My Rock and my salvation, 5: a Hellenistic taboo?

Wolters alerted me to this quotation from Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000), pp. 95-96:

It is interesting that while the Greek translators did not avoid these [anthropomorphic] metaphors in a systematic fashion, they were consistently reluctant to refer to God as a rock. Mostly in the Psalms, but also in Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Habakkuk, the Hebrew text sometimes speaks of God as a rock or stone, a figure that likens God to a fortress, a secure place of refuge. For instance, consider Psalm 18:13, 46:

             For who is God except the LORD?
                   And who is a rock besides our God?...
            The LORD lives! Blessed be my rock,
                   and exalted be the God of my salvation! [NRSV]

The Greek translators of each of these books avoid rendering this metaphor literally. Instead, they substitute words such as God, helper, guardian, and protector, which preserve the sense but not the imagery of the metaphor [note 17]. Since these books were probably translated at different times by different people, each of whom showed the same tendency, this pattern may well reflect a religious taboo of the Hellenistic period. It is difficult to say what motivated the translators to avoid referring to God as a rock, but Isaac I. Seeligmann suspects it was "an apologetic endeavor to escape even the semblance of approval of the worshipping of stone images." [note 18]


[Note 17:] See also Staffan Olofsson, God Is My Rock: A Study of Translation Technique and Theological Exegesis in the Septuagint (Coniectanea biblica, Old Testament 31; Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1990), esp. table 1 on p. 155.

[Note 18:] Seeligmann, Septuagint Version of Isaiah, 100.

So my late father may have been right after all about the connection between the rock metaphor and its possible implications of idolatry.