Psalm 8.5.
The greatness of the human being is seen in the fact that God made him inferior only to elohim, a word whose precise meaning here is disputed. Translations and their supporters are as follows:
(1) God: the ancient Greek versions by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion; Jerome; asv, rsv, tev.
(2) “Angels”: Septuagint (quoted in Heb 2.7), Syriac, Targum, Vulgate; kjv, nab, zür, frcl, njv footnote.
(3) “The gods”: Dahood. niv has “the heavenly beings.”
(4) “A god”: neb, bj, njb, tob, spcl. mft and njv have “little less than divine”; “almost divine” also represents this meaning.
The word
elohim (the plural of el, “god”) can mean different things, depending on the context; its broadest sense is that of divine beings as distinct from human beings, and it is most likely that it is used in this sense in this passage. So the preferred translation is “God” or, perhaps, “the divine beings.”
The verbal phrase translated made him little less is the causative of the verb “to lack,” followed by the adjective “little”: “you have caused him to be little less than ….” Little less than God is not to be taken as rough equality with God, but viewed as higher than the rest of creation. In order to make clear the relation of less than and “inferior to,” it is sometimes necessary to indicate a complement of made; for example, “you made people to have a place only a little beneath you” or “you created people and gave them a place which is below only you.”
The Septuagint translation of 8.5–7 is quoted in Hebrews 2.6–8.
Robert G. Bratcher and William David Reyburn, A Translator's Handbook on the Book of Psalms, Helps for translators (New York: United Bible Societies, 1991), 82.
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