to point out that only Luke has the Good Samaritan story and that it would have been very out of place in John. Luke doesn’t spend much mental energy on “the elect.” Nor does it fit with the general tone of Luke 2.

  4. If translators are really serious that the main text means “favored by God” or equivalent, they need to change their footnotes (RSV, NRSV, ESV, NIV are all offenders) to read “some texts read: ‘peace and God’s favor among men…’”

Regardless, I’m beginning to see this more and more as a case of 20th century Bible translation work dropping the ball on an important verse. Although at least the RSV keeps most of the poetry that the KJV has here, which I think more and more may be the most important part.

12

From Jeremias’ article I learn that Origen took ευδοκιας with ειρηνη (a strained construal rejected by Jeremias and I expect all modern scholars, no doubt rightly). What this indicates to me is that he, like me, found ευδοκιας something of a stumbling-block. (No longer, given the semitic forerunners.)
I’m particularly interested in Origen because he adopted the critical signs which Alexandrian scholars had invented in the 3rd cent. BCE to indicate the status of readings in Homer.

Jeremias takes his evidence as finally settling (this is in 1929!) the controversy over whether the eudokia is God’s or men’s: it’s God’s. I can’t control the Hebrew, but I think this is right, or right from one perspective. Greek-speakers who heard the gospel read will I reckon have understood it less unequivocally, as I’ve said.

He analyzes our verse as a “distich” (2 lines not 3) and notes the parallelism between the two: δοξα ~ ειρηνη, εν υψιστοις ~ επι γης, θεω ~ εν ανθρωποις ευδοκιας. That’s just how I analyzed it in my two-year-old post, you may remember, though I shouldn’t have thought it worth pointing out if it hadn’t been for the existence of the inferior reading (itself evidence of the felt difficulty with ευδοκιας).

13

I’m sorry for such a long post! I think it’s good stuff though, and will beg that you will be ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας towards me about it.

I have read the Jeremias paper now (if only I could learn Greek like I learn German!). As mwh says, he analyzes the verse into distich (εὐδοκίας variant) and tristich (εὐδοκία variant), and traces back the various hypothesis about it. This is unobjectional to me.

Mwh mentions the point about Origen. I think that Jeremias is correct that the construction is unlikely, though his point “but the hypothesis is just based on Greek with no consideration of the Grundtext!” is one that I disagree with. There is no Hebrew/Aramaic Grundtext for Luke. However, I think that the association of εὐδοκίας with εἰρήνη does point to Origen’s probable familiarity with the variant text. A variant to reject, I agree. The advent mystery is the meaning of ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας.

So after analyzing the different hypotheses, Jeremias takes it back to the Hebrew: “Wir haben also in ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας einen Ausdruck vor uns, der auf einen hebräischen Text zurückgeht, der seinerseits auf aramäischer mündlicher Tradition beruhen wird.”

I could go into why his sort of cross-language argument is something unconvincing to me in any context – ie., use the English loan-word “glamorous” in Japanese to refer to a woman and you are saying something about her bust size – but I’d rather point out what Jeremias has missed in his proposed list of NT Greek parallels of this construction.

ὁ ἄνθρωπος τῆς ἀνομίας (v. 1. ἁμαρτίας II Thess 2:3)
ὁ ἄνθρωπος (v. 1. +τοῦ) θεοῦ (1 Tim 6:11)
ὁ τοῦ θεοῦ ἄνθρωπος (II Tim 3:17), pl. ἀπὸ θεοῦ ἄνθρωποι (II Ptr 1:21)
οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ αἰῶνος (Lc 16:8)
οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ φωτός (Lc 16:8)
τῆς ἀναστάσεως υἱοί (Lc 20:86)
υἱὸς εἰρήνης (Lc 10:6)
οἱ υἱοὶ τῆς βασιλείας (Mt 8:12, 13:88)
τέκνα ὑπακοῆς (1 Ptr 1:14)
τέκνα φωτὸς (Eph 5:8)
τὰ τέκνα τῆς σοφίας (Lc 7:35)

And singling out the Lucan parallels:

οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ αἰῶνος (Lc 16:8)
οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ φωτός (Lc 16:8)
υἱὸς εἰρήνης (Lc 10:6)
τὰ τέκνα τῆς σοφίας (Lc 7:35)

In the Lucan parallels Jeremias has not looked at Luke’s sources in the other synoptics. In fact, these proposed parallels tell us about Luke’s style, not his Grundtext. The first two, from Luke 16:8 go back to a Lucan-only section of the synoptics, what I (and mwh?) would call a Luke composition. Ie., these phrases are the kind that Luke likes to use when he is not using Matthew or Mark as a source.

The fourth, Luke 7:35 is a gloss on Matthew 11:19:
M: καὶ ἐδικαιώθη ἡ σοφία ἀπὸ τῶν ἔργων αὐτῆς.
L: καὶ ἐδικαιώθη ἡ σοφία ἀπὸ πάντων τῶν τέκνων αὐτῆς.

And this isn’t a parallel listed by Jeremias, but notice also that he has done exactly the same thing just a few verses up (Matthew 11:16, Luke 7:31):
M: Τίνι δὲ ὁμοιώσω τὴν γενεὰν ταύτην;
L: Τίνι οὖν ὁμοιώσω τοὺς ἀνθρώπους τῆς γενεᾶς ταύτης, καὶ τίνι εἰσὶν ὅμοιοι;

And finally Luke 10:6, which is a gloss of Matthew 10:13:

M: καὶ ἐὰν μὲν ᾖ ἡ οἰκία ἀξία, ἐλθάτω ἡ εἰρήνη ὑμῶν ἐπ’ αὐτήν·
L: καὶ ἐὰν ἐκεῖ ᾖ υἱὸς εἰρήνης, ἐπαναπαήσεται ἐπ’ αὐτὸν ἡ εἰρήνη ὑμῶν·

So absent any Hebrew/Aramaic Grundtext, this is Luke’s style. “Sons of” or “men of” is poetic. Following the many Lucan examples above, I think that we can assume the same sort of self-contained expression. ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας would be “men of good favor” or “men of good pleasure.” It resists further analysis as much as “men of peace.” Adding [of God’s] is doing violence to Luke’s language.

A final note is “Υἱοὶ Βροντῆς” dropped by both Matthew and Luke. Coming from Mark, it’s exactly the place where I would expect to see an aramaicism in the Gospels. Apparently Matthew and Luke didn’t understand it any more than we do today, and left it out.

14

Knowing neither Hebrew nor Aramaic, I’m hardly in a position to judge, but I wouldn’t discount Jeremias so readily, nor more recent scholars who have identified both Hebrew and Aramaic counterparts in Qumran texts. One of Jeremias’ points you don’t mention is that ευδοκια is first found in the LXX. (So far as I know that’s still true.) Seems reasonable to suppose that that fed into Luke, so we should consider what it means in the LXX. ευδοκια is not a word like ειρηνη, and I’m not at all sure that υἱὸς εἰρήνης is on a par with ανθρωποι ευδοκιας (nor do I think it’s poetic). τοὺς ἀνθρώπους τῆς γενεᾶς ταύτης is also quite different. Of course we should “look to the Greek,” but Greek alone will not explain ανθρωποι ευδοκιας, which is is no more of an unmediated Greek locution than ιδωμεν το ρημα in the next verse, or any of the other semiticisms that pervade this section of Luke’s gospel, so strikingly different from his usual style.

“The advent mystery is the meaning of ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας.” The meaning to whom? To Luke? To bilingual Aramaic-speakers? To Hebrew-speaking Greek Jews? To early Christians who heard it read to them? To early exegetes? There’s no single certain answer, and in most cases not enough evidence to tell. To Jerome it means homines bonae voluntatis. (To Jerome ἐπιούσιον in the Lord’s Prayer means supersubstantialem, which I rather doubt is what Jesus meant by it!) To you it means “men of good favor” or “men of good pleasure,” whatever those expressions may mean. “Meaning” is not a straightforward concept at the best of times, and certainly not across languages, as you yourself point out. Apropos, I can’t agree that “among men well approved of [by God]” does violence to Luke’s language. I was suggesting, on the basis of ευδοκ- words both in NT and elsewhere, that that’s how the expression might approximately have been understood, i.e. with “by God” taken as implied. No use saying that’s not what Luke says. What Luke says is ευδοκιας: the question is what was understood by that in context.

15

There is very little of the above that I disagree with. Looking at the Septuagint usages rather than postulating a Hebrew text has been exactly what I have been trying trying to argue for. Since this is Luke, you can throw in Mark, Matthew, and Paul’s letters as well.* In fact, I think that a verse like Roman 10:1 – though a different construction – tells us more about Luke’s usage than Qumran texts.

  • Matthew and Mark would be direct sources for Luke, often quoted verbatim; familiarity with some of Paul’s letters assumes that Luke/Acts is a composition by a single author with no independent eyewitness knowledge of the events of Acts. Ie., note how Acts fleshes out Paul’s biography in Galatians, etc.

I do suggest a more careful look at the differences between Matthew 11:16,19 and Luke 7:31,35. They are only a few verses apart, and assuming that Luke had the text of Matthew right in front of him (hard not to for that section), the two changes appear to be very similar to each other, as a matter of style. Grammatical analysis is a different thing, perhaps.

I could post examples of εὐδοκ- from the Septuagint, etc. I did a search through the text before I made the first post, and in fact highlighted the LXX example that LSJ uses to demonstrate the Luke 2:14 usage.

16

There is very little of the above that I disagree with.

Good. I won’t argue over the residue. I think that’s enough from me.

17

I’ve been keeping one eye on this thread and how you’ve been solving the mystery. One question: mwh wrote earlier about the “familiar” reading “among men of good will". “Familiar” to whom? I thought it was the other intepretation of ευδικιας — that the good will is God’s — that was the common interpretation.

18

“How you get there, depends on where your at” [1] In the world where English is the official language, until roughly sixty years ago the King James Version was the familiar version. The wording found its way into hymns and all manner of other cultural artifacts. Now days most people under 40 are not familiar with the gospels in any form.


[1] The trailer for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point

19

The KJV I could locate translated “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” This is different from “among men of good will”, hence my question.

20

The thing is, the King James says: “and on earth peace, good will toward men.” The KJV is following the less supported Byzantine text tradition that reads εὐδοκία.

I wasn’t able to find the translation “among men of goodwill” or equivalent in any Bible translation other than Douay-Rheims, Lattimore’s New Testament, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses NWT.

In English, I’ve been able to trace back the “in whom he is well pleased” reading to the Revised Version of the NT (1881), from which the ASV, RSV, etc., are all descended. It was the first important revision of the KJV, as far as I know.

RV reading of Luke 2:14 –

Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth(7) peace among(8) men in whom he is well pleased.

  1. Many ancient authorities read > peace, good pleasure among men> .
  2. Gr. > men of good pleasure

This is clear enough to me. Their explanation of the curious phrase “men of good pleasure” was placed into the text as the reading. All revisions since have respected that gloss. The 20th century semitic justifications for the reading seem to be mostly backfill for this decision.