Joseph A. Fitzmyer, «And Lead Us Not into Temptation», Vol. 84 (2003) 259-273

The sixth petition of the "Our Father" has been translated in various ways across the centuries. This article discusses its literal meaning and the permissive paraphrases of it, explaining the sense of "temptation" and God’s activity in "leading" into it, as well as the various subterfuges adopted to avoid the obvious meaning of the Greek formulation, including its supposed Aramaic substratum. It concludes with a pastoral explanation of the petition.

été retenue"²⁹. It did not prove convincing to many interpreters not only because Carmignac sought to establish its Semitic substratum in Hebrew and not in Aramaic, but also because the evidence presented by him in his article, "Fais que nous n’entrions pas" simply is not persuasive. His analysis of 28 examples from the OT and the Qumran Hodayot is interesting, but he himself had to admit that "en beaucoup de circonstances, les deux idées ‘ne pas faire...’ et ‘faire ne pas...’ se confondent en pratique et l’on ne peut guère les distinguer"³⁰.

        The trouble is that the Semitic languages can express the causative sense in one word, using a morphemic change of vowels for the consonantal root, whereas in Indo-European languages one normally has to use a circumlocution to express the causative. Thus the simple (peal) form of Aramaic ll( ((a6lal) would mean, "he entered," whereas the causative (haphel) form l(nh (han‘el, Dan 6,19) would mean, "be caused to enter" or "he brought in". The Semitic substratum of the sixth petition, therefore, would mean "do not make us enter", or "lead us not into", and not "bring it about that we do not enter". A good study of this phenomenon has been made by E. Tov, who has analyzed the various ways in which the Hebrew causative form (hiphil) has been translated in the LXX. Even the well-known causative devices in the Greek language, such as the contract verbs, especially those in –o/w, or those that add an appendage, such as –i/zw, –a/zw or –u/nw, are usually combined with adjectives or nouns, e.g., dikaio/w (make di/kaioj), qanato/w (mortify), pleona/zw (make more, multiply), megalu/nw (make big)³¹. So their function is not the same as the causative morpheme of a Semitic verbal root. In any case, the LXX translations of the Hebrew hiphil do not normally dilute the causative meaning or turn it into a merely permissive nuance.

        Jenni has also taken up this question in an erudite article, which analyzes the matter from a technical linguistic point of view³². After a lengthy discussion, he finally analyzes twelve instances of the Aramaic verb ll( in the Book of Daniel, both in its simple (peal) forms and the causative (haphel)