It does indeed declare the Deu 32:4 Name for God, God is the Rock! So where the translation evidently failed, the truth of the matter did not.
Praise God!!!
And truly if this investigation cannot tell us what happened in the translation, then I will indeed ask St Jerome when I get there.
I wonder about something, dear Alamo-Girl.... As you may know, the last major redaction of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) was carried out under the auspices and authority of one Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who now goes by the name of Pope Benedict XVI. Maybe he might want likewise to revisit the Vulgate take on Deuteronomy 32:4? Especially as it seems clear how profoundly he understands that "God is the Rock." When we send him our book, maybe I should add a petition to this effect?
(Funny thing is, though Catholic by theology, my preferred biblical text is King James. The Vulgate just never "rang" or "sang to me" like the King James version.... Go figure!)
su ei Petros, kai epi tauth th petra oikodomesw mou thn ekklhsian
The Greek has "epi taute te petra", and taute typically means "the same". So a literal translation could well be: "You are Petros, and upon this same Petra I will build my Church." The gender of the noun here doesn't matter one fig, because we are *explicitly* told in John 1:42 that Peter is a Greek translation from the Aramaic Cephas.
You're right..God of course is the Rock elsewhere in Scripture. But you can't take one metaphor from a completely different place in the Bible and read it overtop of a second metaphor so as to distort all meaning of the latter.
So yes, God is a Rock. And Peter is a Rock, as this passage plainly states. Our challenge is not to mix the metaphors but to understand how the one relates to the other.