HistoricalChristian.Faith

Isaiah 29:13 at Matthew 15:8–9 / Mark 7:6–7: “teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” — does Jesus’ critique of tradition rest on the Septuagint against the Hebrew?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the catalog’s LXX-distinctive tag on the twin rows (Matt 15:8–9 and Mark 7:6–7) holds. When Jesus answers the scribes over hand-washing and Corban, he clinches the rebuke with Isaiah 29:13 in a distinctly Greek form — “in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” — where the Hebrew reads that “their fear toward me is a commandment of men learned by rote.” The pointed clause the argument turns on (man-made rules taught as doctrine) is the Septuagint’s, not the standing Hebrew’s: the Greek recasts a passive rebuke of hollow, memorized worship into an active charge that the teachers impose human commandments as though divine. So the “LXX-distinctive” tag is correct, and this is the paradigm proof-text for the whole “the New Testament reasoned from the Greek against the Hebrew” thesis. Two findings keep it honest, and are the reason the row earned its own page. (a) Like Isaiah 7:14, Amos 9:12, and Psalm 16:10, this is a Greek reading of a stable Hebrew — the consonants stand unchanged in the Masoretic Text and in the c. 125 BC Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaiah^a); the divergence is the translator’s interpretive rendering, not an older Hebrew the Masoretes lost — so it belongs with the gloss group, not with Deuteronomy 32:43. (b) But unlike Psalm 16:10, whose empirical prong bites only on the Greek word, here the argument Jesus makes does not hang on the Greek: the Hebrew already indicts worship reduced to a “commandment of men,” so the Septuagint sharpens the charge (as at Amos 9:12 and Psalm 40:6) rather than founding it. The row is a clean, flagship instance of the New Testament following the Greek where it diverges from the Hebrew — provided neither the text-form nor the doctrinal weight is overstated.

Related arguments: the Septuagint’s interpretive gloss — see also Isaiah 7:14 at Matthew 1:23 — is the “virgin” a Septuagintal gloss, and does Matthew depend on it? · Psalm 40:6 at Hebrews 10:5 — a Septuagintal “body,” and does the argument depend on it? · Amos 9:11–12 at Acts 15:16–18 — a Septuagintal “seek the Lord,” and does the Council’s decision depend on it? · Psalm 16:10 at Acts 2:27 / 13:35 — “see no corruption”: does the apostolic resurrection proof depend on the Greek?

See also: the big-picture Septuagint-dependence thesis this row instances — and the deflation of the “340 of 386” headline — is weighed on “did the New Testament authors quote the Septuagint?” (assessment sound); the fork between an LXX-gloss over a stable Hebrew and an older-Hebrew the Greek preserved is worked in the same terms on Deuteronomy 32:43 at Hebrews 1:6 and on Goliath’s height. This page adds the piece those do not carry: the text-form adjudication of the twin synoptic rows, and the finding that — unlike Psalm 16:10 — the Greek word here sharpens but does not found the argument.

The claim

“Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.”

— Jesus to the Pharisees and scribes, Mark 7:6–7 (parallel at Matthew 15:8–9), quoting Isaiah 29:13 in the Septuagint’s form (μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με διδάσκοντες ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων καὶ διδασκαλίας).¹ The interpretation this argument serves is the catalog’s classification — that the citation is LXX-distinctive, drawn from the Greek text-form at the very point it diverges from the Hebrew — together with the two sub-claims the row is famous for: that it is the flagship case of New-Testament dependence on the Greek, and that it grounds the later “human traditions must not override God’s command” (Scripture-against-tradition) argument. The page tests all three: the text-form, whether the Greek is load-bearing, and the doctrinal use.

Who advances it

That the quotation follows the Greek, and that it strikes at man-made tradition, is not a modern discovery — the Fathers built on the verse from the first century. Clement of Rome (c. 96) is the earliest to cite it, quoting the text-form-neutral opening — “This people honoureth Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me” — against those “who hypocritically profess” peace.² Cyprian is the sharpest ancient use of the whole verse for the Scripture-against-tradition point: “What is this obstinacy… to place human tradition before the divine plan…? He cries and says through Isaiah… ‘In vain, moreover, they honor me, teaching the commandments and doctrines of men.’” — and he presses it precisely in its LXX-distinctive form.² John Chrysostom, expounding Matthew 15, reads the Greek “in vain do they worship me” as the prophet’s charge that “the words of God they despise… but of their own they make much account,” and the Glossa Ordinaria (with Anselm) glosses it “without reason do they worship me.”² The one Father to set the two text-forms side by side is Jerome, who prints his Hebrew (“they fear me by the commandment of men, and teach me the precepts and doctrines of men”) against the “LXX: … in vain do they worship me, teaching the commandments and doctrines of men,” and notes that “this testimony was used by the Lord against the Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew.”³ In the modern surveys the same fact is a flat classification — Archer & Chirichigno, the Kalvesmaki table, and the commentators Craig Blomberg (on Matthew) and Rikk Watts (on Mark) in Beale & Carson’s Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament all file Matthew 15:8–9 and Mark 7:6–7 as following the Septuagint against the Hebrew, and it is the standard textbook example of the phenomenon.⁴

The evidence for

The load-bearing clause is the Greek’s, not the Hebrew’s. The Hebrew of Isaiah 29:13 ends: “their fear toward me is a commandment of men learned by rote” (מִצְוַת אֲנָשִׁים מְלֻמָּדָה, miṣwat ʾănāšîm məlummādāh) — a rebuke of hollow, memorized ritual, its verb a passive participle (“taught / learned by rote”). The Septuagint renders the same clause actively and interpretively: μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με διδάσκοντες ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων καὶ διδασκαλίας — “but in vain do they worship me, teaching the commandments and doctrines of men.” Two things happen in the Greek at once: the flat “is / has become” (וַתְּהִי, wattəhî) is heard as “in vain” (μάτην) — the point of the hollow worship made explicit — and the passive “learned by rote” (məlummādāh) becomes an active participle, “teaching” (διδάσκοντες). The result is a decisive shift of target: the Hebrew faults the worshippers’ rote formalism; the Greek faults the teachers’ substitution of human commandments for divine ones. Both synoptics reproduce the Greek’s vocabulary — μάτην, σέβονταί με, ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων, διδάσκοντες / διδασκαλίας — none of which is available from the Hebrew as it stands.¹

The Hebrew consonants are stable, so the divergence lives on the Greek side. There is no rival Hebrew Vorlage in view: the Masoretic consonantal text stands, and the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaiah^a, c. 125 BC) carries the same reading, so the point cannot be that the Greek preserves an older Hebrew the Masoretes later lost. Eighteenth-century critics (Robert Lowth) conjectured that the Septuagint’s “in vain” presupposes a Hebrew וְתֹהוּ (wətōhû, “and vain is…”) for the Masoretic וַתְּהִי (wattəhî, “and it has become”) — a difference of a single final letter (wāw for yōd) — but this is a retroversion from the Greek, attested in no Hebrew manuscript, so it does not move the row off the gloss side of the fork. The honest reading is that the Septuagint of Isaiah, a famously free and interpretive translation, gave the clause its own sense; whether by a minor inner-Hebrew misreading behind “in vain” or by pure paraphrase, the divergence is the translator’s, over a Hebrew that did not vary.⁵

It is the textbook flagship of New-Testament dependence on the Greek. The row’s fame is earned: it is a saying placed on Jesus’ own lips in two Gospels, quoting a proof-text in the Septuagint’s form at the exact clause where the Greek and Hebrew part company, and building a rebuke on the diverging wording. That combination — dominical, doubly attested, argumentatively engaged, and diverging at the load-bearing clause — is why the surveys reach for this verse first when they illustrate “the New Testament follows the LXX against the MT.” It is the synoptic counterpart to Psalm 16:10 in Acts and Deuteronomy 27:26 in Paul.⁴

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The catalog’s classification is correct. Both Gospels reproduce the Septuagint’s μάτην…διδάσκοντες ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων at the precise point the Greek diverges from the Hebrew’s “learned by rote,” and Jesus’ rebuke is voiced through the diverging wording. This is a genuine, live instance of the New Testament reasoning in the Greek text-form against the plain Hebrew — not an inert agreement and not a free paraphrase of both. The row belongs where the catalog put it, and its flagship reputation is deserved.

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

1. This is a Greek reading of a stable Hebrew, not an older Hebrew the Greek preserved. As with Isaiah 7:14, Amos 9:12, and Psalm 16:10, the divergence lives entirely on the Greek side: the Masoretic consonants stand, 1QIsaiah^a agrees, and there is no rival Hebrew Vorlage to recover (Lowth’s וְתֹהוּ is a conjecture back-formed from the Greek, not an attested variant). So the row sits with the gloss group, not with Deuteronomy 32:43 / Hebrews 1:6 or Goliath’s height, where the Greek rests on a genuinely different Hebrew recovered at Qumran (Hebrew-over-Hebrew). Whoever files this verse as evidence of an older Hebrew has conflated two different phenomena. (The honest converse: the Septuagint of Isaiah reached “teaching … commandments of men” long before any Christian polemic against the Pharisees was in view, so the reading is a genuine pre-Christian Jewish interpretation of the verse, not a fabrication read back into it.)⁵

2. The Greek sharpens the argument; it does not found it. Here the row differs from Psalm 16:10, whose empirical prong (“David decayed, this man did not”) works only on the Greek word. Jesus’ charge is that the scribes’ tradition (the Corban vow) “made void the commandment of God” — and that charge is carried by his own argument in the preceding verses (Mark 7:9–13 / Matthew 15:3–6), not by the Isaiah citation, which clinches it. And even the citation survives the switch to the Hebrew: the Masoretic “their fear toward me is a commandment of men learned by rote” already indicts a worship reduced to human precept, which is exactly the nerve Jesus touches. What the Greek adds is edge — it turns a rebuke of rote formalism into the sharper charge that the teachers teach human commandments as divine doctrine, a shift that fits the Corban example like a glove — but the indictment of man-made tradition in worship stands in both text-forms. So the honest finding matches Amos 9:12 and Psalm 40:6: the Greek is exploited, not load-bearing in the strong sense. To claim the whole critique of tradition “depends on” the Septuagint overstates it.¹

3. The synoptic wording is Septuagintal but not letter-for-letter the Septuagint. Both Gospels reorder the Greek’s close: the Septuagint reads “teaching commandments of men and doctrines” (ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων καὶ διδασκαλίας), where Matthew and Mark read “teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (διδάσκοντες διδασκαλίας ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων) — the two nouns swapped so that “doctrines” governs “commandments.” Older commentators (Barnes) noted that the citation is “not quoted literally… from the Septuagint, but retains the sense,” and some (Gundry) read the small rearrangement as light assimilation. It does not weaken the finding: the divergence from the Hebrew — “in vain,” “teaching,” “commandments of men” — is wholly the Greek’s; the reshuffle is within the Greek tradition, not a step back toward the Hebrew. The row is LXX-distinctive whether or not the evangelists tidied the Greek’s word order.⁴

4. The Scripture-against-tradition use is legitimate but rides on the sense, not on the Greek alone. Cyprian, and after him the Reformers, deploy the verse against “human tradition” overriding “the divine precept” — a use the LXX-distinctive “teaching … the commandments of men” obviously suits. But the doctrinal point is not hostage to the text-form: the Hebrew’s “commandment of men learned by rote” makes the same contrast between human precept and true reverence, and Jesus’ own Corban argument (refinement 2) is what actually establishes that a tradition can nullify God’s command. So the verse is a sound prop for the Scripture-over-tradition thesis on either text-form; the Greek merely gives the proof-text its most quotable shape. Nothing in the doctrinal use requires the stronger claim that the argument would collapse on the Hebrew.²

5. Jerome’s handling is the row’s sharpest irony, and a limit on his own thesis. Commenting on this very verse, Jerome insists that “the Evangelists and Apostles did not translate word for word; nor did they follow the authority of the Seventy… but they used their own words, as if they were Hebrew” — his standing claim that the New Testament follows the Hebraica veritas. Yet the quotation he is annotating plainly follows the Greek: “in vain do they worship me” is the Septuagint’s reading against his own Hebrew (“they fear me by the commandment of men”). So Isaiah 29:13 is a clean counter-example to Jerome’s universal rule — the New Testament here does exactly what he says it does not — and it is flagged as such on his detail page. It does not impugn Jerome’s narrower, correct observation that the apostles sometimes follow the Hebrew (as at Matthew’s formula quotations and Zechariah 12:10); it refutes only the blanket form.³

Assessment

Sound. The interpretation this argument serves — that Jesus’ quotation of Isaiah 29:13 at Matthew 15:8–9 and Mark 7:6–7 follows the Septuagint’s “in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” where the Hebrew reads “their fear toward me is a commandment of men learned by rote” — plainly holds; the citation is LXX-distinctive and correctly tagged, and it is the flagship synoptic case of the phenomenon. Kept to what the evidence shows, three things fix the finding’s bounds: (a) this is the Septuagint reading a stable consonantal Hebrew (the Masoretic reading stands, 1QIsaiah^a agrees, and Lowth’s וְתֹהוּ is a conjecture back-formed from the Greek), so it joins the gloss group, not the older-Hebrew cases; (b) unlike Psalm 16:10, the Greek here sharpens the argument rather than founding it — the Hebrew’s “commandment of men” makes the same charge, and Jesus’ Corban argument, not the citation, carries the claim that tradition can void God’s command — so it patterns with Amos 9:12 and Psalm 40:6; and (c) the doctrinal Scripture-against-tradition use (Cyprian, the Reformers) is legitimate on either text-form. Stated so, the row is a clean and unusually well-attested instance of the New Testament following the Greek against a literal Hebrew — the paradigm the surveys name first; stretched into “the Greek preserves an older Hebrew here” or “Jesus’ critique of tradition depends on the Septuagint,” it overreaches. This row joins Isaiah 7:14, Psalm 40:6, Amos 9:12, and Psalm 16:10 as a worked instance of the same species — a distinctively Septuagintal reading of a stable Hebrew, pressed in the New Testament.

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