Who shall be born for whom? A Closer Look at the Refrain of 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel'

The hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" is ubiquitous with the season of Advent. Everybody can sing along, if not for all the verses, then at least for the refrain:

"Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel / To thee shall come, O Israel."

"Veni Veni Emmanuel" as it appears on p. 336 of the Hermann Adalbert Daniel's Thesaurus Hymnologicus (1844)

Or is it, "Rejoice, rejoice, O Israel, / to thee shall come Emmanuel," as printed in Shorter Christian Prayer and various hymnals? Surely I'm not the only one who has stumbled in an attempt to sing one version from memory only to realize that everybody else is looking at the other version.

Why switch Israel and Emmanuel, as the various hymnals do? There's a history to it, with "Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel" being the more famous 19th-century translation by Thomas Helmore. Both versions are considered faithful translations of the Latin original, Veni, veni, Emmanuel, / nascetur pro te, Israel, because both take Emmanuel as the subject of the verb nascetur, "shall come" (literally, "shall be born"), and Israel as the one being addressed ("O Israel"). How could it be otherwise? After all, Jesus, God-with-us, Emmanuel, shall be born for Israel on Christmas morning.

Count me the heretic, I guess, as I propose a third way to translate the refrain. For as much as Jesus comes into the world on Christmas morning, and as much as Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead, there is a third way, a "middle coming," as proposed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. "Because this coming lies between the other two," St. Bernard writes in a famous sermon that appears in the Divine Office, "it is like a road on which we travel from the first coming to the last."

Bernard is saying that while Jesus is born for us on Christmas day, we are being born for Him every day as we travel the journey of our lives as Christians. Israel could just as easily be the subject of "shall be born" because Israel stands for us, and the rejoicing that occurs at Christmas, at least if we've prepared ourselves properly, is both on our part and on the part of Our Savior, Who welcomes His prodigal sons with open arms. We could be telling Emmanuel to rejoice, for we, Israel, are being born for Him, in Him, and through Him in the intentional readying of our souls for His coming during the liturgical season of Advent.

There certainly is nothing in the Latin phrase, in any case, that prevents translating Israel as the subject and Emmanuel as the addressee. While ordinarily a noun in Latin inflects differently depending how it is used in the sentence (think who versus whom, one of our rare English language inflections), Hebraic words like Emmanuel and Israel don't generally adopt the regular endings. Emmanuel looks like Emmanuel, and Israel like Israel, regardless of how they function grammatically in the sentence.

One could point out, however, that Emmanuel is before the verb, the normal placement for the subject. Indeed, the extreme flexibility of word order in Latin poetry that would permit a subject to be elsewhere is predicated upon inflections. But clarity is maintained nonetheless if the phrase is broken into its respective lines. The first phrase would be, "Rejoice, rejoice, O Emmanuel." Only then would the next phrase follow: "Shall come to thee Israel," with Israel easily being understood as the subject because we've already invoked Emmanuel in the prior line. If that last phrase sounds a little awkward with the subject after the verb, remember that the subject also follows the verb to fit the meter in the other common English translation: "To thee shall come Emmanuel."

Punctuation is the one thing that gets in the way of my heresy. Ordinarily there are commas or exclamation points after the commands to rejoice. There is a comma between "for you" and "Israel." All of which, I guess, argues against me, since Israel being set off at the end by a comma indicates that it is the addressee, not the subject. While there is always a line break between "Emmanuel" and "shall come to thee," there is only a comma in a few hymnals that I looked at.

Of course, like any good scholar, my first instinct was to try to look at the original. Most hymnals cite the 1710 Jesuit Psalteriolum Cantionum Catholicarum as the place where "Veni, Veni, Emmanuel," based on the ancient O Antiphons, first appeared. According to WorldCat,  the only copy of the Psalteriolum in the United States is at the University of Washington, and even that is a later, 1780 edition.  The best that I could do was Hermann Adalbert Daniel's 1844 Thesaurus Hymnologicus. A screenshot from this early hymnal therefore appears above. Although the commas in Daniel's do not back my creative translation, like any good heretic I remain stubborn. I'd be willing to bet ten dollars, in fact, that the Psalteriolum version is in notation and doesn't have any punctuation at all, and that Daniel's punctuation is as much an interpretation of the hymn as the famous English translation of Helmore is an interpretation of Daniel. Of course, that would also leave room for my interpretation.

The hymn is more beautiful that way, as poetry generally is with its manifold nuances and multiple meanings. So, don't mind me if I stumble while we are singing. No, we're not looking at different versions this time. It's just me overthinking things again when I was supposed to have been paying attention.

A blessed last few days of Advent to y'all!