The Lexeme panîm and its Greek Rendering in Exodus 33: Between Grammaticalized Idiom and Playfulness

In the mysterious chapter 33 of Exodus, the reader discovers how Moses speaks face-to-face with God, even though the chapter closes by stating that His face cannot be seen. The chapter contains many paradoxical statements, such as God not directly answering the questions of Mo-ses, doublets and ambiguity around the messenger God promises to send with Moses. Sommer has argued that these textual tensions are resolved in the Greek translation, which presents a smoother text. One crucial point that the Greek text would resolve, is the contradiction between Moses speaking face-to-face with God, and the statement that His face cannot be seen. In the Greek, Moses only speaks “vis-à-vis” God: there is no mention of God’s face. Besides, where in the Hebrew text, one finds a manifold of different uses of the lexeme פנים throughout chapter 33, this (quite confusing) wordplay is not present in the Greek rendering, where one only reads of God’s face in the statement that it cannot be seen. This textual difference has also been interpreted as an avoidance, by the Greek translator, of the anthropomorphism of God’s face and God being seen. This presumed avoidance fits well into the context of the recent renewal of the question concerning the theology of the Septuagint (henceforth LXX), i.e. a theology proper to the Greek translator, diverging ideologically at some instances from the theology present in the Masoretic Text (henceforth MT). One element of such LXX-theology would be the avoidance of anthropomorphisms, in favor of a more trans-cendent conception of God. The translation by LXX of the lexeme פנים, rendering only by ‘face’ regarding the impossibility of God’s face being seen, would then be influenced by the ideological avoidance of the idea of attributing humanlike forms (such as the face) to God. From a grammatical point of view, the characterization of the Greek translation as anti-anthropomorphic, could be difficult to hold. In fact, often when lexemes such as פנים are used in combination with a preposition, they contain only vaguely the reference to the body part, and are rather “substantives which have become prepositions only by their union with prefixes, as לִפְנֵי before, מִפְּנֵי, לְמַ֫עַן on account of.” The translation would then not be the result of an anti-anthropomorphic tendency of the translator, but rather result from a natural rendering of an idi-om that had long been grammaticalised and served as “compound preposition,” “pseudo prep-osition,” “semipreposition,” or “Halbpräpositionen.” The present paper hopes to address the fascinating rendering in the LXX of the wordplay us-ing the lexeme פנים. Doing so, it intends to firstly set out how and in what sense the lexeme פנים is used throughout Exodus 33. Next, it strives to offer a detailed analysis of the Greek rendering of the lexeme, that does not seem to safeguard the ‘bodily subpart’ face in most of the render-ings. Is this rendering due to an anti-anthropomorphism, avoiding the attribution of a bodily, anthropomorphic ‘face’ to God - or is it rather due to an idiomatic translation of the grammati-calized idiom as semi-preposition? In what follows, I want to argue that the Greek translation is situated carefully in between using grammaticalized idioms and a playful interaction with the immediate context of the lexeme פנים, as well as with larger intertextual issues.