HistoricalChristian.Faith

Isaiah 59:20 at Romans 11:26 — the Deliverer “out of Zion” (ἐκ Σιων): a form matching neither received text

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the catalog’s neither / free tag on Romans 11:26 holds, and this is one of the doctrine’s sharpest instances of it. At the hinge of his “all Israel shall be saved” argument Paul quotes Isaiah 59:20 with a preposition found in no known copy of Isaiah, Greek or Hebrew: “there shall come out of Sion (ἐκ Σιων) the Deliverer.” The Old Greek reads “for the sake of Sion” (ἥνεκεν Σιων) — the Deliverer comes on Zion’s behalf — and the Masoretic Hebrew reads “to Zion” (lə-Ṣiyyôn) — he comes to Zion; Paul’s ἐκ has him come forth from it, a third and distinct direction. And when he continues (Romans 11:27) “this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins,” the closing clause is not in Isaiah 59 at all but spliced from Isaiah 27:9 — a fact the ancient reader who checked the Greek against the Hebrew, Origen, flagged verse by verse. Two findings, kept separate. (a) The text-form call is secure: Paul’s citation is a free, conflated form matching neither received Isaiah exactly — the tag is right. (b) The best account of the ἐκ is a deliberate Pauline harmonization to the stock “out of Zion” deliverance formula of the Psalter (Psalm 14:7 / 53:6 “that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion,” Psalm 110:2 “the Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion”), a scriptural change, not an arbitrary one — but the omitted possibility of a lost Greek Vorlage is weighed and found unsupported. As at Habakkuk 2:4, the change is exploited, not load-bearing: the clause Paul’s argument actually rests on — “[he] shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob” (covenant renewal for Israel) — stands in every text-form, so the preposition sharpens the redemptive-historical point (deliverance issuing from Zion) without founding it.

See also: this is the second of the three Romans citations the catalog tags neither / free, and it is best read beside its two siblings — Habakkuk 2:4 at Romans 1:17 / Galatians 3:11 (assessment sound), where Paul drops a possessive both traditions carry, and the Targum-shaped “vengeance is mine” of Deuteronomy 32:35 at Romans 12:19 (a catalog row) — the three together being the clearest data for the doctrine’s “quoted plurally / free adaptation” thesis in Paul’s densest quotation-field. The big-picture Septuagint-dependence question these rows bear on is weighed at “did the New Testament authors quote the Septuagint?” (assessment sound). This page adjudicates only the text-form of the citation, not the large separate question of Israel’s future salvation the verse is adduced for.

The claim

“And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins.” (Romans 11:26–27)

— Paul, Romans 11:26–27, quoting Isaiah 59:20–21 (with a closing clause from Isaiah 27:9). Paul opens the citation ἥξει ἐκ Σιων ὁ ῥυόμενος — “there shall come out of Sion the Deliverer.”¹ The interpretation this argument serves is the catalog’s classification: that Paul’s citation matches neither the Masoretic Hebrew (“to Zion”) nor the Septuagint (“for the sake of Zion”) exactly — a free, conflated form that is one of the strongest surface-level proofs of the doctrine’s thesis that the first-century text was plural and quoted plurally. The sub-claim this page tests is what best explains the divergent ἐκ — a deliberate Pauline alteration, or a lost variant text — and whether the change is load-bearing for his argument (it is not).

Who advances it

That Paul’s wording departs from the Isaiah he quotes was seen precisely by the ancient scholar who collated the Greek against the Hebrew. Origen, expounding Romans 11:25–27, stops to note the two divergences exactly: “in the prophet Isaiah, from whom Paul takes this testimony, in place of what the Apostle said, ‘he shall come out of Sion,’ it is written, ‘he shall come for the sake of Sion’; and… what he says here, ‘when I shall have taken away their sins,’ is not written there at all, nor indeed among the Hebrews: yet it has been assumed on the Apostle’s authority.”² The later Latin expositors, reading Paul against a Vulgate Isaiah that reads “to Zion,” register the same gap but resolve it the other way — Jerome, commenting on Isaiah 59:20, prints his Hebrew rendering (“A Redeemer will come to Zion”) beside his Greek one (“A Deliverer will come from Zion”) and glosses the Hebrew Go’el (“redeemer,” ἀγχιστεύς, the near-kinsman who buys back), while Thomas Aquinas, on Romans 11:26, writes plainly: “our text says: a redeemer will come from Zion… But the Apostle uses the Septuagint.”³ In the modern surveys the divergence is a flat classification — Archer & Chirichigno and the Nestle–Aland loci citati file Romans 11:26–27 as agreeing with neither received text at the preposition — and the citation-technique scholars (J. Ross Wagner, Christopher Stanley, Dietrich-Alex Koch) press the stronger, positive form: that Paul deliberately recast ἥνεκεν to ἐκ, conforming Isaiah to the Psalter’s “out of Zion” formula to make a redemptive-historical point, and it is that stronger form the assessment below tests.⁴

The evidence for

Three prepositions, three directions — and Paul’s is in no Isaiah copy. The Masoretic Hebrew of Isaiah 59:20 reads û-ᴙā lə-Ṣiyyôn gô’ēl — “and a Redeemer shall come to Zion,” the preposition lə- marking the goal he comes toward. The Old Greek (Septuagint) renders ἥξει ἥνεκεν Σιων ὁ ῥυόμενος — “the Deliverer shall come for the sake of Sion,” the Greek ἥνεκεν (“on account of, on behalf of”) interpreting the coming as for Zion’s benefit. Paul writes ἥξει ἐκ Σιων ὁ ῥυόμενος — “there shall come out of Sion the Deliverer,” the ἐκ making Zion the point of origin from which the Deliverer issues forth. No known Greek witness of Isaiah reads ἐκ Σιων, and no Hebrew witness supports it: the critical editions (Ziegler’s Göttingen Isaiah, Rahlfs) print ἥνεκεν, and Origen — reading the Greek in the early third century — testifies that the Isaiah he had before him read “for the sake of Sion,” the Apostle having changed it.²

The closing clause is spliced from Isaiah 27:9. Paul’s citation does not stop at the Deliverer. It runs on into “this is my covenant unto them” (from Isaiah 59:21a) and then closes “when I shall take away their sins” — a clause absent from Isaiah 59 entirely, drawn instead from the Septuagint of Isaiah 27:9 (“and this is his blessing, when I shall take away his sin”). So the quotation is a genuine conflation — Isaiah 59:20–21a welded to Isaiah 27:9b — not a single continuous excerpt; Origen caught precisely this, that the closing words are “not written there at all.” A citation that both changes a preposition and grafts on a clause from a chapter thirty-two verses away is the catalog’s definition of a “neither / free” row.⁵

The change is scriptural, not arbitrary — a “deliverance out of Zion” formula. The strong form of the “Paul altered it” reading is not that he invented a preposition but that he harmonized Isaiah to a stock Psalter idiom. Three psalms couple deliverance with Zion under exactly Paul’s ἐκ Σιων: “Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion!” (Psalm 14:7 = 53:6, LXX Ps 13:7 / 52:7, ἐκ Σιων) and “The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion” (Psalm 110:2, LXX 109:2 — a psalm Paul’s churches read messianically). Read against that background, Paul’s ἐκ is a scriptural assimilation: he conforms the Isaiah oracle to the Bible’s own recurring picture of salvation coming forth from Zion, and the change serves his argument — the Deliverer’s provenance (from Zion, i.e. from Israel, or from the heavenly Jerusalem) fits Paul’s insistence that Israel’s standing is not cancelled. That is the honest strength of the deliberate-alteration reading: the change is motivated, patterned on Scripture, and fitted to the argument.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The catalog’s classification is correct. Paul’s Romans-11:26–27 form matches neither the Masoretic Hebrew nor the Old Greek of Isaiah 59:20 verbatim: he carries a preposition (ἐκ) that neither received text reads, and he closes with a clause (“when I take away their sins”) that stands in neither Isaiah 59 nor the Hebrew, imported from Isaiah 27:9. As a demonstration that an apostle could quote a prophet in a shape found in no surviving copy of that prophet, the row belongs where the catalog put it.

What must be refined, so the finding is neither understated nor stretched.

1. The divergent ἐκ is best read as Paul’s deliberate harmonization, not a lost Greek Vorlage. The defeater to test was whether Paul might follow an otherwise-unattested Greek copy of Isaiah reading ἐκ Σιων — which would make the row a variant-text case, not a “free” one. But the evidence runs the other way. Origen, our earliest reader to check, reports the Greek Isaiah as ἥνεκεν and treats ἐκ as the Apostle’s own wording; the critical editions confirm ἥνεκεν as the Old Greek; and the ἐκ Σιων that Jerome and Aquinas later found in “the Septuagint” is most economically explained as a secondary Christian reading of Isaiah assimilated to Paul’s famous citation — the Romans text pulling the later Greek (and Latin) copies of the prophet into line, the very direction of influence the doctrine’s whole reception-history displays. So “Paul followed a lost pronoun-variant” is unattested and improbable; the row is correctly neither / free, a deliberate scriptural harmonization to the “out of Zion” formula, not a copy of a divergent Greek.⁴

2. The argument does not depend on the preposition; ἐκ is exploited, not load-bearing. As at Habakkuk 2:4 and Amos 9:12, the clause that carries Paul’s weight — “[the Deliverer] shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob” (Israel’s covenant renewal, the ground of “all Israel shall be saved”) — stands in every text-form, Hebrew and Greek alike. Whether the Deliverer comes “to,” “for the sake of,” or “out of” Zion, the load-bearing promise is the removal of Jacob’s ungodliness and the covenant that his sins be taken away — and both survive the change of preposition intact. So the ἐκ sharpens the reading (deliverance issuing from Zion, underscoring Israel’s enduring place) without founding it; a reduced form of Paul’s point stands on any of the three directions. This is the opposite pole from Psalm 16:10, where the diverging Greek word is the empirical proof.⁴

3. Jerome and Aquinas call Paul “Septuagintal,” but the exact datum is finer. Both later Fathers read Paul as siding with the Septuagint against their Hebrew Vulgate — Aquinas says it outright (“the Apostle uses the Septuagint”), and Jerome renders “the Septuagint” of Isaiah 59:20 as “from Zion.” But this is exactly the same half-truth caught at Habakkuk 2:4: the Old Greek does not read “out of Zion” (Origen and the critical text agree it reads “for the sake of”), so “Paul quoted the Septuagint” is only half the finding. Paul quoted a Septuagintal base freely recast — and the later “Septuagint” that seemed to vindicate him had itself already drifted toward his wording. Jerome’s Go’el note (the near-kinsman redeemer) is a separate, sound philological observation on the Hebrew, and bears on the sense of “Redeemer,” not on Paul’s preposition.³

4. Keep the text-form question apart from the eschatology. “Who is ‘all Israel,’ and how does the Deliverer ‘turn away ungodliness from Jacob’?” is a vast, separate debate (a future national conversion of ethnic Israel, the church as the true Israel, a remnant, a covenant renewal). This page does not adjudicate it. What is a text-form fact is only this: Paul’s wording — the “out of Zion” provenance and the “take away their sins” splice — is a free, conflated citation matching no surviving Isaiah, however that larger question is settled.⁴

Assessment

Sound. The interpretation this argument serves — that Paul’s citation at Romans 11:26–27 reproduces neither the Masoretic “to Zion” nor the Septuagint’s “for the sake of Zion” exactly, but reads “out of Zion” (a preposition in no known Isaiah copy) and closes with a clause spliced from Isaiah 27:9 — plainly holds; the citation is correctly tagged neither / free, and it is among the doctrine’s cleanest surface proofs that an apostle could quote a prophet in a form current in no surviving witness. Kept to what the evidence shows, three things fix the finding’s bounds: (a) the divergent ἐκ is best read as Paul’s own deliberate harmonization to the Psalter’s “out of Zion” deliverance formula (Psalm 14:7 / 53:6, 110:2) — a scriptural, motivated change, not a lost Greek Vorlage (Origen and the critical text read ἥνεκεν, and the later “Septuagint” that reads “from Zion” is a copy assimilated to Paul); (b) the change is exploited, not load-bearing — “turn away ungodliness from Jacob” carries the argument in every text-form, so the preposition sharpens the Deliverer’s provenance without which the “all Israel” case would still stand (as at Habakkuk 2:4 and Amos 9:12, and unlike Psalm 16:10, where the Greek word is the proof); and (c) “Paul quoted the Septuagint” (Jerome and Aquinas) is only half the finding — the Old Greek does not read “out of Zion,” so Paul quoted a Septuagintal base freely recast. Stated so, the row is a clean instance of the New Testament handling a prophetic oracle in a shape of its own; stretched into “Paul copied a lost Greek text reading ἐκ Σιων” (unattested, and the drift runs the other way) or “Paul’s doctrine of Israel’s salvation rests on the preposition” (the covenant-renewal clause survives it), it overreaches. The separate eschatological question of “all Israel” is left where it belongs.

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